To the Antipodes

This evening Mrs N and I are flying off to Wellington to spend a month with the New Zealand branch of the family. Looking forward to it all, apart from the horrendous journey – 24 hours and more in the air, with an overnight break in Singapore. It will be wonderful to be there, though.
Things will be rather quieter than usual on the blog front, but no doubt there will be occasional dispatches from the far antipodes.
TTFN.

Death of a Queen

On this day in 1694, Queen Mary II of England died at Kensington Palace of hemorrhagic smallpox. She was just 32 years old, and the death of this popular Queen unleashed a torrent of public grief unequalled by any royal death until the 21-year-old Princess Charlotte died in childbirth (with her newborn son) in 1817 (see chapter 'The Saddest Stories' in my book) – and, in our own time, by the death of Diana, Princess of Wales.
  Mary's husband, William III, who had hurried back to England from the Dutch Republic to be with her, was overcome with grief. This habitually austere and distant man dissolved into tears, and was inconsolable for days on end; some thought he would die. 'From being the happiest of men I shall now be the miserablest creature on earth,' he declared. 'The marble weeps,' wrote Matthew Prior, observing this broken man.
 Mary's embalmed body lay in state in Whitehall banqueting house through one of those cold winters that were frequent in that mini ice age, with the Thames frozen from bank to bank. On March 5th, 1695, she was buried in Westminster Abbey, her funeral the first to be attended by all the members of both houses of parliament. And, for the occasion, Henry Purcell wrote his moving and eloquent Music for the Funeral of Queen Mary, some of his greatest work –

Before the end of the year, Purcell was himself dead.
  But enough of these mournful numbers: during her reign Queen Mary was also the dedicatee of Purcell's joyful Birthday Odes, including this glorious masterpiece from the year of the Queen's death – Come, Come, Ye Sons of Art –

Kipling at Christmas

Among my Christmas gifts was a British Library anthology, A Literary Christmas (no editor credited), a nice package of verse and prose, some of it familiar, some quite new to me. In the latter category, I discovered an early work (1886) by Rudyard Kipling which is surely one of the bitterest, most sardonic Christmas poems ever written –

Christmas in India

Dim dawn behind the tamarisks -- the sky is saffron-yellow --
  As the women in the village grind the corn,
And the parrots seek the riverside, each calling to his fellow
  That the Day, the staring Eastern Day, is born.
    O the white dust on the highway! O the stenches in the byway!
      O the clammy fog that hovers over earth!
    And at Home they're making merry 'neath the white and scarlet berry --
      What part have India's exiles in their mirth?

Full day behind the tamarisks -- the sky is blue and staring --
  As the cattle crawl afield beneath the yoke,
And they bear One o'er the field-path, who is past all hope or caring,
  To the ghat below the curling wreaths of smoke.
    Call on Rama, going slowly, as ye bear a brother lowly --
      Call on Rama -- he may hear, perhaps, your voice!
    With our hymn-books and our psalters we appeal to other altars,
      And to-day we bid "good Christian men rejoice!"

High noon behind the tamarisks -- the sun is hot above us --
  As at Home the Christmas Day is breaking wan.
They will drink our healths at dinner -- those who tell us how they love us,
  And forget us till another year be gone!
    Oh the toil that knows no breaking! Oh the Heimweh, ceaseless, aching!
      Oh the black dividing Sea and alien Plain!
    Youth was cheap -- wherefore we sold it.
      Gold was good -- we hoped to hold it,
    And to-day we know the fulness of our gain!

Grey dusk behind the tamarisks -- the parrots fly together --
  As the sun is sinking slowly over Home;
And his last ray seems to mock us shackled in a lifelong tether.
  That drags us back howe'er so far we roam.
    Hard her service, poor her payment -- she in ancient, tattered raiment --
      India, she the grim Stepmother of our kind.
    If a year of life be lent her, if her temple's shrine we enter,
      The door is shut -- we may not look behind.

Black night behind the tamarisks -- the owls begin their chorus --
  As the conches from the temple scream and bray.
With the fruitless years behind us and the hopeless years before us,
  Let us honour, O my brother, Christmas Day!
    Call a truce, then, to our labours -- let us feast with friends and neighbours,
      And be merry as the custom of our caste;
    For, if "faint and forced the laughter," and if sadness follow after,
      We are richer by one mocking Christmas past.

How on earth did Kipling ever gain his reputation as a gung-ho, jingoistic, unquestioning apologist for Empire? It is clear even in a work as early as this that his view of Empire was essentially tragic. For a fuller expression of it, see, for example, his later, more famous (and much better) poem, Recessional...

God of our fathers, known of old,

   Lord of our far-flung battle-line,

Beneath whose awful Hand we hold

   Dominion over palm and pine—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

The tumult and the shouting dies;

   The Captains and the Kings depart:

Still stands Thine ancient sacrifice,

   An humble and a contrite heart.

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

Far-called, our navies melt away;

   On dune and headland sinks the fire:

Lo, all our pomp of yesterday

   Is one with Nineveh and Tyre!

Judge of the Nations, spare us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

If, drunk with sight of power, we loose

   Wild tongues that have not Thee in awe,

Such boastings as the Gentiles use,

   Or lesser breeds without the Law—

Lord God of Hosts, be with us yet,

Lest we forget—lest we forget!

For heathen heart that puts her trust

   In reeking tube and iron shard,

All valiant dust that builds on dust,

   And guarding, calls not Thee to guard,

For frantic boast and foolish word—

Thy mercy on Thy People, Lord!

Christmas Eve

Yesterday, rather to my surprise, I found myself writing a kind of sermon. I am not, of course, a parson, and am woefully unqualified for the job; but if I were one, I fancy the only part of the job I might enjoy would be writing the weekly sermon. Anyway, here's what I wrote – too short for an actual sermon, but topical and to the point...

Viewed as history, the story of the Nativity makes no sense – but viewed as parable, as imagery, as the embodiment of a higher truth, it is surely, in the words of the film title, 'the greatest story ever told', though it is only the beginning of that story. That God should have taken human form is wonderful enough; that He should have come to Earth not as a hero, a conqueror, a vindicated prophet, but as a helpless baby, and an outcast, born in a stable and laid in a manger where animals feed – that is something else altogether: that is a full taking-on the human condition at its weakest, humblest and most powerless. And yet, according to the story, kings and wise men come to join the lowly shepherds in worshipping this helpless child. Clearly something enormous, something entirely new, is happening here. The truth this child brings will be about the strength of the downtrodden, the transforming power of mercy and forgiveness, the loving nature of this God in whose name we must love even our enemies and throw away all former notions of what is just and proper, who is strong and who is weak. As Mary says in the Magnificat, 'He hath put down the mighty from their seat: and hath exalted the humble and meek. He hath filled the hungry with good things: and the rich he hath sent empty away.' All is transformed, turned upside down, by this birth, obscure in the eyes of the world, but infinite in its true, its mighty significance. This baby, whose ignominious birth prefigures a yet more ignominious death, changes everything.
As often at this time of year, I think of the image at the end of R.S. Thomas's 'Song' –

I choose white, but with
Red on it, like the snow
In winter with its few
Holly berries and the one

Robin, that is a fire
To warm by and like Christ
Comes to us in his weakness,
But with a sharp song.

And a very happy Christmas to all who browse here!

(The painting, by the way, is by Georges de la Tour.)

'Life is real! Life is earnest!'

Strolling through the churchyard (as I often do), I noticed a quotation on a gravestone that was definitely not biblical but was, to me, extremely familiar –

'Life is real! Life is earnest!
And the grave is not its goal;
Dust thou art, to dust returnest,
Was not spoken of the soul.'

Yes, it's Longfellow again – The Psalm of Life – and the reason it was so familiar to me was that it was one of the bits of strenuously moralistic verse that my father liked to intone while shaving in the morning, in between the much more exciting narrative poems. I don't think he had the whole of this one by heart, but he certainly had the first quatrain:

'Tell me not, in mournful numbers,
Life is but an empty dream!
For the soul is dead that slumbers,
And things are not what they seem.'

And, from a little later in Longfellow's overlong effusion:

'Lives of great men all remind us
We can make our lives sublime,
And, departing, leave behind us
Footprints on the sands of time.'

(That last line was rewritten by some later poetical wag as 'Arseprints in the sands of time'.)

Another of my father's favourites in this moralising line was

'Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone.
Kindness in another's trouble,
Courage in your own.'

The Queen herself quoted these lines in her Christmas message at the end of her annus horribilis of 1992, but didn't mention the author – not Longfellow but Adam Lindsay Gordon.
  Gordon was an interesting, rather dashing figure – an Englishman who, to escape the consequences of a wild and reckless youth, took passage to Australia, where he became a police officer before resigning to take up horse-breaking. A remarkable horseman and amateur jockey, he also had a brief political career. According to Wikipedia, 'his semiclassical speeches were colourful and entertaining, but largely irrelevant.' After this, he devoted himself more diligently to poetry – Bush Ballads and Galloping Rhymes being his chief claim to (posthumous) fame – while suffering various setbacks, including a head injury from a riding accident and chronic financial difficulties. In 1870, at the age of 36, he walked into the bush and shot himself.  He is now regarded as one of the fathers of Australian literature, even though much of his verse has been written off as quite indefensibly bad.

A Mind of Winter

There's no snow in prospect here in rain-lashed sodden England, so we can only cultivate 'a mind of winter' and look to poetry for something white and seasonal – and, in this case, glittering with enigmatic beauty. It's Wallace Stevens's great short poem of 1921, The Snow Man –

One must have a mind of winter

To regard the frost and the boughs

Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;

And have been cold a long time

To behold the junipers shagged with ice,

The spruces rough in the distant glitter

Of the January sun; and not to think

Of any misery in the sound of the wind,

In the sound of a few leaves,

Which is the sound of the land

Full of the same wind

That is blowing in the same bare place

For the listener, who listens in the snow,

And, nothing himself, beholds

Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.

Blogging Note

I'll be in Mercia for the next fews days, and pre-Christmas busyness is closing in, so blogging might be a little sparse for a while...