INGLESHAM CHURCH

Troilus to Criseyde

                                                   I talk of you:
Why did you wish me milder? Would you have me
False to my nature? Rather say I play
The man I am.

But let me die my love: yet let me die:
With love and patience let your true love die;
Your grief and fury hurts my second life!                     

I      

Throughout that afternoon a warm wind blew
Moaning round the church and its sullen yew;
Thrusting back to where we thought it had begun,
Hurrying black clouds across a weak sun
Bringing and driving away a rainless storm
One minute the wind blessed, next it warned.
And the steady surface of Thames’ slow stream
Glittered and rippled where we might have seen
The dark reflection of our broken dream.
     That afternoon, because all we had to say
Had been said, or could not be said that day,
And as it seemed there was nowhere else to go
We took out a boat and decided to row
Upstream, blown by the wind, vaguely in search
Of some place of peace, or Inglesham Church.
And beside the Thames, along both its banks
Strolled the casual cordon of Sunday ranks;
But we persisted on the wind, against the flow
And came to places no-one else seemed to know;
There we gazed from our boat far over fields
Fading into England—a prospect that reveals
To those not quite content, a mystery,
The sense that we are something we cannot be.
     The Thames lapped softly beneath our skiff
A sound that ceased when we began to drift
When a moment tired I laid down the oars
When I claimed a peace I thought mine and yours;
The Thames lapped softly beneath our skiff
And when the sound ceased we knew the rift
That must follow the dying of our desire,
When the wind would fail, our dream expire.
     So on we went, upstream, past a disused mill
Into a backwater shallow, smooth and still.
Through waving poplars we saw the solid church,
The end coming quickly to our quiet search.
To the root of a dead willow I moored the boat,
Hoping it would still be there, and afloat
When we returned. Then I held out my hand
And smiling you stepped lightly onto land.
We turned from that river, and almost at ease
Made our way to the chosen place of peace.
     Standing silently before the altar rail
Had I not known that words were bound to fail
I would have bowed my head and bent my knee
And prayed quite briefly for you and me.
But in my heart was only stale prayer,
Learnt by rote, long unused, nothing to bear
The weight of what I felt. And had I found
Words to humble me to the real ground,
To pluck out that arrogant, ignorant stare,
Thinking only only of architecture and atmosphere,
Of the high pulpit, of a plaque’s polished sheen,
Of festival flowers wound in the rood-screen,
Had I spoken then I must have stirred
Thoughts you would have called absurd.
     As I turned from the altar, the moans
Of those long dead seemed to rise from the stones
Of that ancient church. I looked towards you,
Perplexed as to what we were going to do.
And I heard again the wind in the trees.
     We walked quickly down the path and through the gate
Not caring to be together in our separate state,
Yet having to go back to where we began the day
So that each might take a new, solitary way.
Across the field, past the hawthorn hedge
Down to the willow lawn at the water’s edge
We hurried to where the idyllic boat lay still,
Now laughing at us, who against our will
Were playing out some meaningless farce
Where the dialogue is discovered by the cast.
Hurriedly, but with custom, I handed you in,
Then pushed off, and clumsily clambered in,
Took up the oars, and trying to avoid your eyes
Sought vigorous action as my disguise.
     So the eternal river bore us down
Towards the night, our parting and the town.

                                        II      

Throughout that afternoon the blind wind
Tore and grasped at the patient trees,
At useless leaves limp upon the boughs,
Stirred, flicked, then forgot those fallen,
Urged movement on the properly still, forced
The silent church into unnatural speech.
As we walked across the field you said to me
‘I want to be happy—now. Every person
Has the right to happiness. There is nothing
That matters more than that.’
                                                But when our world
Was threatened, when our desires were done,
At our parting, I saw your tears, and saw
That you suffered something my heart denied.
After the death of the wind, there comes
A silence, terrifying to some, long sought for
By others, empty, but also full of expectation,
The promise of another world not apparent
A silence in which the recognizable world
Waits, at the edge of the stage, in the wings—
But this promise remaining unfulfilled
The wind stirs (for the wind never dies)
And the ordinary and the usual creep in again.
Only stillness can discover the silence
Ever present beneath the wind-blown world;
There, struggling against violent suppression,
Beaten about, confused by the roaring wind,
A kind of speech begins.

                                       III

What a word is, and what is in a word,
All may become. All else is waste,
The pointless babble of a lost life
Flickering through the puzzled minds
Of people who have no enduring faith,
Only an unvoiced hope carried into the voiceless grave
Into oblivion. There is in a word
What endures, what we are.
                                             Then our lives ended
Might we not find that at one point in youth
Momentary needs and a weakness of will
Turned us away from what in old age
Seemed to be the right and proper course,
The course that we, dying, would choose
If we had our lives again? Might we not find
That anxious to live we had lost our life
By offending the proper pattern of a tale?
Thus I searched my heart, and O Criseyde
In that word I saw that we had to part.
     As I drove away into the roar of night,
Unsure of my way, blinded by bursts
Of broken light, nothing but a noise
Piercing the darkness, how the bitter futility
Of all ambitions tore my heart, how little life
There seemed in all the attributes of living,
How all extant things on the wide surface
Of the earth had lost their potential interest,
And become a source of pain and irritation
Deepening my state of loss. Little wonder then
I wept, not more than a dead body in a ditch,
Yet required to live out my unwanted time:
Taking hope from tiny events—in the journey
That alters nothing, in the comforts of family
And friends who live and die huddled together,
Strangers to mine and each other’s experience;
Amongst people who make no consistent effort
In a world seemingly dead, I awaited death:
Encumbered with the world and hoping for nothing,
Encompassed everywhere by a rotten carcase—
The vast pretence we make at living—I survived.
     And when the deep night was done, after
All immediate grief and agony were spent,
When driven out of our world into chaos
I had let loose all sense, and saw again
The bright embodiment of my being lost,
And faced the opposing thought, that your world,
Visionless I feared, was ever mixed with mine,
And would remain so, always indivisible;
When I thought again of our many conversations
And estranged silences, and found there the doubt
With which you gently met my naive hope
That in this world there lay another hidden;
After the long turmoil of a futureless night
Dawn came, and the sun reclothed the earth
In warmth and colour. In this happier light,
The ruins of our dark and secluded passion
Were an insight into what our love lacked,
An insight that provided words as relief
To a pain more than I felt I could endure.
     But O Crisseid, using this word of you
How easy it has become for me to turn
Our imagined catastrophe into words, to write,
To spur my jangling horse and ride on past, not
Deeply troubled. If words succeed, for the rest,
For yourself, for the actual loss, I have lost
The ability to care.
                                So I stand again
At the misty edge of a further loss—
Careless of the given world.

                                       IV

There are moments when I can be sure
That I am prepared. Far from that church
In a wintery field quite close to the sea
A mist crept quietly over the grey hedgerows
Smothering the chatter of unseen birds
Hushing animals that stirred the dead leaves
Stifling the slap of the restless waves
Leaving nature in awe of what might come.
As the mist dragged the dusk into the night
I was only what the mist was, the darker earth
Beneath my feet, the paler sky closing
Round my head. Involved with emptiness
I might have been waiting for it to appear
As a hand or claw grasping my shoulder,
Twisting me to inevitable defeat. I was nothing
Of what I was, knowing only that I was ready:
Like an old warrior I was complete in one way
Of preparation—that of helmet, spear and shield.
Then to darkness of every kind and death itself
I could have said, ‘Come, I belong to you.’
     But they would not. For that type of loss
Is no longer inevitable: the moment passes
And the preparation is found to be pointless;
Then I knew the anguish of absent love,
The love that could conquer without loss,
Or loss only of the agony of spear and shield—
The burning sensibility of objects in a world
With no revelation.

                                   V

                                        I endure the seasons now
Like a stone god in a garden not well cared for,
A smile fixed, and pipes silent at my mouth,
Set above an ever open gate, through which pass
Many lively people, all arm in arm from the dances
And the parties at the house, who sometimes look up at me
Briefly, blindly, unaware as they chatter
Through the gate, of the pipes I would play,
Of the songs that they and I might sing together,
Unaware that their blind passage marks
The irrevocable passing of life and time.
But I envy their sadness in the autumn
Their delight amidst the winter snow
The calm contentment of their summer:
For I cannot face the returning seasons
Months of death and birth drawing to my death,
And I resist emotion for love of the song
Still silent, still waiting to be sung.
Though unable to grow old, I feel
The mossy stains of accreting years
Silent below a branch of the steady yew
Which I would grasp if I could move:
If I could reach and touch the yew
If now I was to move, I would crumble
And become the shapeless dust I was
The dust I am.
                          Our wrongs made me stone
For through those wrongs I saw the world we lost,
A garden of compassion, grace and ease.
Wanting no other to become the real world
Desire is the constant urge to forget
The life in life that yet I hope to find,
Losing myself in the simple world of sense.
If the created spirit exists, then only in stone,
Still and songless, incapable of the motion
Of flesh and blood: there is grace without light
A sense of distinction while yet involved
In a common darkness; ease without reason—
The sudden calmness despite the blinding passions
Which stir below; and compassion without companions.
The movement out of desire into satisfaction
Is life to those who pass below, is death
To those who think that life must be the spirit
Flesh and blood moving together, silent above
The gate through which we must pass
Singing a song that stone cannot sing.

                                      VI

We are guests who depart in the grey morning
Pausing on the doorstep as we take our leave
Thinking of more magical moments now passed—
The gate in the garden under a quiet moon,
And the silent statue staring down at us,
Deep eyes in shadow, fingers poised to play
Some common tune we cannot quite remember.
As we go we wonder what such memories mean
So often forgotten in the bustle of parting;
And always, as we depart with the others,
The silent god still waits above the gate,
Still has hopes of becoming flesh again;
Though whilst moving through the many gates
That may be discovered every day, we forget,
Then those pipes are still, and we leave no traces
On the deep silence around the garden gate:
There stone still is stone, desire desire,
Dust still dust, and our proud passage
Nothing but the hideous noise of forgetfulness,
The cacophony of perpetual waste.
     If as we go we can be a moment still, remembering
On the doorstep what we saw in the garden,
Then shall the pipes play, and neither the wind
In the yew above, nor our brief passage
Through the open gate, shall threaten us.