God be at mine end

This month Dr Patricia Brennan AM died of cancer at 66. She was best known for her advocacy of women’s ordination in the Anglican church, but she was also a practising forensic physician who specialised in the treatment of victims of sexual abuse, and who, with her husband, had been a missionary in Nigeria. Her death has gone relatively unnoticed (though you can listen to an interview here, and read an obituary here); I hope her tomb will not be entirely unvisited. Among the hymns she chose for her funeral was this brief but ample prayer: 

God be in my head, and in my understanding.
God be in mine eyes, and in my looking.
God be in my mouth and in my speaking.
God be in my heart, and in my thinking.
God be at mine end, and at my departing.

George Eliot on good and great

Further reflections on goodness and greatness led me to the magnificent concluding lines of Middlemarch, and the happily ever after of its heroine, Dorothea Brooke:

Her finely touched spirit had still its fine issues, though they were not widely visible. Her full nature, like that river of which Cyrus broke the strength, spent itself in channels which had no great name on the earth. But the effect of her being on those around her was incalculably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.

Alarm bell Britain

Nick Clegg, UK's deputy PM, likes to talk about “alarm clock Britain” - a phrase that rings bells for our own PM. In this vision, Britons set their alarms in order to wake and work, to give their time in exchange for social capital, and selflessly do without the things that might otherwise have made life lovely, the things the government might otherwise have paid for.

As Cameron's cuts loom, alarm increases about the civil and social amenity they threaten. Scottish novelist AL Kennedy has a heartwarming and amusing blog at The Guardian, and her post on why arts funding shouldn't be cut should be read by everyone. It moved me to tears.

Old friends like book ends

There are those who think it's silly to read something more than once, but I've found one of the greatest pleasures life affords is reading a book you've loved again. There are many reasons to read something again: perhaps to see if it's as good as you remember, perhaps because you have to teach it, perhaps because you know you'll like it. A post at the Bldg Blog has another reason. Re-reading a book as a good way to measure your own growth, as "a literary way of marking your height in the same old doorsill, seeing how high you now stand."

A converse argument comes from Geoff Dyer, author of Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. He confesses here that he reads far less as he gets older. My immediate reaction was a sharp intake of breath, followed by mildly outraged clucking and tutting. But as I read on I took his point. Reading shaped his character, and inspired his construction of a life. Now that he's living that life richly and purposefully, books aren't quite as necessary as they were. “Reading, which gave me a life, is now just part of that life, at the moment rather a small part.”

I'd like to have it both ways, but I suspect I'll find myself at Dyer's age still reading, still imagining a life; measuring my height by the books I'm reading for the seventeenth time.

The moon upon her fluent route

I'm a week late with this inexcusably long post. The so-called supermoon was last weekend, and though I missed the opportunity last Friday,  I couldn't let it go by without assembling some poetry in its honour. There's plenty about so I picked a few lovely ones to place here. Don't feel you have to read them all!

Du Fu (8th century, Tang)
Above the tower -- a lone, twice-sized moon.
On the cold river passing night-filled homes,
It scatters restless gold across the waves.
On mats, it shines richer than silken gauze.

Empty peaks, silence: among sparse stars,
Not yet flawed, it drifts. Pine and cinnamon
Spreading in my old garden . . . All light,
All ten thousand miles at once in its light!

Sir Philip Sidney
With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heav'nly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries!
Sure, if that long-with love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case,
I read it in thy looks; thy languish'd grace
To me, that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, ev'n of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deem'd there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be lov'd, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there ungratefulness?

Alfred Tennyson
When on my bed the moonlight falls,
I know that in thy place of rest
By that broad water of the west,
There comes a glory on the walls:
Thy marble bright in dark appears,
As slowly steals a silver flame
Along the letters of thy name,
And o'er the number of thy years.
The mystic glory swims away;
From off my bed the moonlight dies;
And closing eaves of wearied eyes
I sleep till dusk is dipt in gray:
And then I know the mist is drawn
A lucid veil from coast to coast,
And in the dark church like a ghost
Thy tablet glimmers to the dawn.

Emily Bronte
'Tis moonlight, summer moonlight,
All soft and still and fair;
The solemn hour of midnight
Breathes sweet thoughts everywhere,

But most where trees are sending
Their breezy boughs on high,
Or stooping low are lending
A shelter from the sky.

And there in those wild bowers
A lovely form is laid;
Green grass and dew-steeped flowers
Wave gently round her head.

Emily Dickinson
The Moon upon her fluent Route
Defiant of a Road --
The Star's Etruscan Argument
Substantiate a God --

If Aims impel these Astral Ones
The ones allowed to know
Know that which makes them as forgot
As Dawn forgets them -- now --

Gerard Manley Hopkins
I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;

A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.

Rupert Brooke (extract)
All the earth grows fire,
White lips of desire
Brushing cool on the forehead, croon slumbrous things.
Earth fades; and the air is thrilled with ways,
Dewy paths full of comfort. And radiant bands,
The gracious presence of friendly hands,
Help the blind one, the glad one, who stumbles and strays,
Stretching wavering hands, up, up, through the praise
Of a myriad silver trumpets, through cries,
To all glory, to all gladness, to the infinite height,
To the gracious, the unmoving, the mother eyes,
And the laughter, and the lips, of light.

Robert Frost
I've tried the new moon tilted in the air
Above a hazy tree-and-farmhouse cluster
As you might try a jewel in your hair.
I've tried it fine with little breadth of luster,
Alone, or in one ornament combining
With one first-water start almost shining.

I put it shining anywhere I please.
By walking slowly on some evening later,
I've pulled it from a crate of crooked trees,
And brought it over glossy water, greater,
And dropped it in, and seen the image wallow,
The color run, all sorts of wonder follow.

Kenneth Slessor
Thief of the moon, thou robber of old delight,
Thy charms have stolen the star-gold, quenched the moon-
Cold, cold are the birds that, bubbling out of night,
Cried once to my ears their unremembered tune-
Dark are those orchards, their leaves no longer shine,
No orange's gold is globed like moonrise there-
O thief of the earth's old loveliness, once mine,
Why dost thou waste all beauty to make thee fair?

Break, break thy strings, thou lutanists of earth,
Thy musics touch me not – let midnight cover
With pitchy seas those leaves of orange and lime,
I'll not repent. The world's no longer worth
One smile from thee, dear pirate of place and time,
Thief of old loves that haunted once thy lover!

Ted Hughes
The flame-red moon, the harvest moon,
Rolls along the hills, gently bouncing,
A vast balloon,
Till it takes off, and sinks upward
To lie on the bottom of the sky, like a gold doubloon.
The harvest moon has come,
Booming softly through heaven, like a bassoon.
And the earth replies all night, like a deep drum.

So people can't sleep,
So they go out where elms and oak trees keep
A kneeling vigil, in a religious hush.
The harvest moon has come!

And all the moonlit cows and all the sheep
Stare up at her petrified, while she swells
Filling heaven, as if red hot, and sailing
Closer and closer like the end of the world.

Till the gold fields of stiff wheat
Cry `We are ripe, reap us!' and the rivers
Sweat from the melting hills.

e. e. cummings
who knows if the moon's
a balloon,coming out of a keen city
in the sky--filled with pretty people?
(and if you and i should

get into it,if they
should take me and take you into their balloon,
why then
we'd go up higher with all the pretty people

than houses and steeples and clouds:
go sailing
away and away sailing into a keen
city which nobody's ever visited,where

always
it's
Spring)and everyone's
in love and flowers pick themselves