In Memoriam image by Linda Richardson
The poem I have chosen for December the 12th in my Advent Anthology from Canterbury Press Waiting on the Word, is the first of two extracts from Tennyson’s great poem In Memoriam. You can hear me read this poem by clicking on the title or the play button. Once more the image above is a page from the Art journal which Linda Richardson kept in response to the poems in Waiting on the Word. she writes:
This is a very strange artwork, so if you are looking at it wondering, ‘What is this?’, you would be forgiven for thinking it strange too. However we sometimes miss the meaning in the things that happen to us because they don’t appear in the way we expect. I would, as much as possible, like to keep to the spirit of the art journal I made and include even this strange one. If you are responding to the poems by making or doing something, perhaps you too are dissatisfied by the outcome. It is a challenge sometimes to let it be what it is, so perhaps returning to it later you might be surprised to see a depth you didn’t notice at first.
The round forms dominate the image, floating, it seems in a blue haze. The forms are in two halves, ‘answering each other in the mist’. Some of the forms, ‘swell out and fail as if a door were shut between me and the sound’. The blue haze at the bottom of the image might be our unconsciousness where much is darkness and confusion. We barely understand why we behave in the way we do and why we react emotionally to seemingly small events. We wake from dreams, sometimes afraid or grieving for something we feel we have lost or missed. This is an image of contrasts speaking to each other, of sorrow and joy, sleeping and waking, peace and pain. Are the strange round forms waiting to rise out of the blue of unconsciousness? What will lift them up to the light? ‘The moon is hid: the night is still’. Do you sense the stillness of the round forms that are perhaps brooding egg shapes, waiting for new birth? ‘Be still and know….’
You can find a short reflective essay on this poem in Waiting on the Word, which is now also available on Kindle
In Memoriam XXVIII
The time draws near the birth of Christ:
The moon is hid; the night is still;
The Christmas bells from hill to hill
Answer each other in the mist.
Four voices of four hamlets round,
From far and near, on mead and moor,
Swell out and fail, as if a door
Were shut between me and the sound:
Each voice four changes on the wind,
That now dilate, and now decrease,
Peace and goodwill, goodwill and peace,
Peace and goodwill, to all mankind.
This year I slept and woke with pain,
I almost wish’d no more to wake,
And that my hold on life would break
Before I heard those bells again:
But they my troubled spirit rule,
For they controll’d me when a boy;
They bring me sorrow touch’d with joy,
The merry merry bells of Yule.
Malcolm Guite 