Cantus Firmus
I am presently working on a new sequence of poems written in response to George Herbert’s beautiful poem Prayer. I have long felt that each of the twenty-seven images and metaphor for prayer in that exquisite sonnet could itself be the seed and beginning of a new poem and so I have decided to make my own twenty-seven sonnet response to his masterpiece.
I was going to wait a while to share any of these, but I felt the two most recent ones I have composed, responding to Herbert’s two lines
The six-days world transposing in an hour,
Kind of tune that all things hear and fear
might be helpful for some of my readers in the current stressful and disturbing cycle of news. For when I began the poem on how prayer does not ignore ‘the six-days world’ the busy weekday world, the constant cycles of unnerving news, the noise and pain and clamour of daily life, but rather seeks to transpose that dissonance into the key of love, I realised that I was articulating something I had been feeling for a long time about the damaging and depressing effect of barrages of bad news unprayed through, accumulating as a kind of uninterpreted cacophony in the mind. We need the gift of transposition and the power to hear, however tiny it might seem, the eternal tuning fork that sounds Christ’s love in the midst of things, the cantus firmus that grounds the music the cosmos. As I wrote this I also realised that my poems were haunted by Over the Rhine‘s beautiful song ‘All of it was Music’.
If you have been as disturbed and distressed as I have in recent days I hope the following two sonnets will help.
As always you can hear me read the poems by clicking on the ‘play’ button or on the title. There is a little interference on the recording in the prose introduction to the first poem, but it clears up for the poem itself.
The six days world transposing in an hour
Twenty-four seven in ‘the six days world’,
In endless cycles of unnerving news,
Relentlessly our restless hurts are hurled
Through empty cyber-space. Is there no muse
To make of all that pain an elegy,
Or in those waves of white noise to discern
Christ’s inner cantus firmus, that deep tone
That might give rise at last to harmony?
We may not seal it off or drown it out,
Nor close our hearts down in the hour of prayer,
But listening through dissonance and doubt,
Wait in the space between, until we hear
A change of key, a secret chord disclosed,
A kind of tune, and all the world transposed.
A kind of tune, a music everywhere
And nowhere. Love’s long lovely undersong,
A trace in time, a grace-note in the air,
Borne to us from the place where we belong
On every passing breeze and in the breath
Of every creature. All things hear and fear,
For faintly, through our fall, we too may hear
The strong song of the Son that undoes death.
And one day we will hear it unimpaired:
The joy of all the sorrowful, the song
Of all the saints who cry ‘how long’,
The hidden hope of all who have despaired.
He sang it to his mother in the womb
And now it echoes from his empty tomb.
Malcolm Guite 