The Poems of Rowan Williams

by Rowan Williams

Overview

Rowan Williams's first collections of poems, After Silent Centuries and Remembering Jerusalem, along with a selection of new ones make up this new collection. It displays a poetry that embodies abstract ideas in vivid sensual images. The subject matter ranges widely: the natural world, works of art, recollections of a visit to the Holy Land at Easter, thoughts arising from fragments of the ancient Celtic world, and reflections on modern Welsh life. A group of poems expresses meditations on death, arising from Williams’s experience of grief at the loss of loved people including his father and his mother, and widens to include the last days of Tolstoy, Nietzsche in his madness, Rilke, Simone Weil, and Thomas Merton. There are translations, three from Rilke, and several from the Welsh, where the translator succeeds in his professed aim of writing a real poem in English, which conveys the imagery and energy of the original.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781847774521
Publisher:	Carcanet Press, Limited
Publication date:	04/01/2014
Pages:	96
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.40(h) x 0.40(d)

About the Author

Rowan Williams is an Anglican bishop, a poet, and a theologian. He was the Lady Margaret Professor of Divinity at Oxford and served as bishop of Monmouth from 1992 and Archbishop of Wales from 2000. He was the 104th Archbishop of Canterbury, from July 2002 to December 2012 and became Master of Magdalene College at Cambridge University in January 2013. He is the author of Honest to God, A Silent Action, Where God Happens, and The Wound of Knowledge, among others.

Read an Excerpt

The Poems of Rowan Williams

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By Rowan Williams

Carcanet Press Ltd

Copyright © 2014 Rowan Williams
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-84777-540-5

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CHAPTER 1

    Gwen John in Paris

    for Celia


    I

    I am Mrs Noah: my clothes-peg head
    pins sheets out between showers;
    in my clean cabin, my neat bed,
    the bearded Augusti lumber in and out.

    I am Mrs Noah: I call the beasts home
    together, the cat to lie down with the slug,
    the nun with the flapper. I comb
    the hair of ferns to dry on deck.

    I am Mrs Noah: arranging the flowers
    in bright dust round my garden shed,
    I watch the silent sky without doubt,
    in the soaked moonlit grass sleep without dread.

    I am Mrs Noah: the blossoms in the jug
    throw their dense pollen round the stormy room like
      foam;
    my hands hold beasts and friends and light in check,
    shaping their own thick gauzy rainbow dome.


    II

    Rodin's fingers: probe, pinch, ease open,
    polish, calm. Keep still, he says,
    recueille-toi: sit on the rock,
    gaze out to sea, and I shall make you
    patience on a monument. Keep still.
    I kept still; he looked away.

    On the stairs. In the yard. I stood,
    not noticed, in the middle of half-broken stone,
    aborted figures. I was a failed work,
    keeping still among the darting birds.
    His hand refused to close, my lips
    stayed open all hours. He might drop in.

    Brushing against Rilke in the corridor:
    he smiles with fear or pity. Angels,
    polished and black, bump into us
    at strange angles. Afternoon light
    swells like a thundercloud in the attic, busy
    around an empty chair, draped like the dead king's throne.


    III

    Thérèse dreamed that her father
    stood with his head wrapped
    in black, lost.

    Thérèse looks at the photographer
    under his cloth and sees
    Papa not seeing her.

    I watch Thérèse watching
    Papa and wondering when
    the cloth comes off.

    I watch her thinking
    you can spend a short life
    not being seen.

    Thérèse looks at me and says,
    Only when you can't see him do you
    know you're there.

    She says, Can you see me
    not seeing you? That's when
    you see me.


    IV

    I sent the boys off with their father.
    I shall wait on the drenched hill,
    Meudon, my Ararat, where the colours pour
    into the lines of a leaf's twist.
    And the backs of the chairs and schoolgirls' plaits at Mass
    are the drawn discord, expecting
    the absolution of light in the last bar.


    Drystone

    In sooty streams across the hill, rough, bumpy,
    contoured in jagging falls and twists, they walk
    beyond the crest, beyond the muddy clough,
    children's coarse pencil sentences, deep-scored,
    staggering across a thick absorbing sheet, dry frontiers
    on a wet land, dry streams across wet earth,
    coal-dry, soot-dry, carrying the wind's black leavings
    from the mill valley, but against the gales
    low, subtle, huddling: needs more than wind to scatter
      them.

    There is no glue, there is no mortar subtle,
    solid enough for here: only the stained air blowing
    up from the brewery through the lean dry gaps;
    hard to know how an eye once saw the consonance,
    the fit of these unsocial shapes, once saw
    each one pressed to the other's frontier, every one
    inside the other's edge, and conjured the dry aliens
    to run, one sentence scrawled across the sheet,
    subtle against the wind, a silent spell, a plot.


    Six O'Clock

    As the bird
    rides up the sky, the last sun
    looking up gilds in the hollows
    of the wings, an afterthought of gift
    to guests ignored and hurt, but no,
    the bird rides up the sky, eyes on the night.

    When the sun
    levels its sights across the grass,
    it packs the blades and little animals
    so tight, so heavy that you wonder
    why they don't tumble over
    into their new, uncompromising shadow,
    into their inner dark.


    Our Lady of Vladimir

    Climbs the child, confident,
    up over breast, arm, shoulder;
    while she, alarmed by his bold thrust
    into her face, and the encircling hand,
    looks out imploring fearfully
    and, O, she cries, from her immeasurable eyes,
    O how he clings, see how
    he smothers every pore, like the soft
    shining mistletoe to my black bark,
    she says, I cannot breathe, my eyes
    are aching so.

    The child has overlaid us in our beds,
    we cannot close our eyes,
    his weight sits firmly,
    fits over heart and lungs,
    and choked we turn away
    into the window of immeasurable dark
    to shake off the insistent pushing warmth;
    O how he cleaves, no peace
    tonight my lady in your bower,
    you, like us, restless with bruised eyes
    and waking to

    a shining cry on the black bark of sleep.


    Advent Calendar

    He will come like last leaf's fall.
    One night when the November wind
    has flayed the trees to bone, and earth
    wakes choking on the mould,
    the soft shroud's folding.

    He will come like frost.
    One morning when the shrinking earth
    opens on mist, to find itself
    arrested in the net
    of alien, sword-set beauty.

    He will come like dark.
    One evening when the bursting red
    December sun draws up the sheet
    and penny-masks its eye to yield
    the star-snowed fields of sky.

    He will come, will come,
    will come like crying in the night,
    like blood, like breaking,
    as the earth writhes to toss him free.
    He will come like child.


    Return Journey

    Why are places not neutral?
    on the smoky screen of walls,
    shop windows, sky and pavement spin
    the flickering reels of evidence, dust crawling up
    the frames, the privately detected chronicle
    of clumsily arranged affairs with time and place.

    Grace, yes, but damnation too dissolves
    in place, so it is not the future
    but the past we know to be incredible,
    eluding the imagination: unmoved mover
    of uncomprehending souls, shaping the mind
    glued to the dusty and unwelcome screen.

    Push up the blinds and in the room
    nothing has gone, there in the dark
    we sit unmovable, the wounds as fresh
    as ever, all that was ever done
    frozen against the walls in a bright moment,
    iron and bitter, bright like life.

    Fresh from the freezer, all the smooth pain that settled,
    stayed when we went on, sat and nestled,
    patiently in the corner, waiting to be collected
    when we happen back, it stares in silence
    at these new, would-be alien selves,
    a still, unsmiling, lifelike face.


    Crossings

    While I sit mute, suspicious of my choice
    (Reserve or fluency), how do I reach
    You, then, across the acres of the room?
    Yes, all the platitudes are clear enough:
    Muteness is eloquence, silence is the stuff
    Of sharing, while hands work a busy loom;
    But on your flesh my hands will still be blind.
    Your face is shut. Your body gives no voice,
    But charts a distance. How do we avoid
    A treaty with the compromising word?
    Knowing that after, when we have destroyed
    The ambiguity, the precious surd
    Of uncommitted quiet, we shall find
    Our honesty still waits to be aligned?

    You smiled, apologising for the sound —
    The hollow distant penetrating hum
    Of a dim underground, fathoms down from us.
    In those hard channels silence yields, not here;
    Under the crust, a journey's length is clear.
    The traveller there has mapped his terminus,
    Watches for a predicted stop to come,
    Steps in the floodstream, confidently bound
    A foreknown distance. I cannot select
    Periods so easy from the trodden edge
    Of words influx. Prospects of an unchecked,
    Unending bursting into haemorrhage
    Cut me a channel where we both, pulled down
    Under the hollow humming wheels, shall drown.

    Tell me what I am asking, then, what plea
    You hear without pronouncing. It is you
    Who hold the mirror and who know the name
    And will not say it; while the desperate cold
    Unchristened infant, years or seconds old,
    Tries its new lungs with incoherent blame,
    Clench-fisted, begs the necessary clue
    That holds the hand of an identity
    Its lifelong distance. Absolution's cheap
    This way, as I laboriously forget
    The guilt of joint conspirators, asleep
    Against complaining noises, bodies set
    Waiting for one to learn or one to teach:
    Casual midwives for miscarrying speech.

    Cracks open in the floor across the years.
    The rumpled bed of stone shrugs off the heat
    Of wooden coverlets, impatient with the dark,
    And dust no longer binds the drifting blocks.
    How long before the stone has forced the locks?
    How long before the flesh has split the bark?
    And the foundations, naked to our feet
    Carry us stumbling on a bridge that clears
    The dust-choked distance? While we wait to see
    A waking earth that stirs into the sun,
    Our covers still are drawn, the night walks free
    Between our frontiers, where no path will run.
    Under the wooden shroud, under the stone,
    Under the dust, the fields are locked unsown.

    The shifting floor, the smeared steps inlaid,
    Loosened and footprinted with journey's scars,
    Is this a field for growing, this a rock
    For building? no: the sedges of a marsh
    Where white horizons ring the eyes, and harsh
    Bird cry scratches the standing pools, to shock
    The marble dark in small and passing stars;
    The flats of boring exigence displayed,
    Unreckoned distance. This is all I make,
    Unreckoned distance. This is all I make,
    A roofless acting space, a voice exposed
    To drop its crying in a careless lake
    Of ragged eyes, of watchers undisposed
    To see or pity stale romantic scenes
    Decent embarrassment clothes with safety screens.

    And if I told you, should I be surprised
    If you, turning your head, asked me, And why?
    The choice is mine, the landscape my design,
    The black my painting, and the ice my chill;
    Looked bitterly at the evasive skill
    That locks me up inside this private sign,
    Turning a greedy fascinated eye
    On an emotion still uncompromised
    At its still distance. If I do not tell,
    And play under the bedclothes with conceits,
    What prudence keeps me in this glassy cell,
    The polished atoms of half-willed defeats?
    Well, atoms split, my love, are lovers' death,
    Out in the cold, no wind will lend us breath.

    To break a lock by giving open tongue,
    Stand up, come in and sing us out of doors,
    I know stirs recollections in the flesh,
    And blows the dust from pictures pushed away.
    Collected shadows from another day —
    Collected words, packed stinking, tight, unfresh,
    Ready to send the shiver down old sores,
    Echoes of other bodies, roundly flung
    A few year's distance. And the hoarded tears,
    Unheard reproaches, wait to be unlocked.
    Meanwhile I thoughtfully deploy my fears,
    Afraid to find my facile pities mocked,
    Afraid my probing taps the blood again,
    That my flesh too clouds over with the stain.

    So did we ever have an assignation
    Under the station clock? an intersection
    Of complicated routes? Was there a break
    Between connections when we might have snatched a
      word,
    Unusual and hard and timely, stirred
    By urgencies too close for us to make
    Excuses, plead appointments for protection,
    Slew our eyes round, sketch a retreat formation
    Into the distance promised by the hiss
    And echo of things setting to depart
    All round? Eyes scattering far and anxious not to miss
    Something or anything; travelling apart.
    You never came, we both of us could say,
    Angry, relieved, rejected, gone away.


    Déjeuner sur l'Herbe

    Watching your hands
    turn slenderly the glass
    I wait for rim to snap
    or bowl to spill;
    but when it shall
    shall there be wine to drop
    on the drab summer grass
    or only hours' worth of spent sands?

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Poems of Rowan Williams by Rowan Williams. Copyright © 2014 Rowan Williams. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

	Foreword	9
	Preface	23
	Gwen John in Paris	25
	Drystone	28
	Six O'Clock	29
	Our Lady of Vladimir	30
	Advent Calendar	31
	Return Journey	32
	Crossings	33
	Dejeuner sur l'Herbe	37
	Twelfth Night	38
	Great Sabbath	42
	Oystermouth Cemetery	45
	Third Station	46
	Pantocrator: Daphni	47
	Augustine	48
	Indoors	50
	Rublev	51
	Snow Fen	52
	Kettle's Yard	53
	September Birds	54
	The White Horse	55
	Cornish Waters	56
	Bach for the Cello	59
	Los Ninos	60
	First Thing	62
	Dream	63
	Feofan Grek: the Novgorod Frescoes	64
	Thomas Merton: Summer 1966	65
	Walsingham: the Holy House	66
	Penrhys	67
	Curtains for Bosnia	69
	Murchison Falls	70
	Kampala: the El Shaddai Coffee Bar	71
	Woodwind: Kanuga in March	72
	Remembering Jerusalem
	Jerusalem Limestone	73
	Gethsemane	75
	Calvary	76
	The Stone of Anointing	76
	Easter Eve: Sepulchre	77
	Low Sunday: Abu Ghosh	78
	Graves and Gates
	Rilke's Last Elegy	79
	Nietzsche: Twilight	80
	Simone Weil at Ashford	81
	Tolstoy at Astapovo	82
	Bereavements	83
	Winterreise	84
	Flight Path	86
	Ceibr: Cliffs	87
	Windsor Road Chapel	88
	Deathship	89
	Celtia
	Gundestrup: The Horned God	90
	The Sky Falling	91
	Posidonius and the Druid	93
	Altar to the Mothers	94
	Translations
	Experiencing Death (Rilke)	95
	Roundabout, Jardin du Luxembourg	96
	Angel	97
	Hymn for the Mercy Seat (Ann Griffiths)	98
	I Saw him Standing	100
	Strata Florida (T. Gwynn Jones)	101
	Song for a Bomb (Waldo Williams)	102
	In the Days of Caesar	103
	After Silent Centuries	104
	Die Bibelforscher	106
	Between Two Fields	107
	Angharad	110