York Sonnets

During my stay in Britain I nourished my poetic inclinations in many ways, both by reading and writing poetry, but also by learning and discovering facts, items or landscapes that at some point have inspired me to write. Below you will find a selection of sonnets written in response to some of my impressions and experiences in York whose seminal origin is found in my many excursions throughout the city.

Songs for Lute and Psaltery

I) The Rites of Spring

I come with songs for lute and psaltery

To waken passions still in wintry sleep,

To lure with ruses of my minstrelsy

The love now hidden in the chambers deep,

Which jealous hearts so niggardly will keep

For Self's consumption. So, with music's power
I play my ditties till the world will weep

For having lost, through stubbornness, the hours

Spent all alone. As when the vernal showers

Are summoning the flowers with their drum

And bid the crocus raise its purple towers,

Thus will the passions cast their chains and come,

Prepared for love, when I with good intent

Create sweet music with my instruments.

II) St. Mary's Abbey, York

Tacit the ruins stand, veiled in the sun;
The squirrel hides beneath the pigeon's tree;
Petrified angel, now your duty's done,

Cast off your rod of office, dance with me!

Fair Lady Blackbird, come, I beg of thee,

Lend me thy voice, sing us a madrigal

Accompanied by lute and psaltery

So that our friend Vertumnus heeds the call.

Now list! such happy tunes! Our festival

Commences here among these sculpted stones,

Mementos of a long past love whose fall

Was caused by sword and fire. Let us atone

For crimes against this love of bygone ages

By praising it in these our vernal rages!

III) The Devil's Dance

I roam the streets, a player of my tune,

To coax shy history into my game

Of love, of love-knots and the secret runes

Which lovers send, a lover's coded name.

These winding streets are spokes tied to the frame

Of city walls and rivers, songs enhance

The sense of history man tries to tame,

And history averting keen men's glance.

There on the corner see a devil dance

To fiddles, not to lute or psaltery,

Such mundane tunes to which the sullen prance

When minds diverge from mundane monodies.

Come to our song and stand not idly by;

He only lives who loves and will not die.

IV) Hymns to the Father

Our Father made this earth for man a home

And man seeks to requite His charity;

With songs for lute and psaltery I come

To celebrate my God with piety.

So fill the churches with the melody

Of praise that brings us closer to the Lord,

Be it the trumpet's stern sonority

Where Olaf stands on guard with axe and sword;
Be it St. Martin's Church beside the ford

Or houses for the Holy Trinity

Where choirs emulate the sacred chords

Of angels, and with lute and psaltery

Will we rejoice in harmony to praise

Our Maker in these sweetest vernal lays.

- June 14 - July 20 2011

Let thickest mists in envy master here,

- O that no day would ever more appear, Lady Mary Wroth

Guardian of the Faith

Flamboyantly adorned the vigilant saint

Stares with sullen eyes into the mist.

For centuries he has maintained his tryst

And guarded it against the shadowy taint

Of mundane mist whose whispering complaint

Perennially haunts him. He resists

The envious coaxing it will not desist,

Forged lamentation in a repeated strain.

The mist that leads astray good men on earth

And women too, faith's umbrage, gathers here

In envy of this temple where God's words

Direct the souls of men. The dense, cold air

Coils up the pinnacles like phantom birds

And reigns but the exterior, to its despair.
- June 06 2011

Eaters of Light

On the tympanum of St. Mary's Abbey, York, now at Yorkshire Museum

Mnemonic monsters, beasts of man-made Hell,

Greet the believers at the entrance-door,

And when the sun hangs high at vesper-bell

They stare at us, far darker than before;

They seem to eat the light, like, on the floor

Of their stone-world, a man-like soul is chained

And fed live beasts, that there, for evermore,

Will he be punished, writhing in his pains.

Dear Lord, what does this cure, what are the gains

Your servants will achieve, what remedy

Can here be sought to heal the world? In vain

They try to fight the sin of gluttony
By carving out this mirror of their minds

To tell their thoughts are forged by devil-kind.

- May 25 2011

That ye put off concerning the former conversation the old man, which is corrupt according to the deceitful lusts; And be renewed in the spirit of your mind; And that ye put on the new man, which after God is created in righteousness and true holiness.

- Ephesians 4:22-24

Apostasy

Conceived during Evensong after a reading from Paul's epistle to the Ephesians.

I cursed the name of God and turned my back

Against the cross to taunt Him hanging there,

Then steered my course to find a selvage track

To vanish from God's sight and disappear.

The track was toilsome and the skies unclear,

The shadows of the world led me astray;
I cried "you are but shadows!" but could hear

Their vicious laughter just beyond the way.

So at the end of this my longest day,

Entombed in darkness of my own deceit,

I faced the heavens and began to pray

Cursing my errant mind and wayward feet,

Then from without the darkness heard Him say:
Son, I have walked with you along your way.

- York, February 06-18 2011

Notes

Songs for Lute and Psaltery

Vertumnus: Roman god of seasons.

Was caused by sword and fire: St. Mary's Abbey was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries (1536-41)

(...) and the secret runes: in Medieval times it was not uncommon to write love letters in runes on sticks and bones and send them to sweethearts during the church service. I don't know if this was performed in Britain as well as in Norway, but it wouldn't surprise me.

(...) the trumpet's stern sonority: the wooden angel in the picture is one of four such carvings in St. Olave's Church

Guardian of the Faith

Flamboyantly adorned: the figure in question is the one in the picture, and as can be seen there is nothing flamboyant about him. The choice of word puns on the architectural style called Flamboyant Gothic evolved from the 14th century and onwards, a style marked by elaborate decorations. This carving is situated on the western front which was finished c. 1350.

Eaters of Light

Mnemonic monsters: carvings such as the tympanum in question served as education for the illiterate. 

man-made hell:  the hell of the Medieval mind was a place of elaborately contrived tortures based on visionary literature, such as Tundal's vision and the Divine Comedy (although the vision in the latter example is a fictional construct). Hell in the Christian sense appears for the first time in the Gospels, an afterlife quite different from the Jewish Sheol, but the perversely detailed descriptions of its horrors are not of Christ but Medieval clerics and visionaries, most likely heavily influenced by the Greek narratives of the punishment of wicked men in Hades. 

They try to fight the sin of gluttony: this objective is solely my own conjecture based on the torture the man-figure undergoes.

Apostasy

Observant readers will detect that the epigraph and the poem itself have no correlation in their messages. This is because my poem is not a response to the passage itself, but grew out of a mental process spurred on during the reading of said passage.

Like those who read Medusa's mazeful head

As, to hold up a ceiling or a roof,

Sometimes you see, as a corbel, a figure

Whose knees are pressed up against his chest;

Which, though not real, provokes a real discomfort

In anyone who looks at it

- Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri (translated by Charles Sisson)

Much more then would ye wonder at that sight,

And stand astonisht lyke to those which red

Medusaes mazeful hed.

- Epithalamion, Edmund Spenser

Whilst such specialist skill may have been held in great respect, the "mystery" of masoncraft could also be held in suspicion. The St Albans chronicler is scathing about the "carved work, unnecessary, trifling, and beyond measure costly" which was added "by the treacherous advice" of Master Hugh the Goldclif.

- Medieval Masons, Malcolm Hislop

In this blogpost I am returning to one of my very first subjects: faces carved in stone. This remains a fascination of mine mainly because it was an important part of visual communication in the Middle Ages, a time when most people were illiterate. Faces in stone served, therefore, a didactic purpose. Naturally, the grinning faces of demons or gentle, beautiful visages of angels would illustrate the dichotomy of good and evil very well, and larger spaces - such as tympanums - could contain entire scenes either from the Bible or Christian mythology (which, in my view, includes depictions of Hell). However, not every carving or adornment would be a part of the erudition of the illiterate masses, some of them were simply too far away from the eyes of the flesh to behold. Walking up the tower of York Minster I came across many carvings which are impossible to see from the ground, and this points to an interaction with a world not solely temporal or material. Many of these faces are grotesques, meant to ward off evil spirits which were, to the Medieval mind, as real as foxes, hawks or wainwrights.

In later ages adornments in stone served to a greater extent less educational or religious purposes, especially in the case of excessively crafted tombstones or caskets. In the Early Modern Period there came an increased awareness of the brevity of human life, following the failures of the ideals of Humanism. This awareness becomes manifest in literature, exemplified by Francis Bacon's poem Life and Sir Thomas Browne's Urne Buriall, and art, exemplified by the vanitas theme and its offspring "man is a bubble" which both became popular during the seventeenth century. As if in opposition to this sentiment, many men of high social standing sought to outlast their ashes, to paraphrase Sir Thomas Browne, by tombstones, cenotaphs and memorials, a feature common to men of all ages, but perhaps particularly extravagant in the Baroque era with its numerous cherubs and the like.

Below I present to you a number of stone carvings from various religious settings found in York. Some of them are Medieval, some of them are Early Modern and some are restored Medieval carvings. A little face-spotting when exploring the many beautiful churches of York is a nice way of coming across a vast number of curious little details.

St. Mary's Abbey and Yorkshire Museum and Gardens

The remnants of St. Mary's Abbey are found in the gardens of Yorkshire Museum and it is a popular place for people to spend some idle time, either for themselvs or in company. The abbey was destroyed during the Dissolution of the Monasteries and was established in 1088 as a refoundation of the monastery adjacent to Earl Siward's minster dedicated to St. Olave. A group of monks dissatisfied with the rule of its abbot left St. Mary's in 1132 to found Fountains Abbey, a Cistercian community, and this can be seen in relation to the reputed decadence of its abbots, quite likely one of the reasons why the abbey and its antagonistic abbots features in early ballads of Robin Hood. A number of beautiful carvings - some presented in the previous blogpost on this subject, Faces in Stone - are now stored in the Medieval section of Yorkshire Museum.

(...) Quickly, quickly, bend your knees:
It is the angel of God: put your hands together:
From now on you will see such officers.

- Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri (translated by Charles Sisson) 

This little cherub is found on a stone casket in the museum garden.

The following array of stone statues depict important Biblical figures, but I sadly do not recall the identities of the middle two. Considering their iconography they are either evangelists or prophets, but I can not say with any certitude which evangelists or prophets they represent.

Statue depicting the apostle and evangelist John who was traditionally portrayed as a young, beardless man.

And it came to pass, when Moses came down from mount Sinai with the two tables of testimony in Moses' hand, when he came down from the mount, that Moses wist not that the skin of his face shone while he talked with him.

- Exodus, 34:29

The above passage was falsely translated from Hebrew into Latin by Jerome, so in the Vulgate Moses was depicted as having horns. This came about because the similarity between the Hebrew word for "shining" or "resplendent" and the word for "horns".

St. Mary's Church

There are, to my knowledge, at least three churches dedicated to St. Mary in York. There are two south of the Ouse - junior and senior - and then there is this one, situated in Castlegate and now a place for contemporary art under the aegis of the Yorkshire Museums Trust. Originally an Anglo-Saxon church, the structure is chiefly 13th century with later alterations, and with its spire reaching 47 metres into the air, it is an easily recognisable feature of York when viewed from a certain height. I have sadly not yet been inside it, but I look greatly forward to do so.

With that they heard a roaring hideous sound,

That all the ayre with terrour filled wide,
And seemd vneath to shake the stedfast ground.
Eftsoones that dreadfull Dragon they espide
- The Faerie Queene, Edmund Spenser 

The green man of the woods, also known as a woodwose, one of my favourite creatures from Medieval folklore, as has been pointed out in an earlier blogpost.

I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.

- Job, 30:29

In reality the text is here talking about jackals, wich Jerome falsely translated into dragons in his vulgate. I decided to use the quote here anyway, since this head is surrounded by dragons, and probably also by owls.

(...) quiet as a Nun
Breathless with adoration

- It is a beauteous evening, William Wordsworth

Although traditionally a creature associated with evil, the dragons of St. Mary's are bound up in the classical paradox of all Medieval grotesques: although their features render them as typically evil creatures, especially according to the intertwined Medieval dichotomies of beauty and ugliness and good and evil, the grotesques serve goodness by warding of evil spirits and demons.

St. Michael le Belfry

A beautiful parish church situated by York Minster whose greatest claim to fame is the fact that Guy Fawkes was baptised here. The current structure was raised in the period 1525-37 and replaced an older structure on the same site. It is evidently not as well off as some of its neighbouring churches, since its carvings are badly weatherbeaten.

I'm not sure if the carving is meant to depict a harpy or some similar creature. One of the problems of identification in these matters is that many grotesques are not picked from a bestiary, but a product of the mason's - or perhaps the patron's - own imagination.
 

  

St. Olave's Church

This little parish church just outside the walls of the museum gardens is one of my favourite churches in York. This has nothing to do with its dedication to St. Olaf, but because of its beautiful architecture, typical of English stone churches. The first seminal steps of the process resulting in its current shape can be traced back to the alterations starting in 1466, but much of the structure dates from after the Civil War since the roof was turned into a gun platform during the Siege of York in 1644. 

  (...) I saw that I was

In air upon all sides, and saw extinguished

Every seen thing except the beast itself.

- Inferno, Dante Alighieri (translated by David Sisson)

  

York Minster

Dedicated to St. Peter this magnificent Gothic structure was instigated by archbishop Walter Gray in 1220 and completed in 1472. Walter Gray initially transformed the existing Norman church which had in turn replaced an Anglo-Saxon stone church. Since the Minster is a metropolitan church there are naturally numerous details to chronicle for an eager spectator, but I'm afraid it will have to suffice with a minor selection. The carvings are recent in age as the Minster is currently undergoing a massive restoration project, but I trust they at least are Medieval in aspect.

Why then dooth flesh, a bubble glas of breth,

Hunt after honour and aduauncement vaine,
And reare a trophee for deuouring death,
With so great labour and long lasting paine,
As if his daies for euer should remaine?
Sith all that in this world is great or gaie,
Doth as a vapour vanish, and decaie.
- The Ruines of Time, Edmund Spenser

(C) Terje Breigutu Moseng

 It was already the time when the air grows dark,

Yet not so much that, between his eyes and mine,

There were not revealed things which had been concealed.

- Purgatorio, Dante Alighieri (translated by Charles Sisson)

 The recycling of building stone also appears to have been common practice later in the Middle Ages. A considerable number of sculptural fragments made in the twelfth century for York Minster were recovered during the excavations of the nearby College of the Vicars Choral, where they had been used as building rubble.

- Medieval Masons, Malcolm Hislop

I chose to use this quote not because the picture above shows a detail from the College, but because it serves as a reminder of the transience of sculptures and carvings. And because I like to show off by quoting books.

Here he twisted his mouth and stuck out his tongue

As an ox does when he is licking his nose.

- Inferno, Dante Alighieri (translated by Charles Sisson)