R E Q U I E M by C. J. DRIVER
At the Church of St. James the Great, Ewhurst Green, as part of the World War I
Armistice Centenary, Friday 2nd November, 2018 (All Soul’s Day). Each of the Seven groups of verse were interspersed
by beautiful and restful excerpts from
J.S. Bach’s Cello Suite (No. 1) played by Martin
Bradshaw.
Our
deepest thanks are due to Jonty for his invitation to join him for a reading of
his poem given in Westminster Abbey in September 2014 – at the start of the Nation’s four
years of recollection of The Great War and
remembrances of its losses. The poem was written in 1998 after two months study
leave from Wellington College.
Sixteen
members of the Society left Winchelsea in a Rye & District Community Minibus
on a dry twilight evening, arriving at the Church to a warm welcome from Canon
Christopher Irvine and his congregation. Many old friendships were renewed as
we settled down to hear what Jonty describes “as a single poem in seven parts
in the manner of Brahms German Requiem. It moves from early morning to mid-afternoon
to late night; from winter to spring to summer; from time present to time past
and back to time present; from despair to rage to acceptance – and the forms
balance not only each other but the structure, ranging from rhymed quatrains to
the pentameter (broken and fragmented) to leisurely syllabics. Yet, for all its
technical variety, the voice of Requiem is utterly personal: quiet,
experienced, sombre, vulnerable.”
Below I have selected some stanzas
from most of the seven sections to give examples of this very personal account
of family and homes in South Africa and England – in the hope that readers who
were not fortunate enough to be with us may get its flavour and wish to read
the whole themselves.
A whole day is inspired
by the last two verses of Psalm 39….
“For I am a stranger with thee
And a sojourner as all my
fathers were
O spare me a little that I may
recover my strength
Before I go hence and am no
more seen.”
1.
Before Sunrise. “There are ghosts in the
garden mists….
………………And there is silence
Like the dead walking in a dream.
I dream constantly of the
dead.
Into my sleep they come walking,
walking,
In this frozen dark of mid-winter dawn -
The blank-eyed ghosts of Africa.”
2.
Love
song in Twelve Fragments
3. “I
shall keep my mouth as it were with a bridle….”
“I have no desire to be young again,
Yet no desire for death,
nor to be old
And sensible. For too long I have told
The young what I myself fail to avoid.
So what I want to know is just how long
Have I got – not detail, not to the day
Nor hour, just a stab at when I shall say
My last good-night, fail to
rise from my chair,
4. Halfway
to Heaven “Let not my slippery footsteps slide…”
“Nowhere going
Nothing knowing
Silence only
Almost lonely
Striding streamwards
Trudging hill-high
Downland going
Upland slowing.”
……………..
“It is one of those days when you might
almost believe in heaven;
Early spring, well before
Easter, and when you look across the fields
It’s as if the harrowed lands
had been washed with water-colour
Or the sun had a green filter –
cold still, so you half-wish for gloves….”
There
are Three
Elegies in 5. The first is WAR-GRAVE
“In Brown’s Wood; a cemetery in Northern
France;
……………….
I’ve
come at last to view a single grave;
My
father’s father, Private Harry Driver,
Killed in nineteen-sixteen, aged thirty-two;
Survived a fortnight only, at the front.
……………….
………….. It’s my
grandfather’s grave,
Is it from this death that I began to grow?
……………….
I
stand beside his grave to say a prayer
For Harry Driver, and the rest like him,
On whom the guns were trained before they moved
That morning down the deadly sunken road.
I
cannot make the slightest sense of all
These deaths. If God exists, He must have shut
His eyes, or else would intervene to stop
This slaughter. But God cannot hide
His eyes.
After 6. Love-song
in Old Age
comes 7. Late night: Waking
“Late at night I wake; l’m
still downstairs;
At the garden gate I stand, staring out
At scented summer night. There’s
too much light
To see the stars, but even if I could
I do not know my way around this sky.
An owl is tracing maps below the house,
From tree to lake to copse, and
back again;
Unlike this ancient exiled
sojourner,
He
knows precisely where his place should be.
……………….
Upstairs my wife is sound asleep. My son
Stands by my side, to watch the shadowed lawn
And hedges. I
am at home in England,
At home as much as I shall ever be.
Lightly my strong son hugs me his goodnight
And I reply in kind, my height to height,
To flesh my flesh, and of my father’s,
too.
These garden ghosts have friendly eyes.
Goodnight
The audience were plied with
refreshments in the church by Canon Christopher and his team. The Winchelsea party then repaired to The White Dog for a happy supper. We
were grateful to Lorna and Hilary for organising such
efficient transport to and from Ewhurst Green.
Alan McKinna
(The text of the whole of "Requiem" can be found on the blog as part of the order of service at Westminster Abbey in September 2014)
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: only a member of this blog may post a comment.