Discomfited

Stay me with apples, comfort me with raisins, for I am sick of love The Song of Songs

Nothing can stay or comfort me

Not apples love, nor raisins

I grieve that nothing ever stays

Though all things have their seasons.

Such luscious fruit as summer loves

Is scant and getting scanter

Just apples for the autumn now,

And raisins for the winter.

The heart must have its reasons, love

The reason never knows,

Some things die, and some survive,

Beneath its winter snows.

Since there’s no stay or comfort through

The heart’s severer seasons

Leave as you must dear heart, but leave

No crumbs for comfort when I grieve,

You cannot stay me love, so leave,

I know you have your reasons.

Write-Off

Perhaps this poem's just another write-off,

An easy scrap of paper for the bin,

So, should I struggle on or turn the light off?

My muse, maybe, has booked another night off

Without her here, I can’t even begin.

Perhaps this poem's just another write-off.

And yet I can’t forget what I caught sight of;

A grace I mustn't lose, but cannot win,

So, do I struggle on, or turn the light off?

I’m darkened by the love I most make light of

I cast aside what’s not yet counted in.

Can I presume to recognise a write-off?

It is despair itself that I must fight off

When giving up just feels like giving in

So, do I struggle on, or turn the light off?

There’s something here to salvage, something right off

Life’s radar, or else underneath her skin

I’ve been redeemed; I might have been a write-off,

I'll struggle on until they turn the light off.

Hollows

I lift you lightly, you were made for me;
No box of rain to give the grateful dead,
But breath instead and beauty for the living
A certain shaping of the mountain air
Censes its gentle wood-scent in your hollows
The high, dry, hallows of Montana
First saw you braced and fretted, resonant
And ready to be sounded into song,
The smallest tremor trembles through your form
And turns the air to music. My full heart
Is poured into your forming emptiness
And given back as passion for another,
Your hollows hold a weight that sets me free

I lift you lightly, you were made for me.

I just realised that the blog ccut off the last part of the Dylan lecture so here's the missing conclusion:

All this turns then in the gathering together in the extraordinary image of the door in the flame

I gaze into the doorway of temptations angry flame

And every time I pass that way I always hear my name

This is both the unredeemed memory of the hotel door from which his name is called behind which he is offered  what Eliot called "the bitter tastelessness of shadow fruit"  but also it represents a new awareness that he is known to God, that the very hairs on his head are numbered,

And every time I pass that way I always hear my name

as George Herbert says, in  a poem on the same theme:

But as I rav'd and grew more fierce and wilde,
                                At every word,
    Methought I heard one calling, Childe :
                                And I reply'd, My Lord. (George Herbert The Collar)

We began with the ancient footprints that Dylan sensed in Rome, in that moment of double vision;

Ancient footprints are every where…

 But foot prints are only footprints, they are as it were a testament of absence, there is no possibility of their return. In Every Grain of Sand Dylan confesses and gives full poetic expression to the possibility of presence , the ancient footprints have become ancient footsteps and even though he honestly confesses the experience of absence too, we know that the God who spared Abrahams son on Highway Sixty-one is walking with him on his journey now, and  we are reminded, by the gift of Dylan's music, that he is walking with us too

I hear the ancient footsteps like the motion of the sea
Sometimes I turn, there's someone there, other times it's only me.
I am hanging in the balance of the reality of man
Like every sparrow falling, like every grain of sand

Hi here is the Woolf memorial lecture I gave in Cambridge on Dylan and the Bible.

"In the time of my confession", Memory, prayer and religious roots in the music of Bob Dylan, with Dr Malcolm Guite..:

Oh the streets of Rome, are filled with rubble,

Ancient footprints are everywhere

You could almost think that you're seeing double

On a cold dark night on the Spanish stair

This beautiful vignette from When I paint my masterpiece, written in 1971 shows us how aware bob Dylan is of the layering of time, of the latent memories in place and in language, alerting  us to the ways in which his poetry can give us, enhanced awareness, a doubling of vision, especially if we become alert, as he is, to the power of memory. In that verse Dylan awakens memory not only of Rome's ancient past but also of the other young poet, who lay dying on a cold dark night on the Spanish stair and had written the words that would echo through Dylan's later work, "forever young".

But it is not just Keats and the other poets whom Dylan remembers in his work but on every album, he recalls, and redeploys the scriptures, the poetry of the bible, As the Woolf Institute celebrates its 10^th anniversary with a series of lectures on memory I want to look a little at the way Dylan's music remembers the Torah and the Bible, the essential treasure house of memory, the root of that long fruitful act of remembering which is the Judeo-Christian tradition.

"Trainwheels running through the back of my memory,"

 sang Dylan in Rome in 1971 Those train wheels, the sound of Dylan's muse will take us on a journey not just to the streets of Rome, but as he would say later, "All the way from new Orleans, to Jerusalem."

Lets start with the memories freighted into one of the earliest and most memorable songs of all. Blowing in the wind.

Play song

How many times must we look before we see, how many ears must we have before we hear?

The lyric of this song is an example of what Michael Gray nicely calls "Dylan's Quiet incorporation of biblical rhetoric into his own (BDE p. 64) and he cites Ezekiel 12 1-2

"Thou dwellest in the midst of a rebellious house which have eyes to see and see not, ears to hear and hear not" says Ezekiel, and Jesus turns those words to the command "he who hath ears to hear let him hear". Dylan turns them again to a question to his own generation and ours,

"how many ears must one man have before he can hear people cry

how many times must a man look up before he can see the sky?

If we hav ears to hear, we can hear the biblical echo in this as in many other songs, but  the deepest echo here is not simply in the ears that hear but is both literally and spiritually "blowing in the wind". The biblical moment which Dylan's song baffling conversational song remembers is the baffled conversation between Christ and Nicodemus in John 3:8:

"The wind bloweth where it listeth, and thou hearest the sound thereof, but canst not tell whence it cometh, or whither it goeth, so is everyone that is born of the Spirit"

Here the allusion which is in the defining line of the song is completely consonant with its original scriptural context. Nicodemus the rich young man comes to Jesus with a whole string of questions which Jesus answers with another question: Art thou a teacher of Israel? How shalt thou believe? "

And further everything turns on the way in which earthly images may or may not reveal heavenly truths. Jesus asks Nicodemus another significant "how" question:

"If I have told you earthly things and ye believe not how shall ye believe when I tell you of heavenly things?"

 Now Dylan's song consists entirely of a series of "how" questions:  How many roads? How many seas? How many times? All answered by the cryptic and questioning "answer" that "the answer is blowing in the wind." Here the open-nes, the sense both of possible transfiguration and of an opportunity that might be missed, are equally present in both the Biblical text and the questioning and answering song, so they re-enforce one another. Dylan is a master of fruitful ambiguity, of withholding information precisely to increase the number of possibilities available in an open song, so Blowing in the wind never names either the questioner or the "friend" who answers in the chorus but allows us to explore the possibilities of who here is Christ and who is the rich young man. For this reason the song is multi-valent and a lot of its meaning arises from the context in which it is heard or performed. Stevie Wonder gave an interesting rap on this song when he sang it at the 90's Dylan tribute in New York and went through its many applications decade by decade.

 In the context of Jewish Christian relations we might want to ask. How does this song work as the young "pre-Christian" Dylan sings it to Martin Luther King in the sixties? Or when a "post-Christian" Dylan performed it for the Pope in the nineties?

One might have thought that as Dylan moved so swiftly from his absorption of the folk and blues traditions, replete as they were with biblical echoes, to his self-distancing from the protest movement and the beginning of his explorations of inner psychic and imaginative space, on through the amazing trilogy of mid-sixties electric albums might have diminished the frequency or intensity with which he borrowed from, echoed or re-imagined the Bible. Nothing could be further from the truth, the tone changes but the intensity of engagement if anything, deepens. Consider the album, Highway 61 revisited, the whole album turns on the word re-visited, uncovering Dylan's poetic technique and vision, which is precisely to re-visit and re-imagine the apparently familiar so that it becomes once more, something rich and strange.

The language of that album full as it is of Blake and Eliot, and the borrowed language of Ginsberg's angel-headed hipsters is also constantly calling and recalling the bible in strange new guises. Take the opening of the title track for that album with its street-wise retelling of the story of Isaac and Abraham which turns out, on reflection to be more midrash than mockery:

God Said to Abraham kill me a son

Abe said Man you must be puttin' me on

God said no

Abe said what?

God said you can do what you want Abe but

Next time you see me comin' you'd better run

Abe said where you want this killin' done?

God said out on highway sixty one.

Any reading of this song will be  nuanced by the knowledge that Highway Sixty-One was both the highway traveled by the children of the pre-war country blues players, men like Muddy Waters and B.B King, who found work in the northern factories, plugged in their electric guitars, and created the urban Chicago blues sound that fills the album, and the highway that Dylan himself went down when he left his own father Abraham, known to all as Abe Zimmerman behind and in the midst of his adolescent disguises became for a while, dead to his family. All the contexts come into play in the making of the final meaning of an album that deals with dislocation, displacement and uprootedness: What seems at first merely playful or perhaps only iconoclastic turns out to be deeply and seriously engaged.

Finding Jacob's ladder:

Dylan's retreat to Woodstock in 66 after the "Motorcycle Accident" and his subsequent exploration of bucolic, contemplative and ultimately mystical forms of expression again anticipate and partially cause the shift away from the outward extremism of the sixties counter-culture to a more inward and reflective series of concerns which the rest of 'rock' music began to reflect in the seventies. Dylan's refusal to tour for five yeas,. his absolute devotion to family life, the giving of traditional Jewish names to his children, his daily Bible readings, have been seen , especially by Jewish commentators on his works as signs of a re-integration into his life of his Jewish roots and identity. As his mother said of him at this time:

"In his house in Woodstock today there's a huge bible open on a stand in the middle of his study. Of all the books that crowd his house, that Bible gets the most attention."  (Quoted in Heylin p. 184)

A crucial event in this period which seemed to deepen Dylan's sense of his Jewish Heritage was death of his father in 1968 (for a rabbinical response to this period in his life and music see Trouble in Mind; A Rabbinic perspective on Bob Dylan's 'Religious Period' by Laurence A Schlesinger, published in On the Tracks issue 4 1994)

The Masterpiece of this period, JohnWesley Harding which Dylan himself referred to as the first biblical rock album would require a whole book, let alone a lecture to itself. Since my concern here is memory and prayer, I want to look beyond it to a song which is also a prayer and which Dylan gave great emphasis by recording twice on the same album, and that is forever young from 1974's Planet Waves.

"I found Jacob's Ladder leaning against an Adobe wall", wrote Dylan on the sleeve notes, a statement with both biblical and personal resonance as it was written after the birth of his son Jacob for whom the prayers in forever young are being made. Jacob's dream is about the connection between heaven and earth, the moments when the earthly is transfigured and we find that a particular place, a particular person is "the very gate of heaven", a theme that is echoed elsewhere on the album. (my dreams are made of iron and steel with a big bouquet of roses hanging down from the heavens to the ground, I was in a whirlwind, now I'm in some better place,) but the immediate biblical context  for this song is a place in the book of Numbers:

²²And the Lord spake unto Moses, saying, ²³Speak unto Aaron and unto his sons, saying, On this wise ye shall bless the children of Israel, saying unto them, ²⁴The Lord bless thee, and keep thee: ²⁵The Lord make his face shine upon thee, and be gracious unto thee: ²⁶The Lord lift up his countenance upon thee, and give thee peace. ²⁷And they shall put my name upon the children of Israel; and I will bless them (numbers 6:24-27)

Dylan's response to these verses begins with the invocation of God, the father of us all:

 may God bless and keep you always

and then addresses the child directly: May may you build, may you stay,

But as with earlier examples it is reverent but also playful and free

May you always do for others and let others do for you

May you always know the truth and see the light surrounding you.

The other text of course which is being remembered, as we hinted earlier, is Keats' Ode on a Grecian urn, with its constant refrains of forever, and its climax in the words "forever young". Christopher Ricks is particularly acute in high-lighting Dylan's many echoes and reminiscences of Keats throughout his work among the echoes Ricks high-lights here are the lines

"forever wilt thou love and she be fair

Forever piping songs forever new

Forever warm and still to be enjoyed

Forever panting and forever young.

Ricks shows the beautiful parallels but it seems to me the deliberate contrasts here are even more important.  "a cold dark night on the Spanish stair" connected keats and Dylan as artists, implying that salvation, redemptuioin from time was somehow to be found in art itself,

Somedau everything is going to be different, when I paint my masterpiece"

But things have changed, the Dylan of forever young, still haunted by Keats is looking for salvation from the hands of god, not the portrait of the artist. Keats' lovers are kept forever young by art,  immortalised on the vase and in the poem, but also frozen and beyond the possibility of growth. By contrast Dylan wants the immortality glimpsed in the phrase "forever young" but he wants it with growth and change and maturity,:

 may you grow up to be righteous may you grow up to be true.

The song is saved from the sentimentality into which Dylan feared it might fall by the favct that it is both about the eternal youth and about the dynamic and difficult process of growth and change, the deliberate paradox that we must both grow up and be forever young, which is certainly one of the vital paradoxes at the heart of Christian theology (unless ye receive the kingdom as children, and "grow up into the full stature of Christ.)

This song makes sense and resonates for both Jews and Christians in their respective readings of scripture, for lovers of poetry who catch its echoes and of course for all parents, especially in turbulent times where the need for the foundation which is our collective memory of God, is strongest.  The same latter-day Jewish  prophet who told us the times they are a changing  also gives us that priestly blessing,

May you have a strong foundation

when the winds of changes shift.

Dylan, an archetypal shape-shifter, was to go through many shifts and changes after writing this song and perhaps the most surprising to the wider public was his so-called "born again "period" from the end of the seventies to the beginning of the eighties, though to those of his fans who had been aware of how deeply soaked in biblical narrative and how spiritually charged his poetry has always been it did not seem so entirely unlikely.

The Biblical rock (as Dylan called it) of John Wesley Harding, and the concern with renewed vision that had culminated in planet waves was followed by a brilliant but domestically disruptive return to the road with the significantly named "before the flood" tour and then came "Blood on the Tracks which many read as an account of the breakdown in relationship with Sara,  and which contains "Idiot Wind" a despairing re-visit of Blowing in the wind with its Blakean/Apocalyptic vision of twisted religion: "The Priest wore black on the seventh day and sat stone-faced while a building burned… there's a lone soldier on the cross, smoke pouring out of a box-car door…"

This combination of disruption and renewal in Dylan's life led to the brief whirlwind genius of the Rolling Thunder Review and its accompanying album Desire (1976). But as the tour closed Dylan came very close to personal breakdown, a breakdown in which much of the imagery he had drawn from Old and New Testaments, especially its apocalyptic elements seemed to be bearing down on him (As witnessed throughout Street Legal (1978) but especially in the song "No time to Think")

At the end of this period Dylan had an epiphany which he believed to be the almost tangible presence of Christ and so began the well documented and still controversial "born-again" period. The first published account of this is Paul Williams' Dylan: What Happened? (and books 1979)written very soon after the events. Williams copes with the shock of Dylans conversion by psychologising it and suggesting that he was so susceptible to what he (Williams) calls "witchy women" that he needed to embrace the religion of a patriarchal (Male) God in order to be protected from them! Whilst I admire Williams writing on Dylan as a live performer, I think this account of his conversion is wide of the mark.  For a start Dylan was brought to his Christian faith by a woman with whom he was in love, and ofcrucial importance for the study of Dylan in a Christian-Jewish context is that the "Precious Angel" and "Covenant Woman" who brought him to faith in Christ was one of his Afro-American backing singers. The point of cross-over, in scriptural terms between Dylan's  recovered Judaic and his Messianic Christian phases, is the identity of both Jews and Afro-Americans with the story of liberation in Exodus, as Dylan says in Precious angel, the song which directly recounts his conversion:

Precious angel, you believe me when I say
What God has given to us no man can take away.
We are covered in blood, girl, you know our forefathers were slaves.
Let us hope they've found mercy in their bone-filled graves.

You're the queen of my flesh, girl, you're my woman, you're my delight,
You're the lamp of my soul, girl, and you torch up the night.
But there's violence in the eyes, girl, so let us not be enticed
On the way out of Egypt, through Ethiopia, to the judgment hall of Christ.

What is happening in this song? As a Jewish man who had once forgotten, but has begun to recover his Jewish root,s falls in love with a black Christian woman, issues of ancestry, roots and slavery begin to coalesce in the most extraordinary way. Complete immersion in the civil rights movement, and meeting with the key black Christian leaders especially Martin Luther King was a vital element in his formation as a song-writer. Dylan was present and on the podium when King made his "I have a dream…" speech, and King's powerful use of the Exodus story as a key to understanding the struggle for civil rights of former slaves, must have chimed profoundly with Dylan's own self-understanding as a Jew. Now it was to acquire new layers of meaning. These many layers of meaning are brought together by the subtle ways the song remembers and re-interprets key moments in the Bible.  There is of course the story of the Exodus itself as Dylan knew it from his upbringing, as Martin Luther King used it to address the civil rights movement, there is the literal and emblematic truth "both our forefathers were slaves". Then there is the typological Christian reading of the story in which the leaving of Egypt is the moment of turning from sin, crossing the red sea is baptism and the beginning in grace, the wilderness journey is our Christian life and the crossing of Jordan is our final passage through death to our home land. Dylan fuses these and adds details and nuances of his own. We are covered in blood has, as Michael Gray has pointed out, a threefold meaning in this song: "blood as in ones family and racial history, blood as in carrying the stain of people's inherent violence and sin, and blood as in the blood of Jesus Christ which covers us and cleanses us from all sin."

The strange reference to Ethiopia not only connects with the precious angel, Mary Aice Artes being an African American, but may also allude to numbers 12:1 where we are told that Moses had married an Ethiopian woman to the consternation of Aaron and Miriam.

For many people the album Infidels (1983) marks the end of the "Born again" period and the beginning of a more integrated and obliquely stated expression of Dylan's  faith and certainly a more open and imaginative, more nuanced use of scripture, as witnessed by songs like Jokerman and I and I.

The eighties were not a great period for Dylan but consensus is that Oh Mercy (1989) was a great return to form and this song contains many beautiful takes on scripture especially in the resigned "Shooting star".

Dylan has continued on every album since then to quote and allude to the scriptures in a wide variety of ways, but many critics have noticed that his most recent album Modern Times (2006) has the greatest number of scriptural allusions of any album since the born again period. Genesis and Exodus seem to predominate, though I believe the final song, "Aint Talking," an allegorical summary of Dylan's life, contains allusions to the account of Mary Magdalene and the risen Christ in the Garden of resurrection.

However I would like to conclude with a look at Every grain of Sand the song from which the title of this talk is taken, which seems to me to be both one of Dylan's greatest achievements and also the song in which the twin themes of memory and prayer are most deeply interfused.

(Play song)

In every grain of sand Dylan shows his great powers of re-invention, the way in which he can take the "old time melody" and in the very act of re-echoing it he can make it new. What he redeems, melodically, and indeed lyrically is the fatuously sentimentlal song" I believe" which has the same arpegiated background a song which simply lists "nice things" and says isn't the world sweet? I must believe in God. Dylan calls up the echo, but only in order to put the vital question what about the dark things, the things we ourselves have spoiled and broken, what about the sorrow, the violence the chill, the bitter dance of loneliness the broken mirror of innocence? Can we believe can there be a providence or a God in the midst of temptation's angry flame and all our memories of decay?.

Micheal Gray has written beautifully and extensively about this song, both about its biblical echoes and the ways it makes use of  William Blake's metres and imagery. I will draw on his work but also take it a bit further, especially focussing on the themes of memory and prayer. Gray locates the song and its "confession" in the book of Daniel and sees Dylan as a latter day Daniel captive in a modern Babylon, confessing not just personal sin but the sin of the nation, and making a confession in the sense of a "confession of faith.. " This is true as far as it goes but I think Dylan is also availing himself of the way biblical echoes can intensify purely personal feeling as well as making it more universal.  I also think that what makes this song so unique is that Dylan is not slavishly reciting scripture, not remembering it verbatim, but calling it up in order to turn it around question it, engage with it so that when at last it yields consolation that consolation is real and deeply drawn. Take for example the second line of this song

"when the pool of tears beneath my feet flood every new born seed.

Gray rightly points out that the seed image here recalls Jesus' parable of the sower, one of the stories that governs and directs the whole song, but he misses I think the allusion linking tears and seed-sowing which Dylan is remembering here ;Psalm 126 verses 5 and 6

⁵They that sow in tears shall reap in joy.

⁶He that goeth forth and weepeth, bearing precious seed, shall doubtless come again with rejoicing, bringing his sheaves with him.

Tears of remorse ought to be fruitful, to "bring forth fruit worthy of repentance" but the danger is that they become barren debilitating, self-pitying. The line between compunction and despair is so easily crossed, the decay from despair to cynicism and moral paralysis too easy. That is why Dylan is "toiling in the dangers and in the morals of despair," that is why the Cain image, noted but not developed by Gray, is so important in the second verse. Confession is precisely a looking back on mistakes, remembering them before God, but we have to remember them for freedom and not remember them in such a way that we become despairing and deterministic about ourselves, as Dylan was to say in a much later song: These memories I've got, they could strangle a man"

Eliot's reflections on memory are helpful here:

"this is the use of memory, for freedom…"

"history may be freedom, history may be servitude.. "

Confession must remember but not capitulate to the patterns of the past:

Don't have the inclination to look back on any mistake

Like Cain I now behold this chain of events that I must break

That is beautifully written poetry the easy linking of the cain/chain rhyme and in the delivery, the pause after chain but the refusal to end on chain, and the instsistant carrying of the line till it breaks on the word break, where breaking the chain is th entire point of confession and the purpose of memory, as Dylan was to say in a later song

Gon' walk down that dirt road until my eyes begin to bleed
'Til there's nothing left to see, 'til the chains have been shattered and I've been freed

Cain also had the chance to break the chain and didn't take it, there was nothing inevitable in his murder of Able, he is in fact warned and given new vision by God, "sin is couching at your door its desire is for you…".The Master offers Cain a mastery over his own fury which he refuses and all this is latent in Dylan's next line:

In the fury of the moment I can see the masters hand

In every leaf that trembles and in in every grain of sand

And here we come to one of the other key images in the song, every grain of sand. Certainly Dylan  is seeing with Blake's eyes here, his vision doubled by the vision of another poet as it was by keats on that cold dark night on the Spanish stair. Blake's Auguries of Innocence echo through Dylan's song,

To see the world in a grain of sand

And a heaven in a wild flower

Hold ionfinity in the palm of your hand

And eternity in an hour,

However, this is not just a single grain of sand, but repeatedly, every grain of sand and the question at stake is not do I have private mystical vision but, is there a God? Does he care for me? Does it matter what happens? Can I break the chains of the past? Every Grain of Sand is as  Biblical as it is Blakean, for Dylan is remembering that other seed (seed is  another key word for this song) the seed of Abraham.

This is Highway 61 Revisited revisited. God said to Abraham kill me a son, but that was not the end of the story, for God himself provided the sacrifice, and made this promise:

"By myself have I sworn, saith the Lord, for because thou hast done this thing, and hast not withheld thy son, thine only son: ¹⁷That in blessing I will bless thee, and in multiplying I will multiply thy seed as the stars of the heaven, and as the sand which is upon the sea shore;" (Gen. 22:16-17)

Dylan himself is part of the seed of that promise and comes to understand himself as one infinitely precious grain of sand. Then, as the image is repeated later in the song there comes another of the beautiful turns and returns of scripture which is the hallmark of his technique. In Genesis the grains of sand represent something innumerable, something literally numberless, but there is a transition in this song from the numberless and unknown to the numbered and known, mediated through psalm 139 and through the words of Jesus.

O Lord, thou hast searched me, and known me

Psalm 139, like Dylan's song about knowing, about whether and in what way we are known bu God and about whether and in what way we know ourselves. The psalmist has the same sometimes comforting, sometimes haunting, sense of being accompanied through the dark on his journey (sometimes  I turn theres someone there, other times its only me,) but as the psalm grows in confidence there comes this image

¹⁷How precious also are thy thoughts unto me, O God! how great is the sum of them!

¹⁸If I should count them, they are more in number than the sand: when I awake, I am still with thee.

Every grain of sand is now not only an image of the seed of Abraham of whom Dylan is one but of Gods constant looking to and thoughts of us, and the beautiful turn is the way in a single line Dylan fuses the Old Testament passage about the impossibility of our numbering the sand with a New Testament image of Gods infinite and particular knowledge of each one of us::

Are not two sparrows sold for a farthing? and one of them shall not fall on the ground without your Father. ³⁰But the very hairs of your head are all numbered. ³¹Fear ye not therefore, ye are of more value than many sparrows. (Mathew 10:29-31)

And onward in my journey I come to understand

That every hair is numbered, like every grain of sand

Why is this question of whether and how in what way we are known by God so important to Dylan? Precisely because the despairs and the temptations with which this song deals are precisely those of being at once known and unknown.

He is one of the most well-known people on the planet: his name is known to all, and yet ithe name by which he is known is not his name and what he is known and remembered for is not himself, but his many artistic masks and personae. The temptations, particularly the sexual temptations of the Famous musician on the road are both frankly and delicately dealt with. The lust and rage that afflicted Yeats here become "temptations angry flame", but in Gods eyes the singer knows that the forgotten women who came and went on the road are also grains of sand, as precious as the named and famous, in the eyes of God, all that is remembered and confessed in the line

The broken mirror of innocence in each forgotten face.

The irony, to which this song is fully alive, is that the very sexual encounter in which we hope to be most known, (for Adam knew Eve his wife), has become the encounter in which we are most masked and anonymous. Instead of a deepening union of mutual love and knowledge all we are left with is

The bitter dance of loneliness fading into space

I am just back from a week at St. deiniols the wonderful library-retreat in wales. Here are a couple of sonnets I wrote there, one inspired by the fifteenth-century stone font at St. edwards in Cambridge and the other by the 16th century oak communion table we use there. All comments welcome

The Font

Old stone angels hold aloft the font

A wide womb, floating on the breath of God,

Feathered with seraph wings, lit with the swift

Bright lightening of praise, with thunder over-spread,

And under-girded with their unheard song,

Calling through water, fire, darkness, pain,

Calling us  to the life for which we long,

Yearning to bring us to our birth again.

Again the breath of God is on the waters

In whose reflecting face our candles shine,

Again he draws from death the sons and daughters

For whom he bid the elements combine,

As old stone angels round a font today

Become the ones who roll the stone away

This Table

The centuries have settled on this table

Deepened the grain beneath a clean white cloth

Which bears afresh our changing elements.

Year after year of prayer, in hope and trouble,

Were poured out here and blessed and broken, both

In aching absence and in absent presence.

This table too the earth herself has given

And human hands have made. Where candle-flame

At corners burns and turns the air to light

The oak once held its branches up to heaven,

Blessing the elements which it became,

Rooting the dew and rain, branching the light.

Because another tree can bear, unbearable,

For us, the weight of Love, so can this table.

I have mentioned in this space my project to write a set of seven sonnets in response to each of the great O advent antiphons. by way of a happy advent present to all and sundry I am posting the complete set here together with the antiphons that inspired them in English (and in Latin for good measure). Please feel free to make use of these in church services or whatever, but I'd be grateful if you let me know that that's what you're doing. so here they are, each sonnet preceded by its antiphon:

O Sapientia, quae ex ore Altissimi prodiisti,
attingens a fine usque ad finem,
fortiter suaviterque disponens omnia:
veni ad docendum nos viam prudentiae.

O Wisdom, coming forth from the mouth of the Most High,
reaching from one end to the other mightily,
and sweetly ordering all things:
Come and teach us the way of prudence.

O Sapientia

I cannot think unless I have been thought
Nor can I speak unless I have been spoken
I cannot teach except as I am taught
Or break the bread except as I am broken.
O Mind behind the mind through which I seek,
O Light within the light by which I see,
O Word beneath the words with which I speak
O founding, unfound Wisdom, finding me
O sounding Song whose depth is sounding me
O Memory of time, reminding me
My Ground of Being, always grounding me
My Maker's Bounding Line, defining me
Come, hidden Wisdom, come with all you bring
Come to me now, disguised as everything



O Adonai, et Dux domus Israel,
qui Moysi in igne flammae rubi apparuisti,
et ei in Sina legem dedisti:
veni ad redimendum nos in brachio extento

O Adonai, and leader of the House of Israel,
who appeared to Moses in the fire of the burning bush
and gave him the law on Sinai:
Come and redeem us with an outstretched arm




O Adonai

Unsayable, you chose to speak one tongue
Unseeable, you gave yourself away,
The Adonai, the Tetragramaton
Grew by a wayside in the light of day.
O you who dared to be a tribal God,
To own a language, people and a place,
Who chose to be exploited and betrayed,
If so you might be met with face to face,
Come to us here, who would not find you there,
Who chose to know the skin and not the pith,
Who heard no more than thunder in the air,
Who marked the mere events and not the myth.
Touch the bare branches of our unbelief
And blaze again like fire in every leaf.




O Radix Jesse, qui stas in signum populorum,
super quem continebunt reges os suum,
quem Gentes deprecabuntur:
veni ad liberandum nos, jam noli tardare.

O Root of Jesse, standing
as a sign among the peoples;
before you kings will shut their mouths,
to you the nations will make their prayer:
Come and deliver us, and delay no longer

O Radix

All of us sprung from one deep-hidden seed,
Rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
But, severed from the roots of ritual,
We surf the surface of a wide-screen world
And find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
Whose heart we once inhabited in love,
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root
The stock and stem of every living thing
Whom once we worshiped in the sacred grove,
For now is winter, now is withering
Unless we let you root us deep within,
Under the ground of being, graft us in.




O Clavis David, et sceptrum domus Israel;
qui aperis, et nemo claudit;
claudis, et nemo aperit:
veni, et educ vinctum de domo carceris,
sedentem in tenebris, et umbra mortis.
O Key of David and sceptre of the House of Israel;
you open and no one can shut;
you shut and no one can open:
Come and lead the prisoners from the prison house,
those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death

O Clavis

Even in the darkness where I sit
And huddle in the midst of misery
I can remember freedom, but forget
That every lock must answer to a key
That each dark clasp, sharp and intricate,
Must find a counter-clasp to meet its guard.
Particular, exact and intimate,
The clutch and catch that meshes with its ward.

I cry out for the key I threw away
That turned and over turned with certain touch
And with the lovely lifting of a latch
Opened my darkness to the light of day.
O come again, come quickly, set me free
Cut to the quick to fit, the master key.



O Oriens, splendor lucis aeternae,
et sol justitiae:
veni, et illumina sedentes
in tenebris, et umbra mortis
O Morning Star,
splendour of light eternal and sun of righteousness:
Come and enlighten those who dwell in darkness and the shadow of death.

O Oriens

E vidi lume in forme de riviera Paradiso XXX; 61


First light and then first lines along the east
To touch and brush a sheen of light on water
As though behind the sky itself they traced

The shift and shimmer of another river
Flowing unbidden from its hidden source;
The Day-Spring, the eternal Prima Vera.

Blake saw it too. Dante and Beatrice
Are bathing in it now, away upstream…
So every trace of light begins a grace

In me, a beckoning. The smallest gleam
Is somehow a beginning and a calling;
"Sleeper awake, the darkness was a dream

For you will see the Dayspring at your waking,
Beyond your long last line the dawn is breaking".


.


O Rex Gentium, et desideratus earum,
lapisque angularis, qui facis utraque unum:
veni, et salva hominem,
quem de limo formasti.
O King of the nations, and their desire,
the cornerstone making both one:
Come and save the human race,
which you fashioned from clay
O Rex Gentium

O King of our desire whom we despise,
King of the nations never on the throne,
Unfound foundation, cast-off cornerstone,
Rejected joiner, making many one,
You have no form or beauty for our eyes,
A King who comes to give away his crown,
A King within our rags of flesh and bone.
We pierce the flesh that pierces our disguise,
For we ourselves are found in you alone.
Come to us now and find in us your throne,
O King within the child within the clay,
O hidden King who shapes us in the play
Of all creation. Shape us for the day
Your coming Kingdom comes into its own.


O Emmanuel, Rex et legifer noster,
exspectatio Gentium, et Salvator earum:
veni ad salvandum nos, Domine, Deus noster


O Emmanuel, our king and our lawgiver,
the hope of the nations and their Saviour:
Come and save us, O Lord our God.

O Emmanuel

O come, O come, and be our God-with-us
O long-sought With-ness for a world without,
O secret seed, O hidden spring of light.
Come to us Wisdom, come unspoken Name
Come Root, and Key, and King, and holy Flame,
O quickened little wick so tightly curled,
Be folded with us into time and place,
Unfold for us the mystery of grace
And make a womb of all this wounded world.
O heart of heaven beating in the earth,
O tiny hope within our hopelessness
Come to be born, to bear us to our birth,
To touch a dying world with new-made hands
And make these rags of time our swaddling bands.

The Ten Thousand Things

Libretto

Part 1:

Prelude:

One who vanishes

Fills the world.

One who is silent

Speaks the word.

He dies to himself,

On his own spear.

In his absence

Ten thousand things appear.

Narrator:

The men who kneel before you are both Jesuits, born at different times with different visions but united by a common mission and a common vow.

Here is Saint Francis Xavier, Apostle to the East

He hopes to win the world for Christ

By walking through the world

with Buddha's begging bowl.

And here, Matteo Ricci, a scholar in his silks

He hopes to woo the Chinese emperor

By coming grandly as Christ's courtier.

Chorus

On the high mountain

Falls the small rain.

On the emperor's back

The small worm's silk.

On the beggar's back

The fields of cotton.

From the silk cocoon

The gift of wings.

On the high mountain

Falls the small rain,

They vanish again,

The ten thousand things.

Narrator:

Now both men took a vow of absolute obedience,

To die to themselves,

To be perinde ac cadaver,

To make no more complaint than a corpse

At any order or indignity.

To keep that vow they died to their old lives,

They died to Europe and were born again

Ambassadors for Christ in China and Japan.

We start their story as they make their vows.

Xavier and Ricci

Perinde ac cadaver

Not my will but thine be done

And in thy will is perfect peace

Desires are done to death and one by one

Like life drained from a corpse at last they cease

I turn back to the giver

Perinde ac cadaver

This moment and forever

For me the war is over

I lose my self to find his perfect peace

Chorus

Francis thought that he had died and, borne again upon the waves of time, he came out of the west into Japan, a beggar clad in cotton

And after him a generation later Matteo came from his cocoon and sailed to China in his rustling silks

See they come to us from separate shores and centuries to separate shores and centuries to make an end and a beginning

Xavier:

Now I have died

I rise again

The old life is forgotten

I only have the Master left to please

The Son of Silk

Came to be clothed in cotton

And so I wrap my corpse in rags like these

Cover the secret kingdom of the soul

In tattered cotton and a beggars bowl

Matteo:

Now I have died

I rise again

The old life is forgotten

I only have the Master left to please

Cast off the corpse's

Shroud of ragged cotton

And take the silken road beyond the seas

The soul that dies in silk shall rise on wings

To shape the empire of the king of kings

Chorus:

I turn back to the giver

Perinde ac cadaver

This moment and forever

For me the war is over.

Part II:

Narrator:

How did they fair, this silk and ragged pair?

They learnt too late perinde ac cadaver

Had made them instruments of politics and power

They would have been ambassadors of Christ

The powers of Europe had another purpose

And turned them into tentacles of empire.

Xavier has been greeted with contempt

The Zen monks at Fukosho monastry

Are not impressed by his mock poverty

His poor translators make a mockery

Of all the precious verses of his bible

To men of power he is a poor  barbarian

Unless he comes back bearing gifts

Chorus

He comes as a beggar in cotton

And like a beggar he goes.

The Tenno and the Shogun will not see him

Until he comes with gifts

And not an empty bowl.

On the beggar's back

The fields of cotton.

From the silk cocoon

The gift of wings.

And time that ticks

And death that stings

Xavier:

Put off the cotton now

Put on the silk

Forsake the silence of your vow

And buy the world for Christ with empty talk.

Divide the time and sell it by the hour

Fight fear with fear and offer power to power.

Measure time and change the way things happen

A canon is a measure and a weapon.

Here is a gift to give a king of kings

The clock divides, the canon deals deaths stings

Fall from the One on folded eagle's wings

Divide and conquer the ten thousand things

Chorus

From the silk cocoon

The gift of wings.

And time that ticks

And death that stings

Narrator:

Ricci had more success it seemed at first

And he became a tutor in the court

He taught the arts of memory, translated classics

He re-imagined all that is in Christ

The son of Heaven, for a Chinese world

But just behind his back

The Portuguese were building power

Making his little church their empire's bridgehead

Chorus

With clocks and clavichords he won the emperors heart

And broke his own

For he had walked with Jesus and Lao-tzu

Talked with Confucius as he did with Christ.

He comes now with calligraphy

Behind him come cadavers with their cannon

Ricci:

This candle wears away before whose light

I practice my calligraphy.

This candle might be counting down the time

That flickers between passing lights and darks.

Time in the east is not marked off in ticks.

It is not measured by our western clocks,

Time is a stream that falls and fills

And wears like water on the rocks.

So I have filled and fallen

I am worn, white-haired before my time.

Narrator

They came to us on separate shores and centuries

To make a new beginning and an end

Ricci

I practice my calligraphy

The emperor is watching me in fear

The Portuguese are watching from afar

My little church is an invader's tower

My heart would make the character of peace

I have been made the character of war.

Narrator:

They came to us on separate shores and centuries

To make a new beginning and an end

The end of mission seemed to them a failure.

We saw them start with vows to be like corpses

And now we watch them die indeed and truth

Xavier:

In my end is my beginning

What I have done is seed that may not rise

Ricci

Nothing is lost for one who vanishes

Fills the world

One who is silent speaks the word

Xavier and Ricci:

But not my will but thine be done

And in thy will is perfect peace

Desires are done to death and one by one

Like life drained from a corpse at last they cease

I turn back to the giver

Perinde ac cadaver

This moment and forever

For me the war is over

I lose my self to find his perfect peace

Chorus:

One who vanishes

Fills the world.

One who is silent

Speaks the word.

He dies to himself,

on his own spear.

In his absence

Ten thousand things appear.

On the high mountain

Falls the small rain.

On the emperor's back

The small worm's silk.

On the beggar's back

The fields of cotton.

From the silk cocoon

The gift of wings.

On the high mountain

Falls the small rain,

They vanish again,

The ten thousand things.

Narrator:

Who can link the East and West?

Who can step from death to life?

I write this a few days after the Oratorio of The Ten thousand things, for which I wrote the libretto had its world premiere at Cambridge's West Rd Concert Hall. It was an amazing esperience to  watch and hear my words take flight in a new artistic medium borne aloft by Kebin Flannagan's amazing powers as a composer and by the skill and artistry of the Angla Sinfonia and chorale. Words that I had composed as a single, almost uninflected utterance were suddenly alive and rustling with a new music and purpose; single lines became rich choral textures and a new symphonic poetry blossomed around the original verbal poems. Its really impossible to describe but I thought I would post the full libretto here for those who are interested. I hope that Kevin will have some samples of the work itself up on his website soon http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/faculties/alss/deps/mpa/staff/kevin_flanagan.html

here's a list of his recent compositions:

Flanagan, K. (2007) Duo no. II for Violin and Piano: Cambridge, AMPublishing

Flanagan, K. (2007) Three for Malcolm, the first three of a series of settings of contemporary poets involving the Riprap quartet: Cambridge, AMPublishing

Flanagan, K. (2007) (New) Set for Violin and Piano, for Mifune Tsuji, and premiered in the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge: Cambridge, AMPublishing

Flanagan, K. (2007) The Ten Thousand Things, oratorio for four soloists, choir, and chamber orchestra, in collaboration with the poet Malcolm Guite of Girton College, Cambridge, first performed in West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge: Cambridge, AMPublishing

Flanagan, K. (2006) Riprap, CD recording released in March 2006 on the AMPublishing label, performed West Road Concert Hall, Cambridge in 2007. The pieces were also broadcast on the BBC World Service in October 2006, as well as being performed in the RFH on national poetry day in 2005: London, 33 Records.

Just to say that I have anaged to get the full lyrics (and Chords!) for all the songs on my Green Man cd onto my official website at www.malcolmguite.com do check them out

Malcolm