Madeleine in Church

Madeleine in Church

1                                  Here, in the darkness, where this plaster saint
2                                                Stands nearer than God stands to our distress,
3                                  And one small candle shines, but not so faint
4                                           As the far lights of everlastingness
5                                  I’d rather kneel than over there, in open day
6                                          Where Christ is hanging, rather pray
7                                              To something more like my own clay,
8                                                                        Not too divine;
9                                               For, once, perhaps my little saint
10                                               Before he got his niche and crown,
11                                          Had one short stroll about the town;
12                                          It brings him closer, just that taint
13                                                   And anyone can wash the paint
14                                          Off our poor faces, his and mine!
15                  Is that why I see Monty now? equal to any saint, poor boy, as good as gold,
16                  But still, with just the proper trace
17                  Of earthliness on his shining wedding face;
18                  And then gone suddenly blank and old
19                  The hateful day of the divorce:
20                  Stuart got his, hands down, of course
21                  Crowing like twenty cocks and grinning like a horse:
22                  But Monty took it hard. All said and done I liked him best,—
23                  He was the first, he stands out clearer than the rest.
25                          Should have immortal souls; Monty and Redge quite damnably
26                          Keep theirs afloat while we go down like scuttled ships.—
27                                                    It’s funny too, how easily we sink,
28                                                    One might put up a monument, I think
29                                   To half the world and cut across it “Lost at Sea!”
30                  I should drown Jim, poor little sparrow, if I netted him to-night—
32                                           Or my poor saint with his tin-pot crown—
34                                                    When we are sure that we can spare
35                                     The tallest, let us go and strike it down
38             If there were any Paradise beyond this earth that I could see.
39                                             Oh! quiet Christ who never knew
40                                     The poisonous fangs that bite us through
41                                             And make us do the things we do,
42                                     See how we suffer and fight and die,
43                                             How helpless and how low we lie,
44                                     God holds You, and You hang so high,
45                                     Though no one looking long at You,
46                                             Can think You do not suffer too,
47             But, up there, from your still, star-lighted tree
48                      What can You know, what can You really see
49                               Of this dark ditch, the soul of me!
50                               We are what we are: when I was half a child I could not sit
51             Watching black shadows on green lawns and red carnations burning in the sun,
52                                                        Without paying so heavily for it
53                      That joy and pain, like any mother and her unborn child were almost one.
54                                                                I could hardly bear
55                                     The dreams upon the eyes of white geraniums in the dusk,
56                                                        The thick, close voice of musk,
58                                     Or, sometimes, my own hands about me anywhere—
59             The sight of my own face (for it was lovely then) even the scent of my own hair,
60                         Oh! there was nothing, nothing that did not sweep to the high seat
61                                     Of laughing gods, and then blow down and beat
62             My soul into the highway dust, as hoofs do the dropped roses of the street.
63                                                        I think my body was my soul,
64                                                        And when we are made thus
65                                                                Who shall control
66                                     Our hands, our eyes, the wandering passion of our feet,
67                                                        Who shall teach us
68             To thrust the world out of our heart; to say, till perhaps in death,
69                                                                When the race is run,
70                             And it is forced from us with our last breath
72             If it is Your will that we should be content with the tame, bloodless things,
73                             As pale as angels smirking by, with folded wings.
74                                     Oh! I know Virtue, and the peace it brings!
75                                                      The temperate, well-worn smile
76                             The one man gives you, when you are evermore his own:
77                                 And afterwards the child’s, for a little while,
78                                              With its unknowing and all-seeing eyes
79                                 So soon to change, and make you feel how quick
80                             The clock goes round. If one had learned the trick—
81                                              (How does one though?) quite early on,
82                                 Of long green pastures under placid skies,
83                                 One might be walking now with patient truth.
84                       What did we ever care for it, who have asked for youth,
85                                 When, oh! my God! this is going or has gone?
86                                     There is a portrait of my mother, at nineteen,
87                             With the black spaniel, standing by the garden seat,
88                             The dainty head held high against the painted green
89             And throwing out the youngest smile, shy, but half haughty and half sweet.
90                             Her picture then: but simply Youth, or simply Spring
91                                          To me to-day: a radiance on the wall,
92                                          So exquisite, so heart-breaking a thing
93                             Beside the mask that I remember, shrunk and small,
94                                              Sapless and lined like a dead leaf,
95             All that was left of oh! the loveliest face, by time and grief!
96                 And in the glass, last night, I saw a ghost behind my chair—
97                 Yet why remember it, when one can still go moderately gay—?
98                             Or could—with any one of the old crew,
99                                     But oh! these boys! the solemn way
100                             They take you, and the things they say—
101                             This “I have only as long as you”
102                 When you remind them you are not precisely twenty-two—
103                             Although at heart perhaps—God! if it were
104                                          Only the face, only the hair!
105                         If Jim had written to me as he did to-day
106                         A year ago—and now it leaves me cold—
107                                  I know what this means, old, old, old!
109That is not always true: there was my Mother—(well at least the dead are free!)
110             Yoked to the man that Father was; yoked to the woman I am, Monty too;
111             The little portress at the Convent School, stewing in hell so patiently;
112The poor, fair boy who shot himself at Aix. And what of me—and what of me?
113             But I, I paid for what I had, and they for nothing. No, one cannot see
114                         How it shall be made up to them in some serene eternity.
115If there were fifty heavens God could not give us back the child who went or never came;
116             Here, on our little patch of this great earth, the sun of any darkened day,
117         Not one of all the starry buds hung on the hawthorn trees of last year’s May,
118                         No shadow from the sloping fields of yesterday;
119                  For every hour they slant across the hedge a different way,
120                                       The shadows are never the same.
121                         “Find rest in Him” One knows the parsons’ tags—
122             Back to the fold, across the evening fields, like any flock of baa-ing sheep:
123Yes, it may be, when He has shorn, led us to slaughter, torn the bleating soul in us to rags,
124                              For so He giveth His belovèd sleep.
125                         Oh! He will take us stripped and done,
126                         Driven into His heart. So we are won:
127             Then safe, safe are we? in the shelter of His everlasting wings—
128             I do not envy Him his victories, His arms are full of broken things.
129                         But I shall not be in them. Let Him take
130                                  The finer ones, the easier to break.
131And they are not gone, yet, for me, the lights, the colours, the perfumes,
132                         Though now they speak rather in sumptuous rooms,
133                                       In silks and in gem-like wines;
134                  Here, even, in this corner where my little candle shines
136                         With golds and crimsons you could almost drink
137         To know how jewels taste, just as I used to think
138         There was the scent in every red and yellow rose
139                                      Of all the sunsets. But this place is grey,
140                                               And much too quiet. No one here,
141                                               Why, this is awful, this is fear!
142                                                        Nothing to see, no face,
143                                  Nothing to hear except your heart beating in space
144                                               As if the world was ended. Dead at last!
145                                               Dead soul, dead body, tied together fast.
146                                  These to go on with and alone, to the slow end:
147                      No one to sit with, really, or to speak to, friend to friend:
148                                  Out of the long procession, black or white or red
149         Not one left now to say “Still I am here, then see you, dear, lay here your head.”
150                                  Only the doll’s house looking on the Park
151                      To-night, all nights, I know, when the man puts the lights out, very dark.
152         With, upstairs, in the blue and gold box of a room, just the maids’ footsteps overhead,
153         Then utter silence and the empty world—the room—the bed—
154                                  The corpse! No, not quite dead, while this cries out in me,
155                                               But nearly: very soon to be
156                                               A handful of forgotten dust—
157                                  There must be someone. Christ! there must,
158                                           Tell me there will be some one. Who?
159                                  If there were no one else, could it be You?
161                      So many devils? Was she young or perhaps for years
162         She had sat staring, with dry eyes, at this and that man going past
163                      Till suddenly she saw You on the steps of Simon’s house
164                                  And stood and looked at You through tears.
165                                               I think she must have known by those
166                                  The thing, for what it was that had come to her.
167                                  For some of us there is a passion, I suppose
168                                  So far from earthly cares and earthly fears
169                                  That in its stillness you can hardly stir
170                                               Or in its nearness, lift your hand,
171                                   So great that you have simply got to stand
172                                   Looking at it through tears, through tears
173                          Then straight from these there broke the kiss,
174                                       I think You must have known by this
175                          The thing, for what it was, that had come to You:
176                                       She did not love You like the rest,
177                          It was in her own way, but at the worst, the best,
178                                       She gave you something altogether new.
179                                   And through it all, from her, no word,
180                                       She scarcely saw You, scarcely heard:
181                          Surely You knew when she so touched You with her hair,
182                                       Or by the wet cheek lying there,
183And while her perfume clung to You from head to feet all through the day
184                          That You can change the things for which we care,
185                          But even You, unless You kill us, not the way.
186                          This, then was peace for her, but passion too.
187                          I wonder was it like a kiss that once I knew,
188                                   The only one that I would care to take
189         Into the grave with me, to which if there were afterwards, to wake.
190                                   Almost as happy as the carven dead
191                          In some dim chancel lying head by head
192         We slept with it, but face to face, the whole night through—
193One breath, one throbbing quietness, as if the thing behind our lips was endless life,
194         Lost, as I woke, to hear in the strange earthly dawn, his “Are you there?”
195                          And lie still, listening to the wind outside, among the firs.
196         So Mary chose the dream of Him for what was left to her of night and day,
197It is the only truth: it is the dream in us that neither life nor death nor any other thing can take away:
198         But if she had not touched Him in the doorway of the dream could she have cared so much?
199         She was a sinner, we are what we are: the spirit afterwards, but first, the touch.
200And He has never shared with me my haunted house beneath the trees
201Of Eden and Calvary, with its ghosts that have not any eyes for tears,
202And the happier guests who would not see, or if they did, remember these,
203                                       Though they lived there a thousand years.
204                          Outside, too gravely looking at me, He seems to stand,
205                                                    And looking at Him, if my forgotten spirit came
206                                                                Unwillingly back, what could it claim
207                                                                Of those calm eyes, that quiet speech,
208                                                    Breaking like a slow tide upon the beach,
209                                                                The scarred, not quite human hand?—
210                                       Unwillingly back to the burden of old imaginings
211                                       When it has learned so long not to think, not to be,
212                          Again, again it would speak as it has spoken to me of things
213                                                                That I shall not see!
214                          I cannot bear to look at this divinely bent and gracious head:
215                                   When I was small I never quite believed that He was dead:
216                                       And at the Convent school I used to lie awake in bed
217                          Thinking about His hands. It did not matter what they said,
219                                                    When there was no one else to see
220                                       I used to think it would not hurt me too, so terribly,
221                                                    If he had ever seemed to notice me
222                                                    Or, if, for once, He would only speak.

Notes

24] rips: disreputable, dissolute, or immoral people. Back to Line
31] penny light: a small votive candle, available in a church for one penny. Back to Line
33] Calvary: according to the canonical Gospels, the site of Jesus’s crucifixion. Back to Line
36] other two: according to the canonical gospels, two thieves were crucified alongside Jesus. Back to Line
37] I, too, would ask...I could see: Here, Madeleine echoes the conversation between the penitent thief and Jesus during the crucifixion: “And he said unto Jesus, Lord, remember me when thou comest into thy kingdom. And Jesus said unto him, Verily I say unto thee, To day shalt thou be with me in paradise” (Luke 23:42-43). Back to Line
57] jessamine: jasmine. Back to Line
71] Line from the Lord’s Prayer. Jesus teaches this prayer to his followers during the Sermon on the Mount; see Matthew 6:9–13. Back to Line
108] And for all that—but one has lived, everything has its price (French). Back to Line
135] lancet-window: a narrow, arched window, pointed at the top. Back to Line
160] How old was Mary...through tears: Luke 8:2 names Mary Magdalene as a follower of Jesus from whom Jesus cast out seven demons. “Madeleine” follows exegetical tradition in identifying Luke 8:2’s Mary Magdalene with the unnamed, sinful woman of Luke 7:36–50, whose story lies behind much of this verse paragraph. In Luke 7:36–50, Jesus is dining at the house of Simon the Pharisee; an unnamed woman is moved to wash Jesus’s feet with her tears, wipe them with her hair, and then anoint them. Simon is silently shocked that Jesus allows himself to be touched by a sinner; Jesus, however, commends the woman’s actions, forgives all her sins, and criticizes Simon’s lack of charity. Back to Line
218] Holy Week: the week immediately before Easter Sunday. Back to Line
Publication Start Year
1916
RPO poem Editors
Malcolm Woodland, Alexander Lynch