In memoriam: Gloriana

A brief meditation on the Once and Future Queen

I promise the final part of my triad on the new transcendentalism is on its way. In the first part I considered how fiction is now at pains to overturn the retrograde notion of mere coincidence, or cosmic meaninglessness, and replace it with what in the West was known traditionally as grace and providence. My previous post, the interlude about Notre Dame, reviewed this idea as well. In the second part of the triad I wrote about the gentle epiphany of handicraft and other embodied arts and skills that we increasingly lack but which are so crucial, I believe, to feeling connected to and part of the rest of creation. Pursuant to that part of my triad, I also have an essay in the works on martial arts and some recent experiences of the Michigan Renaissance Festival; or, to put it differently, on the contrast between how something like unarmed or premodern combat and warfare actually worked in the real world, versus how we make it appear in our various media of entertainment (video and tabletop gaming, movies, books, LARPing, etc). That essay is the outgrowth of part of a conversation I had recently on radiopaper about storytelling versus gaming, which is perhaps yet another way of stating the idea. But before I lob that at you, I will finish the triad on the new transcendentalism with some thoughts on what I call deep history and rooted holiness. I will be writing in that part on Thoreau and Saint Kateri Tekakwitha.

But today was laid to rest Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and of Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith. Shortly after she died on the 8th of September, which also happens to be the Feast of Nativity of Mary (remember there are no coincidences, so when one queen dies on the birthday of another, there is meaning to be had), I composed a prose poem of sorts. The prose poem by itself will be my next Slant post. I am sharing it here as well.

The poem, which I call “A Litany for the Once and Future Queen,” is composed entirely of quotations from or allusions to works of British literature. When I reflected on Elizabeth’s passing, I realized that she had symbolized for me the land from which my mother tongue and most of my ancestors come. I have been fortunate to travel extensively in the British Isles and to have known many fine Britons. In the aplomb with which they have conducted their former sovereign to eternity I see the British virtues and characteristics I most admire. But because I am an American, it is as a place of language that Britain dwells in my heart.

On looking back over my prose poem, I was struck by how thoroughly Christian it is. This should not be surprising: Britain has been Christian for most of the time the faith has existed. And yet one can take the most important things for granted. When I was a young student, I used to say literature was my religion. In fact that has proved to be truer than I guessed in my youth, as this little piece reveals. I wrote in my last post about being Catholic, but the truth is I am a sort of default Anglican, as is anyone, I think, who has spent decades studying the literature of Britain. I think many British people have been similarly surprised by the religiosity on display in the Queen’s obsequies. There can be little doubt that in many ways the West is in the process of re-paganizing. But it is as if (or so many sensitive Britons seem to think) the kingdom has this week looked in the mirror of the Queen’s death to discover itself still Christian, or haunted by the archaic echoes of Christian cosmos and peoplehood.

I will refer back to this idea of the deep roots of Christianity in Britain (and its relation to sacral monarchy) in the third part of the triad on the new transcendentalism. For now, I simply offer the following prose poem. If you don’t catch every allusion, hopefully the tone comes through all the same. I end with a reference to Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, written in the time and in celebration of the first Queen Elizabeth. The header image of this letter is a depiction of Britomart, heroine of the third and fourth Books of that epic romance, in a troubled, introspective moment at a place in Faerie Land called Rich Strond. The artist is Walter Crane and the painting from 1900. Britain is the land whence comes modern fantasy literature, thanks to Spenser’s achievement: those are the cliffs of Faerie behind Britomart, of course, but they are also the cliffs of Dover.

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A Litany for the Once and Future Queen

I heard of shy Caedmon, sneaking out of the feast before the harp was passed to him, for he could not sing, and he fell asleep in the barn by the animals he was charged to keep and dreamed of an angel who told him to sing, so sing he did, of the creation first and then of every other holy tale until no great thing God had done had failed to find its way into English.

And I heard of his nameless peer who dreamed of syllicre treow on lyft leodan, leohte bewunden, beama beorhtost—wondrous tree lofting high, all wound up in light, the brightest Cross.

I heard of Gawain tested and found true enough, and from the same poet heard how wandering in Britain’s backwoods he came upon Heavenly Jerusalem and his pure pearl there, the little girl he lost on this very unhappy Earth.

I heard from Chaucer, paid in tankards of wine, how they went from every shire’s end to Canterbury, the holy blissful martyr for to seek, that them had helped when that they were sick.

I heard Dame Julian who saw Christ: And in this he showed me a little thing, the quantity of a hazel nut lying in the palm of my hand, as it seemed. And it was as round as any ball. I looked upon it with the eye of my understanding, and thought, What may this be? And it was answered, It is all that is made.

I heard William Dunbar’s lament for the Makars, and John Skelton sing of Elynour Rummyng’s very bad beer. But this new English, my own English—

that I heard for the first time when it was written: Whoso pulleth out this sword of this stone and anvil is rightwise king born of all England.

And it was written in Tyndale’s Bible: For God so loveth the worlde yt he hath geven his only sonne that none that beleve in him shuld perisshe: but shuld have everlastinge lyfe.

There is our prose in the first flush of youth. There is Philip Sidney writing his Arcadia to amuse his sister, and Robert Burton anatomizing melancholy, and Thomas Browne’s stark religion and archaic urns and burgeoning gardens.

Follow Michael Drayton through every corner of the Kingdom of Many Blessings, his Poly-Olbion. Hear Vaughan’s waterfall. See Southwell’s burning babe and Crashaw’s flaming heart of Saint Teresa. Turn to John Donne for elegy, the end of all relation, and to Herbert for love and for prayer to fill the bare ruined choirs.

Thomas Traherne chided me: Men do mightily wrong themselves when they refuse to be present in all ages: and neglect to see the beauty of all kingdoms.

So I laid me down with Izaak Walton in thicket and by riverside, and with Andrew Marvell in a green shade; with Robert Herrick I danced the harvest home. (William Morris and Richard Jefferies would see the green receding and the time when it would come again.)

I’ve seen the wind lift the hair of Keats’ Autumn and sat beneath the lime-tree with Coleridge. Went with Emilia Lanier to Cookham and with Jonson to Penshurst. I’ve been to Pemberley and Howard’s End, to Redwall Abbey and Bag End. I’ve been up and down the Tees with Anne Wilson, and turned thought upon thought uneasily with Charlotte Smith on Beachy Head.

Through the sloughs I’ve gone whistling with John Clare, and gone up Nan Shepherd’s living mountain in the Cairngorms. Through wild Wales with George Borrow I’ve been, and to the primordial Orkneys with Edwin Muir and George Mackay Brown.

R S Thomas preached to me with a hard verse, and George MacDonald with fantasy. I’ve heard the Book of Common Prayer and the English Hymnal, heard Hopkins with his sprung rhythm and Robert Bridges with his loose alexandrines forever testify to the beauty and the glory of creation.

And amazing grace: I heard John Newton sing the Olney Hymns with William Cowper, and heard of Cowper’s mad task to put in words the apocalypse of a winter evening’s walk. I heard William Blake sing of Jerusalem builded among the dark Satanic mills, and of his arrows of desire.

The Holy Grail came alive again in the words of Arthur Machen and Charles Williams and John Copwer Powys. Merlin spoke again through Mary Stewart. And Eden—I heard J R R Tolkien tell his son away at war that certainly there was an Eden on this very unhappy Earth, and I have studied The Natural History of Selborne.

If you have ears to hear and eyes to see, the York Mystery Plays come alive again in the mysteries of Dorothy Sayers, Agatha Christie, P D James. In that bitter century I found so many other women of faith without whose words I might never have found faith myself: Helen Waddell, Rose Macaulay, Caryll Houselander, Rumer Godden, Eleanor Farjeon, Barbara Pym, Evelyn Underhill.

I’ve heard the wind blow in the willows by Alice Oswald’s River Dart and whip across Watership Down, and moan in the Scottish Borders with the sound of Sir Walter’s minstrelsy. Hawks dove through that wind in the endless quest to trade death for life, and when J A Baker saw them at it, he knew that the hardest thing of all to see is what is really there.

I’ve blinked and sputtered with D H Lawrence in the mines, and delved deeper to where Jaquetta Hawkes knew the old gods and goddesses still live in the bones of the land. I’ve gone with T S Eliot to Burnt Norton and East Coker and Little Gidding, looking for history, for England.

I heard the stories of Tess and Jude in Wessex, and MacPherson’s Ossian, and Percy’s relics of ancient English poetry, all as if they’d come up out of the bedrock, out of the circling seas, out of the dream that is no dream, the living figures of some great allegory of love.

And how I’ve loved to hear from the eccentrics: Lawrence Durrell, who first taught me the beauty of place; Alan Watts, who wound up a hippie in California but to the end of his days talked of pubs and gardens; and R H Blyth, whose Zen is my Zen, and whose Gospel is my Gospel; and Phillip Sherrard, from whom I first learned what it means to live in a cosmos.

All these whom I have mentioned by name and by their work, and many more whom you may know, are to me like the gallant knights and bold ladies sent questing over a land that is Britain and it is Faerie. Long ago in a poem it was written that she who sent such men and women questing was called Gloriana in Faerie, and in this very unhappy Earth she was called Elizabeth. That was a harsh queen, but with the same name and in our time she came again, no longer a tyrant but like the still point, she seemed, of the turning world. And now that Elizabeth, that Gloriana, has passed away. So for now there is no more to say but:

God save the King. Long may he reign.