Just for tonight I have turned pagan. I’ll touch up my woad, brush off my mammoth skin and rehearse my shamanic skills by the light of the moon, Tonight is the longest of the
year and has such indisputable natural phenomena to mark it. I’d like to walk up the hill behind us to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, but we have drizzle, low cloud and fog, none of which apparently beset the Three Wise Men from following the star to Bethlehem. If there is any sun at midday tomorrow it will penetrate above the lintel of the doorway of Newgrange in Ireland. The light will stream down a long passageway and alight on the bones of the dead, or at least that is one theory. Those Neolithic astronomers and engineers 5000 years ago hit their mark perfectly and from it we have that wonderful symbolism of the lowest winter light signalling the turning of the dark into the growing light following the solstice.
This Monday requires a new scale to measure the gloom that has descended on us all with the curtailment of Christmas and accelerating infections. We’re all hearing of so much anguish as longed-for Christmas arrangements with loved ones crash into despair. Huge deliveries of turkey will be wasted, or empty larders will have to be quickly re-stocked. To cap it all it has rained and rained. Around noon we drove down Maid Marian Way in Nottingham, a thoroughfare that is usually bedlam, exasperated by the Council’s predilection for changing the junction configurations every time they hear we’re coming. Today it was if the entire population had run for shelter in anticipation of a High Noon gun-fight. You could almost imagine the tangle weed blowing down towards the Broadmarsh.
Our purpose for the visit was to take some gifts to friends with the expectation of a few cheery greetings over the hedge and across the deep puddles and rivulets flooding down the roads. With all the strategies being deployed to meet outside, play games remotely, blow kisses, mime hugs across public spaces and garden boundaries I have been reminded of a whole repertoire of songs where lovers call to each other across wild rivers – usually one tries to swim across and inevitably drowns. There was Running Bear who loved Little White Dove; there is Waly Waly also called The Water is Wide; The Water of Tyne; the Maori song Pokarekare Ana. And of course Leander dies swimming across the Hellespont to his lover Hero, but I don’t know any songs about that.
So on this, the longest night of the year I’m celebrating the almost invisible shaft of light that bathes the bones of the dead, by reading the gloomiest of poems, which even in R.S.Thomas’s bitter and pessimistic verse can’t quite assuage the light that will come with the indisputable natural phenomenon of spring. This acknowledges how we may well be feeling on this dreadful news day, but after tomorrow nothing can stop the fact that there will be several seconds more of light. I love the idea of the year turning to increased light from this cyclic immersion into darkness, as if on some spindle or axle. It makes mid-winter so much more encouraging than mid-summer.
"Song at the Year's Turning
Shelley dreamed it. Now the dream decays. The props crumble; the familiar ways Are stale with tears trodden underfoot. The heart's flower withers at the root. Bury it then, in history's sterile dust. The slow years shall tame your tawny lust.
Love deceived him; what is there to say The mind brought you by a better way To this despair? Lost in the world's wood You cannot stanch the bright menstrual blood. The earth sickens; under naked boughs The frost comes to barb your broken vows.
Is there blessing? Light's peculiar grace In cold splendour robes this tortured place For strange marriage. Voices in the wind Weave a garland where a mortal sinned. Winter rots you; who is there to blame? The new grass shall purge you in its flame.
© R.S. Thomas