Durham Cathedral

by Jerome Hanratty (1930-2013)

The deep lawns muffle the mellow bells,
Here, high on Palace Green, aloof among the graves,
The coiffured trees, gowns and the grey old stone.
Down in another world, in pigmy forms,
The people walk, talk still, transact,
Give shout from threaded streets:
Durham’s medieval lanes
Clinging, narrowly clutched to this hill.

This rocky hill commanded by Cuthbert
To be cliffed with a church,
Massively settled, four square to gales,
An axe-hacked tribute to a militant God;
Hard Norman hammer
Beat from the wind and whinsill knot
Of Lindisfarne. Stark Dies Irae
Stamped in stone to signify
Correction: monument
To faith and fear in art anonymous.

Once
Its corners crowded like a market: rounded talk
Of farm-footed folk feeling for place
When
For fve hundred years a North Star to pilgrims
Pulled from afar like blood to the heart
Of this growing organ, huge in guts:
Groined from the cold knagged northern rock
But lancing with light from the presence within
Of saint and sacrament.
Blazing windows, blazing gold
Framed that shrine; on Neville Screen,
A maze of statues, alabaster; and, aloft,
The highest Bishop’s Throne — in little Christendom.

Sanctuary depending on a doorknob,
And firm protection in a pillared roof
That brooked no thought of downfall:
Solid in breadth, supreme in height,
Butressed towers and bonded chest:
The vaults that spelt security
And vaulting curves that spelt out mystery,

Aspiring as they rose to arch and key.
A sanctifed creation, one of the many
High heat pulses studded over England
Like piazza’d fountains in a dusty city:
Buildings unsurpassed
As specimens.

As in this case,
As in this vast and valveless case,
Within whose tall and straightened sides,
In lurching wake of trippers, strut
The surpliced ranks of choristers,
Verger to parson, Trollope-touched
And tinted with one wholesome tone.

Meantime
In cloister walk is stroll of nations’ flags,
On altar steps a flash of sandalled legs.
In crypt, re-christened Undercroft,
A medal-winning menu stars transparently,
And, passing totems set for sale,
Smart signposts beckon through the arch
Darkly to treasures hushed and cosseted,
To catalogue of manuscript and jewelled cross.

While marble pillars in the airy Galilee,
Lacking a full and ancestral sun,
Loom anaemic and chill in this windy fort,
Now that the paintings have peeled from the walls
And the blazing glass is gone.

Art Showcase 3

From Concealed Drives, a collection of poems framing thoughts and lamentations on bygone eras in North East England.

Jerome Hanratty was the author of 5 volumes of the Wheel of Poetry, as well as a host of other books and plays. He lived through the Depression, wartime, and subsequent phases of development, decay and regeneration; seemingly eternal cycles that have shaped the region through the ages.

Mouth of the Tyne

Penbal 1 – Lee Stoneman

No air-built castles, and no fairy bowers,
But thou, fair Tynemouth, and thy well-known towers,
Now bid th’ historic muse explore the maze
Of long past years, and tales of other days.
Pride of Northumbria!—from thy crowded port,
Where Europe’s brave commercial sons resort,
Her boasted mines send forth their sable stores,
To buy the varied wealth of distant shores.
Here the tall lighthouse, bold in spiral height,
Glads with its welcome beam the seaman’s sight.
Here, too, the firm redoubt, the rampart’s length,
The death-fraught cannon, and the bastion’s strength,
Hang frowning o’er the briny deep below,
To guard the coast against th’ invading foe.
Here health salubrious spreads her balmy wings,
And woos the sufferer to her saline springs;
And, here the antiquarian strays around
The ruin’d abbey, and its sacred ground.