The Virgin of Sorrows

September 15, 2007

Gregory Day singing Yeats on the CD. I googled him, and discovered he’s a rugged, handsome Australian who wrote the renowned novel The Patron Saint of Eels. One did not expect him to be a tenor.

Sang for the ordination of Barbara Plimpton at All Souls. She phoned me a while ago and asked if I would write a poem on the theme of the Lady of Sorrows, which I did, and which came out, I think, well.

For the Virgin of Sorrows

Remember a time before the big, important occasions
that made it into the book, before the winemaking
and the raising from the dead.

Remember you were a girl, and a boy brought you flowers.
The moon moved and another boy brought you flowers.
It looked like that

was the way it was going to be for a while, boys
in procession with the gold and red flowers
of the desert, the free-for-the-asking

pomp of a land that once was Paradise.
One day it was an angel. One day it was an angel
bearing one stark, white lily.

Do you remember what was beautiful to you then?
Do you recall who turned your head
with his armloads of flowers?

One boy was different from the others, being divine,
but did he not come with his hair in his eyes,
bashful and stammering like the rest?

O! He was blinding white, you say. His beauty
was the lightning cast upon the mountain.
You found you could forgive him even that.

Did he not offer what they all offered, another name
and the destiny of children in the place
where your own destiny had been?

If he offered a crown, was it a crown of sorrows,
or was that a gift opened slowly, year after year,
the tolling of a bell in the darkness:

One for the One who watches Israel;
Two for the figures on the road to Bethlehem;
Three for the God made perfect in your womb.

Mother of sorrows,
Maiden of mirth,
Cup of begetting,
White knife of birth,

Mother unfathered,
Fountain of song,
Dame of white dreams
The dark drags along.

Virgin most married,
Queen of the night,
Hawk among swallows
In their curving flight.

Lady of ladies,
Mother of Man,
Cradling Forever
In your two arms’ span.

Mother of the falcon.
Mother of the fox,
Held in my heart
Like a jewel in a box.


I had not known Plimpton before this time, and was not sure I knew her when I saw her, but if this carol has helped speed her on her way, then all is well.

Yet it has been a strange day, as if I had been exhausted at the start of it. Cool and bright, swept by yesterday’s rains. Titus stares out the front window as though summoned to watch and wait.