Thomas Kretz
Old Winchester Cathedral
St Swithun’s Day, if thou doest rain,
For forty days it will remain;
St Swithun’s Day, if thou be fair
For forty days ‘twill rain nae mair.
What did a bishop do eleven hundred years ago,
besides healing the broken eggs of poor women
and making scrawny sterile farm animals multiply?
Swithun was neither mitered nor carried a crook
as his statues say; was as indifferent to weather
as any Englishman could be; hardly superstitious;
never saw a cathedral or imagined one’s foundations.
What he did live was three silken intertwined lives:
rational man, passionate Christian, able minister;
and for these he was buried and three times exhumed
inside and outside and inside of his plains church.
He played chess with King Alfred too young for war
and taught the court profane arts only priests knew.
What rules he wrote for his community of Brothers
could not outlive the gentle man and easy father.
He walked the byways consecrating myth and legend;
enriched them with the Faith, tempered, temporised.
What Ben Jonson and Jane Austen remembered in rhyme
the congregation learned to recall every 15th July
from before the time the first umbrella was opened.
What I think of is the glorious dawn he died in 862,
last Mass at Stonehenge during the vernal equinox
a Danish slave pouring the water of final absolution.
cathedrals
Christianity
Page(s) 84
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