The picnic, the dance and the abiding tree.

I never did Higher English at secondary school. I did it at night school in a year that introduced me to three Shakespeare plays, The Merchant of Venice, Macbeth, and Othello; George Orwell's Essays; D H Lawrence's Sons and Lovers; Wilfred Owen's War Poems; and several poems by W H Auden. What I made of Auden's poems I have only the haziest notion, except I knew what I was reading was important, in that way that when you are young you just know.

Since then I've slowly read more of his poems, gleaned from anthologies, quoted in odd places from Four Weddings and a Funeral to the current Archbishop of Canterbury, who is one of Auden's best critics and most thoughtful admirers. In his review of Volume 3 of Auden's Collected Prose, the essayist Alan Jacobs considers Auden's Horae Canonicae the high point of Auden's statements on his Christian beliefs. As a mature account of what is at the heart of his Christian faith, this sequence of poems, Horae Canonicae, demonstrates the fusion of poetic art and religious experience as feeling, thought and conviction.

In my haphazard, accidental and occasional encounters with Auden's poetry I hadn't come across this cycle as a complete sequence. So I went looking for it. By which I mean, forgive me, I Googled it. And struck spiritual gold, or oil, or whatever the equivalent metaphor is for important because valuable spiritual discovery.

A couple of years ago this cycle of poems featured on Radio 3 on Good Friday, introduced by Rowan Williams and read by the actor Tom Durham. The other night I spent an hour or two listening to the poems and the introductions by Williams, and what started as anticipated enjoyment quickly became unexpected encounter.

The combination of sympathetic and spiritually attuned commentary by Rowan Williams, clear and unaffected reading of Auden's poems by Durham, the evocative beauty and religious inquisitiveness of the poems themselves, and this in the context of a Good Friday meditation, made listening a complex process of prayer, aesthetic enjoyment, intellectual pleasure, and inward surrender to events and realities at once ineluctably tragic yet inexplicably redemptive.

Reading these poems again, you become aware of Auden's patient discontent, his by now chronic longing to understand "what happened between noon and three…", on that pivotal day when the business of Empire required yet another crucifixion. This time with hidden but eternal consequence. The poem 'Compline' ends with profound eschatological hopefulness, more than a hint of eucharistic thankfulness, and a celebration of the mutual indwelling and shared participation that is the eternal movement of Love in the celebration of a redeemed creation.

                                         ….facts
are facts,

(And I shall know
exactly what happened

Today between noon and three)

That we, too, may
come to the picnic

With nothing to
hide, join the dance

As it moves in
perichoresis,

Williams' commentary and Tom Durham's readings can be found here.