Kathleen Raine's poetry is not a recent discovery for me – but it is a recent re-discovery. I'd forgotten just how perceptively she sees, and the lucid integrity with which she describes, the human condition. And there are lines that give voice to those subterranean longings that run through our souls, their sound the distant echoes of what we have lost or have never yet found. Her poetry is imaginative and wondering, mystic without being vague, compassionate but avoiding indulgent sentiment that distorts the vision of what life is at its most real, and what it might be if only we had the courage to see it and say it and live it with honesty and freedom. Some of her poems exemplify the poet at her most visionary and prophetic, able to play with ideas that are light or dark, allusive yet descriptive of her way of seeing the world, and beyond. Here's one.
WORLD'S MUSIC CHANGES
World's music changes:
The spheres no longer sing to us
Those harmonies
That raised cathedral arches,
Walls of cities.
Soundings of chaos
Dislodge the keystone of our dreams,
Built high, laid low:
Hearing we echo
Rumours of the abyss.
There was a time
To build those cloud-capped towers,
Imagined palaces, heavenly houses,
But a new age brings
A time to undo, to unknow.
There are few poems I know that so succinctly define post Christendom and the Post-modern malaise of the spirit, as Christians struggle to come to terms with a fading tradition, lost influence, the confused climate of moral life and the intellectual challenge of transposing the Gospel into a different key for a different and changing age. In my own canon of poets R S Thomas comes closet to her in voice and in the unflinching honesty with which he sees the world. More of Raine in the next few days.
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