E E Cummings: Selected Poems

      One of the good things about teaching sixth-formers (all those years ago) was that occasionally, instead of my recommending things for them to read, they suggested books to me, and I’m grateful to Giles because I did buy a collection of e e cummings’ poetry, and have enjoyed it very much.

He’s a difficult one to approach for a number of reasons, not the least being his unusual presentation conventions – never a capital letter, unspaced punctuation, random brackets and line breaks and a lot more. He was satirised for many years as e j thribb in Private Eye.

Re-reading (most of) this collection, I was struck this time by his love of the sonnet, at least as a 14-line poem, for I’d say that’s what the majority of them are. Some of them obey more of the traditional sonnet conventions such as rhyme schemes, octave and sestet, shift of focus and so on. And I wondered, do the ‘gimmicks’, does the unconventional approach get in the way of poetic communication? I thought of visual art – painting – and wondered further; can we think about and modern appreciate poetry in the same way as we do modern art? For me, the poetic vision and inspiration are definitely there, but do we process the words of a poem in the same ways we react to shape and colour in a painting, for example?

I wasn’t seeking comparisons, but two in particular surfaced as I read. Firstly, John Donne, whose verse is clever and witty (in the metaphysical sense) and full of multiple meanings, but flow and meaning are only rarely overshadowed by form, structure or language, which is much more the case with e e cummings. And then, looking even more closely at how he uses language, and also rhythm, I found plentiful echoes of the master of sprung rhythm, Gerard Manley Hopkins, another poet whom I rate very highly. The abrupt pauses and changes of direction are there, as is the sense of wonderment at life and the world.

Cummings’ love poetry comes over as genuine, truly felt, and unashamedly erotic at times, and this is very difficult to achieve without slipping over the edge into smut or porn, and I think he only overdoes this a couple of times. He’s also capable of some pretty vicious political satire, which I thoroughly enjoyed.

This is a really good selection, and it’s well presented, too, with a helpful introductory couple of pages of context before each of the different sections the anthologist has chosen to create. A good one to revisit, and it was on a whim, too.

John Carey: A Little History of Poetry

     Well, as I reached the end of this book, I was thinking how useful it would have been at the start of my Eng.Lit. Degree. It is exactly what is says on the cover, starting with the Epic of Gilgamesh and reaching as close to today as reasonably possible. I’ve liked John Carey’s writing about literature for quite a number of years, and his modest biography of John Donne (John Donne: Life, Mind and Art) has subdued my desire to read the latest one everyone is raving about…

Apparently the Jews in exile in Babylon may well have encountered the Gilgamesh story, which, surprise surprise (!) features both a flood and a snake, both of which later turn up in the book of Genesis.

Carey portrays the broad sweep of the development of poetry through the ages, and its changing purpose and function, too. It’s highly accessible as an introduction and a survey, both for the informed and uninformed reader. It’s eminently readable, and Carey’s knowledge and above all love of poetry shine through; he shows us the good stuff and explains why he thinks it’s good, and equally, at times, tells us what isn’t.

The book consists of many short, often thematic and comparative chapters. Whilst this works most of the time and suits his purpose, you can also see how hard it is to do justice to Shakespeare’s sonnets, for instance, in such a chapter. His love of John Donne’s poetry shines through in such a chapter, though, but I felt that Milton lost out. He’s tuned into the beauty and variety of the ways poets use our language – there are a couple of chapters on poetry not written in English, as there needs to be, but these don’t work nearly as well. I thought I knew poetry pretty well after a lifetime of study and teaching, but not; there’s just so much of it, and one inevitably both selects and sticks to what one likes best.

Carey achieves what he sets out to do, and admirably; I wholeheartedly recommend this book.

Sonnets, sonnets, sonnets

     I’ve come across a couple of good ideas – which of course I borrowed – during the various states of lockdown over the past year and a half. Someone wrote about listening to all the Bach cantatas, one a day, an excellent idea even if, as in my case, some days it was none and other days playing catch-up… And then someone was reading through Shakespeare’s sonnets one a day. I’d never read them all, just the usual dozen or so well-known anthologised ones that were important in teaching literature and criticism.

My reading of the sonnets was never one a day, either, just like the Bach cantatas weren’t. But it was an interesting exercise, now that I’ve reached the end. I’m glad I’ve done it, and I intend, if and when I can find the time, to spend more time studying them carefully. It’s hard to frame an overall response, really. There are a lot – 154 – too many? The sameness is rather daunting, the same structure and rhyme-scheme, apart from the single curious twelve-line one, and I’ve often used that as a way to be somewhat dismissive, especially when I’ve set Shakespeare alongside his contemporary John Donne, whose poetry I’ve always preferred for its variety of form and astonishing boldness and inventiveness.

But this reading has had me reflecting. Shakespeare’s sonnets are a tour-de-force because there are 154 of them, and even within the restrictions of that form he is both incredibly inventive, and also far wittier than I’d ever expected… again, this had been one of the areas where I’d compared him unfavourably with Donne, whose wit I still find matchless. There’s variety in Donne, but there’s an amazing number of variations on a theme in Shakespeare, which becomes captivating after a while. And then there is the inventive interplay between and among the sonnets themselves…

The other thing about the writer who set me off on this, was that they read the sonnets out loud. I loved this idea (in the privacy of my study), and parsing them as I read so that they scanned correctly and made sense was a serious challenge, which this retired English teacher rose to and enjoyed.

On death in literature

People die in literature all the time; their deaths are dwelt on for a while, and affect other characters. What occurs rather less often is deliberate and sustained consideration of the subject of death itself, perhaps viewed as too depressing to sustain an entire novel.

You can reflect on death in poetry: John Donne, for instance, does it masterfully in his Holy Sonnet Death Be Not Proud. Donne, Anglican clergyman and Dean of St Paul’s, knows that death is not the end, not ultimately something to be fearful of, because it leads to something far better – heaven and eternal life. He thunders at Death personified, though as a twenty-first century reader I’m not convinced, and I wonder at times how much his seventeenth century readers were.

Eugene Ionesco devotes an entire play to death; of all his works that I’m familiar with, Le Roi Se Meurt, which I had the good fortune to study at A Level (alongside King Lear, which was an interesting comparison) is the play I’ve found most powerful and affecting. The king has come to the end of his life and usefulness and so must die, but first he must accept this, and prepare himself for non-existence. Here, a king is an Everyman figure: powerful he may have been, but he cannot avoid the lot of every human, no matter how lowly. He rages and refuses, attempts to elude and evade; his young Queen supports him in this futility, holding out vain hope, while his other, older Queen must drag him kicking and screaming to face reality. It’s an absurdist drama and gains a great deal of its power from this, with the near-Brechtian alienation effect sharpening the focus on one man and his coming to terms with death. The single line (translated) “Everyone is the first person to die” had a profound effect on me at the age of 17, and I’ve never forgotten it: it gets to the core of the question so directly.

Leo Tolstoy’s novella The Death of Ivan Illych is jarring, disturbing: one day Ivan’s life is running normally, the next, he learns he has a fatal illness, which takes its course, and we observe his growing confusion and confusedness in himself as death approaches, as well as the attitudes of family, colleagues and neighbours, whose responses vary from initial concern to eventual boredom, because their lives are continuing normally and they are not (yet) faced with death in such a brutal way. And this is the way we react to knowledge of someone’s approaching end: we may be shocked or upset, and yet are reassured by the knowing that we will survive.

I first read Arthur C Clarke’s The City and the Stars as a teenager, and have come back to it a good number of times; as you might expect, as I’ve grown older, my response to it has changed. I now see how he has attempted to remove death from human experience, not in the manner of the Swiftian Struldbruggs, but through technology: the computer that runs the city of Diaspar (go on, work out the almost-anagram) has perpetuated that city for a thousand million years whilst the rest of Earth has worn out and disappeared. Each citizen has their mental pattern, their brain and memories stored, and is brought back to life every thousand years or so, for another, fresh existence… you die and yet you don’t, being preserved in the computer’s memory banks. I quite like this idea, and could happily while away some hours planning my next existence.

Poems for Valentine’s Day #5

Warning: explicit content in this post

Donne Elegy XX

TO HIS MISTRESS GOING TO BED.

COME, madam, come, all rest my powers defy;
Until I labour, I in labour lie.
The foe ofttimes, having the foe in sight,
Is tired with standing, though he never fight.
Off with that girdle, like heaven’s zone glittering,
But a far fairer world encompassing.
Unpin that spangled breast-plate, which you wear,
That th’ eyes of busy fools may be stopp’d there.
Unlace yourself, for that harmonious chime
Tells me from you that now it is bed-time.
Off with that happy busk, which I envy,
That still can be, and still can stand so nigh.
Your gown going off such beauteous state reveals,
As when from flowery meads th’ hill’s shadow steals.
Off with your wiry coronet, and show
The hairy diadems which on you do grow.
Off with your hose and shoes; then softly tread
In this love’s hallow’d temple, this soft bed.
In such white robes heaven’s angels used to be
Revealed to men; thou, angel, bring’st with thee
A heaven-like Mahomet’s paradise; and though
Ill spirits walk in white, we easily know
By this these angels from an evil sprite;
Those set our hairs, but these our flesh upright.
Licence my roving hands, and let them go
Before, behind, between, above, below.
O, my America, my Newfoundland,
My kingdom, safest when with one man mann’d,
My mine of precious stones, my empery;
How am I blest in thus discovering thee!
To enter in these bonds, is to be free;
Then, where my hand is set, my soul shall be.
Full nakedness! All joys are due to thee;
As souls unbodied, bodies unclothed must be
To taste whole joys. Gems which you women use
Are like Atlanta’s ball cast in men’s views;
That, when a fool’s eye lighteth on a gem,
His earthly soul might court that, not them.
Like pictures, or like books’ gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array’d.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal’d. Then, since that I may know,
As liberally as to thy midwife show
Thyself; cast all, yea, this white linen hence;
There is no penance due to innocence:
To teach thee, I am naked first; why then,
What needst thou have more covering than a man?

Writing about this poem is a challenge; teaching it was always one, but I did not like to shy away from it, for it is Donne at his finest, his wittiest, his sexiest, too. I would like to know what he made of it if he ever looked back at it, much later in his life, when he was Dean of St Paul’s…

Structurally, it’s a single piece, in rhyming couplets: none of the inventiveness of some of his love lyrics in this elegy. And we have to remember, as we read, that although in our twenty-first century reading, the poet appears to be actually addressing a woman as she undresses, for Donne this may not have been the case: the poem may merely have been a poetic exercise, an extended piece of wit (not humour, but cleverness, a show-casing of knowledge) of the kind that educated young men of the time might be expected to turn out, a poem about a woman undressing. The mistress may be real or imagined.

I’m afraid it can help our understanding of poems like this to read with the smuttier mind of a teenager, deliberately looking for the double-entendres, and I’ll urge you to do that: consider at least the words which I’ve underlined in the text of the poem…

Clearly women wore far more clothes, and far more complex clothes in those days! Almost the first half of the poem is a catalogue of the different garments he watches her remove, and his description of what is then revealed. The reference to Mahomet’s paradise is interesting one: clearly even in Donne’s time people were familiar with the nowadays hackneyed (and perhaps inaccurate) trope of the hordes of beautiful virgins awaiting the blessed in paradise.

We can sense the poet’s eagerness, impatience even, in Licence my roving hands and the line that follows, understandable perhaps, after how long the disrobing must have lasted. O, my America, my Newfoundland: I love this line, so clever, with its topical references to the newly-discovered world across the Atlantic; this is what I mean when I write about ‘wit’. And then follow the slightly less original comparisons with mines of precious stones and empires; jewellery is clearly a distraction to him, as we see from the classical reference to Atlanta’s balls. Pleased that she is finally undressed, he points out how much quicker he was in removing his clothes, as if to set the example and reassure her: if he is naked, why should she be afraid to be? The last line says it all.

Does the poem work, as a piece of erotic fantasy? Or is it pornography? Those are not throwaway questions, but serious considerations, and started off lively discussions in some of my classes with sixth-formers. I don’t see it as pornographic because in the end I can see no exploitation of the woman here; nonetheless I’m not totally comfortable that, as in some other of his love lyrics, only the man gets to speak: the woman’s voice is imagined and her consent therefore assumed.

Donne: A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day

Today I would like to share one of my favourite poems…

‘Tis the year’s midnight, and it is the day’s,
Lucy’s, who scarce seven hours herself unmasks;
The sun is spent, and now his flasks
Send forth light squibs, no constant rays;
The world’s whole sap is sunk;
The general balm th’ hydroptic earth hath drunk,
Whither, as to the bed’s feet, life is shrunk,
Dead and interr’d; yet all these seem to laugh,
Compar’d with me, who am their epitaph.

Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring;
For I am every dead thing,
In whom Love wrought new alchemy.
For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.

All others, from all things, draw all that’s good,
Life, soul, form, spirit, whence they being have;
I, by Love’s limbec, am the grave
Of all that’s nothing. Oft a flood
Have we two wept, and so
Drown’d the whole world, us two; oft did we grow
To be two chaoses, when we did show
Care to aught else; and often absences
Withdrew our souls, and made us carcasses.

But I am by her death (which word wrongs her)
Of the first nothing the elixir grown;
Were I a man, that I were one
I needs must know; I should prefer,
If I were any beast,
Some ends, some means; yea plants, yea stones detest,
And love; all, all some properties invest;
If I an ordinary nothing were,
As shadow, a light and body must be here.

But I am none; nor will my sun renew.
You lovers, for whose sake the lesser sun
At this time to the Goat is run
To fetch new lust, and give it you,
Enjoy your summer all;
Since she enjoys her long night’s festival,
Let me prepare towards her, and let me call
This hour her vigil, and her eve, since this
Both the year’s, and the day’s deep midnight is.
St Lucy’s name comes from the Latin word for light (lux, lucis) and her feast day is on 13 December in the church calendar. In mediaeval times, before the reform of the calendar and when it was increasingly out of step with the seasons and the stars, her feast day would have coincided with the shortest day of the year, when one could at last begin to feel hopeful that the worst was over, and there would gradually be more light as the days began to lengthen. Donne obviously felt the same as I and many others do, that this is a really grim time of the year…

This is not an easy poem: in fact the sense is pretty impenetrable without notes and a glossary. I’m not going to provide those, as this post is not an exercise in literary criticism, merely some of my thoughts by way of appreciation of a poem I’ve liked for many years. It was probably written on the occasion of a serious illness or a parting, rather than a death; it may or may not be about his wife.

In the first stanza, images of short days, lack of light, shrinkage and death abound, moving into attempts to imagine emptiness, absence, a total vacuum in the second. Images form the science (?) of alchemy, hard enough for us to understand nowadays, extend the idea. I sense Donne retreating ever further into himself as the poem progresses, as he tries to picture an elixir – a distillation – from nothing. Others may look forward to eventual new life as spring approaches, he says, and this is a feeling many of us may share, the sense of relief after that shortest day has finally passed and we can look forward to the – however gradual – lengthening of the days again, but the poet feels he cannot: the final stanza allows that possibility to other, inferior lovers. The sun moves into the zodiacal sign of the goat – Capricorn – symbol also of lust and sexual pleasure.

The poem is an epitome of despondency, sadness, melancholy; self-indulgent, perhaps, but a feeling in which I find it perversely pleasurable to wallow for a while each December. It’s a wonderful example of Donne’s wit, not in the sense of humour but in the older sense of knowledge, as well as a marvellous example of the extended metaphor or conceit. Notice how cleverly the very last line echoes and mirrors the first…

August favourites #31: Donne poem

Another cheat here: I already awarded Donne my favourite love poem award, and here he is again with a category all to himself. He deserves it for the marvellous variety of his poetry: in later life a very religious and holy man, Dean of St Paul’s and so famous for his sermons that apparently people travelled from all over Europe to hear him preach. He wrote some profoundly moving religious poetry, one of which you will encounter in another of these posts. But before his religious days, he was a man of the world writing very secular poetry: the Elegy on His Mistress Going to Bed is a wonderful poem. His philosophical meanderings in A Nocturnal Upon St Lucy’s Day take some unpicking, but for sheer cleverness I’ve always admired The Flea. Men have always been trying to persuade women to go to bed with them, with varying degrees of subtlety and success, and that will surely continue, but in Donne’s time it was the mark of any half-decent poet that he could write a poem to persuade a reluctant female. Andrew Marvell’s To His Coy Mistress is probably the most famous example of the genre but I think Donne’s poem is wittier, with the would-be lover lecturing the woman, taking her through a series of arguments, and refuting her (unheard) grounds for refusal… and basing it all on a flea, and flea-bites? How romantic! But clever, certainly.

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

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August favourites #1: Love Poem

I’m doing something different for the holiday month of August, writing about some of my favourites: poems, plays, music, art and other things, a short piece on a different topic each day. The categories are random, as are the choices within them, meaning that’s my favourite that day, and is subject to change… And I will try and explain why each choice is special for me. As always, I look forward to your comments.

I couldn’t begin to count the number of love poems I’ve read, taught, studied and loved, but there is one that always calls to me, and which is definitely my favourite: John Donne’s A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning. The poet is about to travel overseas, a dangerous journey in the early seventeenth century: no guarantee that he will make it back to his wife. And I know that he must have been in love with her, because he wrecked his career by marrying her secretly. He forbids her to be sad about his departure, assures her he will be back, and that he will miss her. The conceit (extended metaphor) of the two of them as a pair of compasses (mathematical not navigational) is marvellously developed, and there is a lovely erotic touch, imagining his physical desire re-awakening as he gets closer to home.

As virtuous men pass mildly away,

   And whisper to their souls to go,

Whilst some of their sad friends do say

   The breath goes now, and some say, No:

So let us melt, and make no noise,

   No tear-floods, nor sigh-tempests move;

‘Twere profanation of our joys

   To tell the laity our love.

Moving of th’ earth brings harms and fears,

   Men reckon what it did, and meant;

But trepidation of the spheres,

   Though greater far, is innocent.

Dull sublunary lovers’ love

   (Whose soul is sense) cannot admit

Absence, because it doth remove

   Those things which elemented it.

But we by a love so much refined,

   That our selves know not what it is,

Inter-assured of the mind,

   Care less, eyes, lips, and hands to miss.

Our two souls therefore, which are one,

   Though I must go, endure not yet

A breach, but an expansion,

   Like gold to airy thinness beat.

If they be two, they are two so

   As stiff twin compasses are two;

Thy soul, the fixed foot, makes no show

   To move, but doth, if the other do.

And though it in the center sit,

   Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans and hearkens after it,

   And grows erect, as that comes home.

Such wilt thou be to me, who must,

   Like th’ other foot, obliquely run;

Thy firmness makes my circle just,

   And makes me end where I begun.

On Shakespeare worship

Is Shakespeare that good? How good is he?

I’ve recently come back from my annual week with a group of a couple of dozen like-minded folk where we’ve sat and studied and explored Shakespeare and been to Stratford to see a couple of his plays at the RSC – Romeo & Juliet and Macbeth this year. The first performance was not bad, the second was brilliant. And at some point we find ourselves sitting in a room all saying in different ways how wonderful Shakespeare was… and sometimes I find myself feeling uneasy.

Can we step back and judge the man objectively any more, or has he been canonised in such a way that it’s impossible to be critical? Or is he clearly brilliant every which way and that’s that?

His language is wonderful: it’s hard to challenge that, particularly in his plays. I was particularly aware of this first re-reading and then watching Macbeth in performance. But when I’m reading or listening to his sonnets, wonderful as they are, I’m always reminded of his contemporary John Donne, whose poetry I’ve always preferred, who breaks out of the restricted and constraining sonnet form when he feels like it (quite often), who often writes as he would speak, with great power and freshness, contrasted with which Shakespeare can seem a bit trite, and same-y – all those sonnets! But when I read or see plays, yes Marlowe occasionally matches Shakespeare’s language in range and scope, as does Webster too, at times… but Shakespeare just does it so well, so consistently, so effortlessly, time and again.

Many people pay tribute to the way Shakespeare contributed to the development of our language, his coining of new words to suit divers occasions and situations; it’s true. But so did Milton, just as much and as powerfully, but people don’t read Paradise Lost any more, and so they never see or hear Shakespeare’s equal in this field.

We are fortunate that so much of Shakespeare’s oeuvre has survived – a couple of plays are known to be missing – and perhaps many plays by rivals did not. Shakespeare wrote in all the genres – historical plays, comedies, tragedies and romances, so there is a breadth to his work we do not have in his rivals. His themes are the same as those used by everyone else, and the judgement seems to be that he just outdid the rest.

I have never really been interested in any of the so-called controversies about Shakespeare’s identity, or his authorship of the plays or not: I don’t think it will ever be possible to have incontrovertible proof of anything that happened four centuries ago, and every generation produces its crop of theories. It would be good to have more information about the man and the gaps in his biography, but then, it would be good to have a lot of things…

Shakespeare is ‘for all time’, said friend and rival Ben Jonson. This may well mean the subject-matter of his plays and how he develops his ideas and characters. Writers are always going to write about the same issues – love, hate, jealousy, rivalry, death, ambition, friendship… but does Shakespeare inevitably have the last or the best word on all these topics? Maybe he enjoys an advantage as a dramatist, in that he brings it all to life, in front of us onstage: there is an immediacy and an intensity that few novelists are able to achieve in what is a totally different literary form.

What do you think?

On 31 October, 1517

All sorts of things have been reminding me of October 31 being the 500^th anniversary of Martin Luther‘s 95 theses, whether or not these were actually nailed to the church door in Wittenberg. Having a Catholic school education in England in the 1960s was an interesting experience, as there was still some of the feeling of being a member of a persecuted minority in the air; we were presented with a sketchy outline of the split in the Church as part of history lessons at primary school. Moving to a secondary school where the Anglican Church was the norm and saw itself as continuous with the church brought to England by Augustine at the end of the sixth century, I was offered an account of events from an opposite perspective, together with no small amount of mockery of Catholic beliefs and practices. Then I moved to a Catholic secondary school and got everything in more detail from the ‘right’ perspective again…

I suppose those experiences were useful in terms of teaching me about different viewpoints; they certainly got me interested in what could have caused such major ructions at the heart of Christianity. I’m still learning, and there’s an excellent explanation of the doctrine of justification by faith alone in this week’s edition of The Tablet.

My travels have taught me how different the Reformation was in Germany compared with England; in Germany there seems to have been much more of a continuation than a violent rupture; no mass iconoclasm such as destroyed so many cultural riches in England. I continue to be appalled by the vandalism and wanton destruction of Henry VIII’s reign.

There are three writers who I’​ve found very helpful in developing knowledge and understanding of the religious issues and historical events. One is a Catholic priest who wrote in the 1950s, Philip Hughes, who wrote a short volume on the Reformation in general, and a second, monumental tome, The Reformation in England, which details the demolition of Catholic England.

Then there is Eamon Duffy, who has written works of socio-religious history which trace the actual effects of the English Reformation on its people in two detailed and astonishingly well-researched books, The Stripping of the Altars, and The Voices of Morebath. This second volume looks at the changes as they affected on small rural community over the years between the first breach with Rome and the Elizabethan settlement.

Finally there is Diarmaid MacCulloch, whose hefty tome Reformation came out in 2003, and which I have decided to revisit as we come up to that symbolic 500^th anniversary. I’ll write more about his book when I’ve finished it.

And then, I cannot forget some of the literature which uses the Reformation as its starting-point. Kingsley Amis‘ novel The Alteration posits the Reformation never having happened in England and focuses on the moral horror of a young boy who is due to be castrated to preserve his voice for use by the Church. And Keith Roberts‘ Pavane, a far better novel for my money, is set in a world where the Reformation also didn’t happen, along with various other events consequent upon it…

A curious novel – Q – was published a decade or so, apparently written by an Italian collective who presented themselves as one Luther Blissett. It focuses on the social upheavals in Europe during the early years of the Reformation particularly the Anabaptists and the events in Munster, along with the early efforts of Rome to thwart what was going on.

Finally, I can’t overlook the astonishing religious poetry of my favourite poet, John Donne, a man genuinely torn by the religious strife in England and the theological controversies – although he ultimately knew which side his bread was buttered on. He brings to his Holy Sonnets and other poems the same ardour he brought to his sexual conquests and fantasies in his love lyrics, before he ‘saw the light’, took holy orders in the Church of England and went on to become Dean of St Paul’s and a man whose sermons people came from all over Europe to hear. Not much likelihood of similar fervour nowadays.