Sunday Whatever by Mick Bloor

Poetry is one of those things that seems to divide readers into quite different camps. I am a poet and a poetry lover but fully understand how other people just don’t ‘get it’. This piece, though it’s about a poet is not altogether about poetry. Mick Bloor shows yet again what a knowledgeable and well read writer he is. Excellent stuff.

An Encounter of Sorts by Mick Bloor.

Wystan Hugh Auden (1907-73) is reported to have said: ‘I should be furious if I ever met another Wystan.’ Well, maybe he did and maybe it wasn’t fury he felt.

The poet was born in York, where his father was a doctor. There’s a blue plaque on a house there to prove it. But he had strong family connections with the village of Repton in Derbyshire. Repton is known for being the home of a prominent, fee-paying, boarding school (established in 1557), and for being the capital of the ancient Saxon Kingdom of Mercia. The village church is dedicated to St. Wystan and is of ancient foundation. Indeed, more ancient than was realised until 1779, when a grave-digger accidentally toppled into a forgotten Saxon crypt below the church. The crypt had been the resting place of the bones of the Mercian kings and of St. Wystan, a royal prince and a monk who refused to succeed to his grandfather’s throne, preferring a life of prayer and contemplation.

The saint was murdered in around 840, slain by Beorthfrith, his cousin and the son of the new king Beorthwulf, Wystan’s uncle. It was said that a column of light shot up from the spot where he died and was visible for thirty days. Prior to the Viking conquest and destruction of both the Mercian Kingdom and of Repton, the crypt had become an early site of pilgrimage; miracles were attributed to St. Wystan.  

Auden’s father was raised in the village and attended Repton School as a day pupil; he returned to the village in his retirement and was buried there in 1957, with Auden attending his father’s funeral. His father’s fondness for the place seems sufficient explanation for the son’s name.

Both Auden’s grandfathers were Church of England clergymen and he was raised in a High Church Anglican family. In his thirties, he renounced the leftist politics of his early poems and, in 1940, he joined the Episcopal Church in America – a committed, albeit private, Christian once more. Though living in America and Austria, he never lost touch with his roots. In 1966, for example, he gave a talk at Repton School. It would have been most unlike Auden, on at least one of his visits, not to have visited the crypt, which had been described as one of the most precious survivals of Anglo-Saxon architecture in England, renowned for the beauty of its carved supporting pillars…

His father must often have visited this strange vestige of an ancient age, both as a young boy and a pensioner. The poet shuffled down the stone steps. The sudden underground chill set off his hacking cough. He dearly wished it was permissible to smoke in church. He stared about him: the stone pillars were indeed very beautiful with their sinuous barley-twist decoration. The crypt was quite small and, of course, empty: no mouldering bones remained. Yet he nevertheless sensed something, a co-presence of some kind.

Whatever it was, it called to him, perhaps through a family familiarity with this place. Or was it something much, much older that stirred him – maybe the folk memory of the pilgrims whose scuffing feet had worn those ancient stones? Or was it older still? Was it an intuition of the guilt and unease of those court plotters and murderers, who might well have been duty-bound to attend the interment of their victim Wystan’s bones? The poet sensed an association and a meeting.

It was long, long ago in ages past:
The delivery of the martyr’s bones,
To lie in the royal crypt at last.
And at that ritual, was there also fear?
Did the slayers think their guilt was clear?
A prince and monk and martyr slain –
Did his slayers dread he’d rise again?

Mick Bloor