Lollai, Little Child

This is poem 82 from a wonderful little anthology, “A Selection of Religious Lyrics,” edited by Douglas Gray, in Oxford University Press’s Clarendon Medieval and Tudor Series (1975). Written in Middle English, I have put it into modern English with a handful of changes/ "improvements" to enhance readability.

   The poems in this anthology are mainly not literary masterpieces; they derive from the faith of "ordinary" people or, often, the priests and friars who wrote them for use in preaching to unlettered congregations. They reveal how medieval society was completely saturated in the life and language of the Christian faith and, therefore, how disastrously far Western Europe has fallen into the intellectual barbarism of "secularism," i.e. social Marxism. But now there is a new swamping faith knocking at the door - Islam, which will deliver the coup de grace to the unfaithful, child-aborting snowflakes who constitute what is left of Western "civilization."

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Lollai, lollai, my little child, why weep so sore?
You needs must weep; it was prepared before
Ever to live in sorrow, and sigh for evermore,
As your elders did before, while still alive they were.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lulloo,
   In an unknown world trapped are you.

Beasts and birds, the fishes in the flood,
And everything alive that’s made of bone and blood,
When they come into the world, they do themselves some good –
All but the wretched brats of Adam’s brood.
   Lollai, little child, by care are you fore-met,
   You are lost in this world’s wildness that’s before you set.

Child, if it chances you shall thrive in plenty,
Remember you were fostered at your mother’s knee;
Ever have in your heart’s-mind thought of these three –
Whence you came, what you are, and what shall come of thee.
   Lollai, little child, lollai, lollai,
   With sorrow you came into this world, with sorrow you’ll wend away.

Nor should you trust this world, it’s your foul foe,
The rich it makes poor, the poor rich also,
It turns woe to weal, and then weal to woe,
Trust not any man in this world while it turns so.
   Lollai, little child, your foot is in the wheel,
   You know not whether it turns to woe or weal.

Oh child, you are a pilgrim wicked-born,
You wander this false world, looking before.
Death shall come with a blast out of a sombre horn
And cast down Adam’s kin, as he was cast before.
   Lollai, little child, your woe was caused by Adam,
   In Paradise-land through the wickedness of Satan.

Child, you’re not a pilgrim but a foreign guest,
Your days are reckoned, journeys all imprest;
And whether you wend north, or whether east,
Death shall waylay you with sadness in your breast.
   Lollai, little child, this woe has Adam wrought,
   When he ate of the apple which Eve him brought.

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Put into modern English © November 2021

"Ah, Ah, Ah"

This poem derives from Jeremias 1:6 - "And I said: Ah, ah, ah, Lord God: behold I cannot speak, for I am a child." It also refers to David Jones's "I said, Ah! what shall I write?" in his "The Sleeping Lord and Other Fragments" (Faber 1974). David Jones is the Welshman in stanza 5.

   I was impressed to learn from Douglas Gray's "A Selection of Religious Lyrics" (see my introduction to the following post of "Lollai, Little Child") that in the medieval age "there was a traditional belief that men when born cried 'A!', the first letter of Adam's name," i.e. in recognition of the disaster of Original Sin into which they had now arrived.

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“Ah, ah,” the new-born cried,
   “Adam, you have done me ill:
Safe was I in the squeezing womb;
   Now, in the air I chill.”

An apple’s bite brought psyche’s woe,
   Edginess in the self’s deep;
Pigs and swill are the crème of life:
   The dumbstruck children weep.

“Ah, ah,” the prophet said,
   “Words begrudge, but God-touched I
Waste and strike down the bellied cits –
   Their idols and their scry.”

But few there are face truth with will:
   Exile’s trek, task-master’s whip,
Bloody those who “coud’na fash”
   Begging for bite and sip.

“Ah, ah,” the Welshman wrote,
   God’s seven lamps gone flicking-faint;
“Nozzles pump and glass refracts,
   But purpose, form, are taint.”

The Lost in Action being lost
   Crassness fevers each man’s glance:
Turn, turn, but where, to what end?
   A dice! It falls askance.

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© November 2021

Season's Change

Here's a link to "In a Summer Garden," which, on reflection, has very little to do with the theme of "Season's Change," but what the hell... It was written in August 1980 and posted on 4 June 2012. (By the way, in the final stanza the rhythm requires that the Greek word Agápe be pronounced Agapé. Not having any Greek I am confused because the Oxford English Dictionary - before the wokeist luvvies got hold of it - gives the latter pronunciation.)

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      The seasons change,
      The body aches,
And there’s no joy in ale and cakes;
      The great estrange
      From warmth to cold
Shivers the flesh like shoes un-soled:
   Hallows’ Eve for some
   Comes with deaths and wakes.

      Plans neatly plumb,
      Ambitions great,
For one who lived beyond the gate
      Collapsed to crumb;
      And fates and loves
Now ripped and stained like floor-dropped gloves
   Fester in remorse,
   Tapping sorrow’s drum.

      Thoughts become coarse
      And limbs are crick,
Eyes wander, guilty, with a tic;
      Like frost on gorse
      Sins' razors cut,
Selves parlay but can only “but”:
   Wary, bodies limp –
   Judged, no longer trick.

      And grits are skimp,
      The urbs decays,
Its self-myth stripped to un-gemmed clays,
      Grey-veined and crimp;
      Exhaustion’s moan
Finals what now will be ungrown:
   City walls unkept
   Shadow thief and pimp.

      Now Time has crept
      To winter’s brim:
Will riddling Birth or roisters’ whim –
      A foot which stepped
      Through crusted snow –
Scuffle a path that men might know
   Warmth, spring’s flaring hum;
   Truth, that’s nature’s limn?

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© October 2021

"Autonomy"

From famine to surfeit. Here's a much fuller treatment on this theme, called "Urbi et Orbi," written in December 1979 and posted on 11 December 2011.

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   Christ Cross-ly cauterized the world then Rose:
His challenge opened Heaven’s gates: we so-and-sos,
   Now choiced, should dash to Him upon our toes;
Instead we game the odds then freeze in hell-gate’s snows.

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© August 2021

Three Ages

In a very early poem, "Four Answers Above," written sometime in 1973-76, I broadly covered (oh dear, I've split an infinitive) the same theme albeit from a much gloomier point of view. And I was only in my twenties! I posted it on 23 December 2013; it is linked here.

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Even though the young have all the luck,
      Their wits, their strength,
Sheer stamina that goes to any length
   To gain an edge, to earn a buck,
      They still end up stuck.

Come midlife and there’s little left to suck
      And see: there’s bills,
Alimony and redundant skills:
   You may try a final dodge or duck,
      But you still end up stuck.

Of age I’m speechless: you survive the ruck
      And climb age’s heights
But find mere sickness, frailty and spites:
   Death will giggle, its hand will pluck –
      And you’ll know you are stuck.

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© August 2021

Time Passes

I find I covered the same subject in a lyric, "Impromptu," written in February 1980 when I wasn't even old. I posted it on 26 December 2012 and it is linked here. Twelve lyrics on the months of the year, and therefore called "Months: Lyrics," written in 2014/5, were posted on 11 March 2016 and are linked here.

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      An ancient wall,
   And one brick shoddy-red
   (Things decay and fall)
Crumbling palely in the rain’s
   Dissolving caterwaul:
In short years gone it’s dust and dross
At the wall’s foot, crawled on by moss.
   Time passes, so pass I.

   The leggy Shepherd’s Purse
   Gangling by the wall
   (Things decay and fall)
Grows dry, yellows to mulching sticks,
Sortileged by an autumn squall:
Those abandoned bones will lie in frost
By the needy chaffinch grubbed and tossed.
   Time passes, so pass I.

      A neighbour’s dog
      Gone gruff and old
   (Things decay and fall)
Lifts its leg against the wall,
Wheedling a few drops’ rancid scrawl,
Then limps off with a weary bark
Having made its final short-lived mark.
   Time passes, so pass I.

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© August 2021

Hark! The Lark!

This should be read with a certain speed, thus copying the singing manner of the lark. I have been reading the Elizabethans recently and they often contrast the lark with the cuckoo. Hence, opportunistically, here's a link to a poem on a totally different theme and written as long ago as 1980. It's called "The Cuckoo,"  was posted on 1 January 2013 and is linked here 

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A hidden dot in heaven’s misted blue –
That vault that’s depthless,
Arching from one far vista to horizon’s other –
And yet insisting on its presence,
Its song a tress
Of radiation that’s unquenchable
As upland streams, as swittering
From rock to rock in barbling freefall,
Scooting in lightfoot pleasaunce
Vertexly down scree and sprawl,
They seek a hearer open-mouthed impressed
By acrobatics’ twirling similes of song,
The skylark broadcast-sows its one and all:
"Avaunt you pigeon-chested knock-kneed males,
Come hither, yes hither, you ladies all,
Here’s a squire who fills his thong,
Eager to tup all summer long,
That, brood on brood,
My offspring like a Saxon horde
May claim the scrub and crop-rich fields
Of these chalk-boned and lazy-rolling wolds!"
An hour or more he hangs
And sings, the syrup-heat of summer, hued
And dense, lolling like ocean swells;
His wings in dashing flitter
Pump up his shout;
Like bells it pells, mells, wells, quells,
Skittles like shells, invokes like spells,
That none might guess
That ground-returned
He’s but a ball of drying mud,
Leaf-shred flecked and mongrel,
Belly-plump like a swelling downy bud,
His only brag his bristling crest,
Rising, sinking, rising, sinking,
As billiard-eyed he darts here-there,
Glancing, glaring, glancing:
How like the silly human, that crack-brained chest-thump chump,
Lard-bellied, trigger-fused concerned with “face”!
Take air, man, launch,
With weightless grace
Ascend the sun’s rich otherness,
Forgetting ground-stuck truths;
Think only of the lark as pure
Affectless being merged in thrilling blue,
A presence and a fons
Which sheerly gives beyond all mind or weal;
And as that lark which neither knows nor cares
But, winging, sings,

So, too, do you.

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© July/August 2021