Poem of the Week: A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham

I just found this today, unfortunately too late to post on Her Feast Day which was yesterday.

From The Guardian

By Carol Rumens

A lament for a Catholic place of pilgrimage devastated by Henry VIII, this simple ballad delivers a powerful sense of grief

A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham

In mediaeval England, the most important shrine to the Virgin Mary was in the Norfolk village of Walsingham. It was laid waste in one of the acts of destruction set in train by Henry VIII during the English Reformation. Yet the name Walsingham has echoed in the work of later poets, for example, Hopkins, Eliot, Robert Lowell. The latter, in a section of "The Quaker Graveyard in Nantucket", memorably describes the penitents walking barefoot down "the munching English lane" to the shrine where an inscrutable Our Lady sits, plain and expressionless and "too small for her canopy."

This week's anonymous poem, "A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham" is closer in time to the scene it depicts: it dates from around 1600. Unusually, for a ballad, it begins with the classical gesture of evoking the Muse, in this case, of course, the Virgin Mary herself. The next quatrain calls on an unexpected addressee. The "Prince of Walsingham" is presumably the King, who, in his youth, had been a devotee of the shrine. The mock humility ("grant me to frame …") quickly gives way to the anger and grief of "bitter plaints".



The familiar pastoral metaphor gets an unfamiliar twist: safe grazing is a distant idyll for the "seely sheep", already slaughtered by the wolves of the Dissolution. The ruined shrine symbolises a violence that shattered lives as well as a religion and its buildings. Two of my own ancestors, in fact, George and Richard Lumley, were executed for taking part, twice, in that heroic religious protest march, the Pilgrimage of Grace, in 1536-7.

"A Lament for Our Lady's Shrine at Walsingham" is not a narrative poem, except in glimpses of older, happier scenes. Their recollection underlines the sharp contrast with the present. The ballad works primarily by antithesis: tall, glittering towers now lying level with the ground, toads and serpents instead of pilgrims (palmers), nights instead of days, holy deeds turned to outrages (despites), hell instead of heaven. The ballad seems to be a work of literary craftsmanship, and it is sometimes attributed to the Earl of Arundel, Philip Howard. There is a strong impression that the speaker really witnessed, or wants to demonstrate he has really witnessed, the various scenes, and the description of former glory and present devastation is to some extent documentary.

The language is simple. Tetrameter and trimeter lines alternate, and the poet is happy to let the trimeter drop a stress now and again, in lines such as "The sacred vine", "The seely sheep". The rhythmical intensity of the lament is heightened by its numerous repetitions. The name, Walsingham, occurs eight times. It is the last word in lines one, three, and five, and so sets up a kind of soft dactylic chime which is audible throughout the poem. "Bitter" is another word repeated with painful emphasis. "Wracks" is the old form of "wrecks" but it does double duty here in its association with "racks".

Thought and syntax, sound and sense, are one throughout this poem, but there is a subtle development, almost what modern readers would call a "mourning process." In the penultimate verse the address shifts to Walsingham itself, already personified ("while she did stand") and perhaps identified with Mary. This is the apex of feeling, and subsequently the speaker seems resigned to the loss. Now the word that has unified the ballad with its end-of-line repetitions, appears at the beginning of the line. The word order has been virtually reversed, and in "Walsingham, O farewell" the emphasis is, appropriately, on the mournfully valedictory two syllables of "farewell". The little jolt in the metre, like a caught breath, adds to its pathos.

In the wracks of Walsingham
Whom should I choose
But the Queen of Walsingham
to be my guide and muse.

Then, thou Prince of Walsingham,
Grant me to frame
Bitter plaints to rue thy wrong,
Bitter woe for thy name.

Bitter was it so to see
The seely sheep
Murdered by the ravenous wolves
While the shepherds did sleep.

Bitter was it, O to view
The sacred vine,
Whilst the gardeners played all close,
Rooted up by the swine.

Bitter, bitter, O to behold
The grass to grow
Where the walls of Walsingham
So stately did show.

Such were the worth of Walsingham
While she did stand,
Such are the wracks as now do show
Of that Holy Land.

Level, level, with the ground
The towers do lie,
Which, with their golden glittering tops,
Pierced once to the sky.

Where were gates are no gates now,
The ways unknown
Where the press of peers did pass
While her fame was blown.

Owls do scrike where the sweetest hymns
Lately were sung,
Toads and serpents hold their dens
Where the palmers did throng.

Weep, weep, O Walsingham,
Whose days are nights,
Blessings turned to blasphemies,
Holy deeds to despites.

Sin is where Our Lady sat,
Heaven is turned to hell,
Satan sits where Our Lord did sway --
Walsingham, O farewell!