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Butterfly On Stained Glass
Church of St Mary The Virgin, Holy Island
is undecided, at the dead saint’s
feet;
having rested well since October;
but now, needing more light and heat,
stumbles from brown sandals, to grey cowl,
to pink hand, then finds that clear glass
with blue sky behind, settles, and the sun
illuminates her outstretched wings:
each uncounted scale laid out between veins,
the red-orange sheen, black and yellow patches,
blue lunules on the margins
and I reach up
cup her in my hands, walk through old incense
from transept to porch, to the open door,
release her into this day, her unsteady wings
catching the light again over celandines
and gravestones and on towards the sea.
The success of In encouraged Andrew to
give up his teaching work and to concentrate on writing.
He was in demand. The Mid Northumberland Arts Group commissioned
poems on the Lindisfarne Gospels - published initially in
the little booklet Good News from a Small Island. It was,
he said, ‘a perfect project
for me’- it had allowed him to to spend time in ‘various
warm and dry Reading Rooms; learning and forgetting more than
a mindful of facts’. In the interview with himself that
Andrew wrote for The Rialto, and which is published at the
end of 2nd, he talks about his writing method: ‘ I’ve
seen you in the library, downstairs in the reference section.
A pile of books; last week you had six on gastropods, five
on lighthouses, three on numerology. You scan read them, jot
down words, smile. Is this Significant Research, being somewhere
warm or just avoiding actual writing?’ The Good News
poems are ‘mainly’ about how ‘the Gospels
were made and the men who made them’ but, he says, ‘there
are more personal poems here.’ Holy Island is where the
Lindisfarne Gospels were created and kept originally (like
many other important treasures they are currently in the British
Museum). The butterfly poem is the last one in the booklet.
On the face of it this is a simple poem,
a narrative - the poet watches a butterfly which, flying
towards the light, moves up a stained glass window and stops
on the clear glass; thinking to help the poet captures the
butterfly and releases it into the open air, where it flies
off. The poet observes the illumination of the stained glass
window, where the coloured glass is laid between veins of
lead and the insect which, stretched out on the clear glass,
with its veins and scales, mirrors this structure. The Gospels
are an illuminated manuscript - several of the poems are
about this; it’s also important to note that ‘illuminate’ means
to shed light on - as in the sense of gaining or giving intellectual
or spiritual enlightenment.
What struck me as odd about the poem was
the use of ‘her.’ Ever
the literalist I wondered how he knew; in many butterflies
the sexes are differently marked but in the Small Tortoiseshell,
which this is from the description, they are indentical. Then
I remembered Psyche - as my dictionary says ‘ a Hellenistic
personification of the soul as female, or sometimes as a butterfly.’ And
a bit of light shone in. And then a bit more when I remembered
a section of the title sequence of In - the sequence is about
being mentally ill in hospital.
On the window; a flower smeared
and four nurses come running.
He’d tried to break the glass
with his face or his face
with the glass, but only spread
blood on his lips, on his shirt
as they carried him out. He cried.
Now, the last of the sun, clouds,
abstract red on the window shining
and we could all be tested by that shape,
we could all say: rose, a sunset,
the sea, whatever you want, take us home.
The ‘test’ refers to the Rorschach test, where
your personality is assessed by your response to a set of ink
blot pictures. Here is different glass with a different stain.
And again we come up against the imprisoning power of glass,
the patient can see through it, is drawn to the light and the
outside, but, like the butterfly, cannot get through. Just
as when you are depressed, or obsessed or gripped by addiction,
it is possible to see that other ways of being exist but impossible
to imagine your way to them. The last line here ‘ the
sea, whatever you want, take us home’, is of searing
emotional intensity - when you are mentally ill there is no
safe place, no home ( though the hospitals used to be called
asylums, and were so in the sense that the patients were at
least out of the way of being persecuted by the sane). The
last words of the butterfly poem are ‘and on towards
the sea’, and this movement is beyond , moving away from ‘the
gravestones’. It is an escape into a freedom, though
going we know not where.
Michael Mackmin
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