POETRY: Ruined Abbeys, by Peter Levi

That time of year thou may’st in me behold
When yellow leaves, or none, or few do hang
Upon those boughs that shake against the cold—
Bare ruin’d choirs where late the sweet birds sang.

Monastic limestone skeleton,
threadbare with simple love of life
speak out your dead language of stone,
the wind’s hammer, the sun’s knife,
the sweet apple of solitude;
there is a ninth beatitude:
a child in his simplicity
is more than a just man can be.
The idle ruins disregard
a chance human companion,
my words will make little mark on
limestone so jagged and so hard:
places essentially deserted
enchant only the single-hearted.
What are they, sprouting in the trees
dumb and so terrible to see?
What stony intellectual bees
could buzz among such fantasy?
And has my world traveled too far?
Watching all this in an armchair
consider what these ruins are,
desolate spirits in the air
singing in their stone languages
what religion is not and is,
not a museum but a stone
no man can understand alone:
what kind of spirit brought together
all these scattered arches and walls?
and what voice appeals and appalls,
weaving summer and winter weather
into the fabric of a vision,
a silent judge and no decision?

The face of all these stones is dead,
ruins petrify in the trees,
the tower glares like a bald head,
these dead abbeys are fantasies:
like terrible symbolic dreams
nourished on woods and stones and streams,
the dry voice of the river Styx.
Religion wears out its relics.
Their mouths are stone, their eyes are blind,
and who knows what they were saying?
Who can grasp this abandoned thing
pealing like thunder in my mind?
Sometimes I think it is a hymn
shouted by heavy seraphim.

And you might think walking in it
while the pillars move through your eyes
a life, a light seems to visit
a country where it calls and dies,
the truest silence is this noise,
how can that speak which has no voice?
Stone, wind and air without a sound
have risen speaking from the ground.
In the crude dark in the rank air
these clumsy harsh provincial stones
talk loud and clear as megaphones;
it is a virtue to despair
if human language is not this:
what heaven will be and earth is.

What is it in the eye and hand
that makes one thing out of another?
monasteries out of England,
a monk out of a human brother,
bread out of grain in the earth
or a young child out of a birth,
cloisters that could not last for long
from something resistant and strong.
Think what broods out in such a choice,
the ruin human minds intend,
what is this building in the end?
The stone’s voice and the water’s voice,
ragged walls in the tallest trees
predestined by my first wishes.

My work is like this after all,
to take new life out of a rhyme,
an hour of watch out of nightfall,
to make the day break from dead time,
so the sun’s hand in the drowned grass
flashes a hundred panes of glass;
we rebuild night and thoughts of night
into a pyramid of light.
Absolute stillness occupies
the empty vaulted corridors,
the bare feet and the dusty floors
look like a criminal disguise
for secret thoughts and walking late
and that one thing I contemplate.

The pillars are rearing their weight,
the workmen’s hands that lifted them
persist as force, to meditate
the discipline of the stone stem:
these stones were in their eyes and face,
their live bodies are this place:
honeycomb of shadows: a city
remote from terror and from pity;
look at the peaceful, soaring motion
like an unmotionable wave,
they never stir in their conclave,
they never speak in their devotion,
but the dead abbey still retains
the dead hand on the limestone reins.

Broken towers push their rough heads
where nothing can climb after them:
sheer arches rest on airy beds
the stone springs upward from the stem:
the eyesight of some holy man
is where this crumpled wall began,
vision and ruin seem the same:
ruin was his nature and name:
pillars like exploding rockets
that draped heaven or stained the moon,
the sting of dark, the swing of noon,
the sun itself and the planets
the empty heavens and the dove—
I understand nothing but love.

But who can understand heaven,
who understands peace of spirit?
What ignorant, what iron men
built this cold place so loving it?
The salmon leaping in his stream
can pull far stronger than a dream,
the black crow against the wind
can climb far higher than the mind.
Who is the man can set his face
to believe heaven will protect
a thing of his own intellect,
a thing of mass, shadow and space?
Confusions in the eye and heart
are where poems, not abbeys start.

The ruins wading through the grass
are like the ghost of Saint Bernard;
as if a thousand years must pass
and the stone face be deeper scarred
Before it wakes like a wild creature
into the elements of nature,
might like a swan of heaven sing
its holy note only dying.
Think what brings an abbey to birth
from how deep in prehistory
it took the strong shape you can see,
it seems to have roots in the earth
leaves in the air: but the wind grieves,
it stands empty, there are no leaves.

Ruins are like a strong body
growing its strength in country air
then breeding age until you see
nettles are waving in its hair,
the ruined body keeps its shape
by the mechanics of landscape:
fox in the gorse, wind in the tree,
raincloud, fellside, mystery:
what was born wild is never tame:
ten numbers never written down
can make a spade a wall and a town,
fellsides and abbeys are the same:
until time draws like a deduction
true proportions for their destruction.

Water and stone, bracken and wood,
clouds in the sky, sheep on the fell
have transmuted the true and good:
look close at them and you can tell
the architecture that they like,
think how the sun and wind will strike
at truth and goodness in this shape,
hammering walls too tough to rape.
This world is like a window-pane,
age within age goes its own way:
fields of barley denser than hay
sweep up into long heads of grain
transmuted by his hands who said
the grain will die, my words are bread.

Unquarried rock carries the print
of prehistoric origins,
the burnt forest sleeps in the flint
and the worked stone builds the ruins;
what ice, what mountain weight of ice
compounded rock in this crevice?
What glacier groaned in the lock
to lock this strength into this rock?
Streaming with water, secretly
breathing the cold eating the sun
until its prison was undone
by Christ in the twelfth century,
this rock endured, and you can trace
the hurt hands in the quarried face.

Bones are a limestone but it bleeds,
a man is an imperfect stone,
what the unquarried limestone needs
is intellectual alone,
it can sing louder than a thrush
on the fellside in the rose-bush,
without a clapper like a bell,
as clear as Christ in the gospel:
all creatures breed with their own kinds,
and when this rock was remarried
Christ and the gospel blessed its seed
with amor vincit, love binds.
What is it in the marks you see
so moves you to morality?

Think how high a pillar can stand,
primitive art, a kind of zero,
still the work of somebody’s hand:
a self-portrait, a limestone hero,
a fantasy drawn in the light,
expressing self-knowledge as height:
and stone on stone:—this discipline
has a deep limestone origin.
Only the virgin stone knows why
the arches swing against the sky.
We use ruins for idle time
to take a bath in the sublime.

This abbey was what the tree is
and the column is natural,
now its branches are silences:
e’en let it stand till it down fall.
Angels like birds caught in mid-flight
were incoherent at twilight;
birds are dead meteors, this age
puts out no stony foliage,
but my face is a figurehead
split by the weather in the south,
the stone ivy twines in my mouth,
angels are finished, birds are dead:
and yet the ivy on the tree
is my life, is what I shall be.

Deep in the woods masses of leaves
live as no abbey is alive,
the unprinted sunrise receives
its praise only from crops that thrive.
Monasteries in their Novemeber
can only mumble and remember
this sharpness in the life and sense:
life is some kind of innocence.
Natural uses and abuses
eat down the forest in the end,
and only stone is the stone’s friend,
distilling solitary juices:
heaven revives and lives forever,
the end of religion is never.

Night stalks through the ruins.
Moonlight and dusk handle relics.
The river remembers it sins.
Things interpenetrate and mix.
The old sunk ship rises up high
disturbing birds in the black sky,
You are yourself at night, prophetic
in your nature, and sympathetic
to forgotten laws of childhood,
night is your natural limit,
this body of darkness in it
is your extreme of solitude.
The abbey at night is a king,
an unexplained, solemn thing.

And this darkness never deludes.
It is original justice,
the Buddha of these solitudes;
riches too cold for avarice.
This is the original mark.
Monks like bees buzzed in the dark,
they were moths in a black forest
where the tree-sugar ran truest.
This is intellectual light:
day-working and night-waking,
the psalms sung with their eyes aching
the human darkness and midnight:
the bees of darkness in the hive
of light when the light was alive.

An absence and a poverty:
a certain simple understanding
of what a man is or will be,
ears and eyes for the one commanding
face with the gaze of fire that looks
out from the first Christian books.
Something human opens at night
and grows slowly towards the light.
It dawns. Birds call for daybreak,
stop singing, and the world’s awake.

Bread of heaven, heavenly light
shake away sleep from my eyes,
make the sun flame, the day be bright,
O light, O darkness of the wise.
This abbey is stones and ashes;
I no longer know what it is.
Dead monuments. An extinct fire.
It has neither voice nor desire.
Say at one particular moment
which old history had prepared
and many generations shared
this abbey element by element
was desecrated beyond all mention
and the fire smothered and the hearth pissed on.

Try; break the walls up in your head,
let cattle-urine splash the chrism,
see the place well desecrated,
safe for art history and capitalism;
and then remember in the end
that all of this really happened.
But that the intonation of the wind
is savage, and it is not in the mind.
We live at the whole world’s expense,
we live in debt, what was rejected
can not ever be resurrected.
Never. There is no innocence.
In this generations will share:
a dead abbey is a nightmare.

Look at this and be terrified,
it was not the judgment of God,
it was not sloth, or wealth, or pride,
but a choice taken and followed.

Peace is a bird in mid-heaven
that can be known by lonely men.
This lonely and abandoned house
whose voices no voice can arouse
visited for an hour or two
will say in Latin meditate,
and recites phrases like too late
to those who know what they should do.
Well, forget the abandoned crime:
live better in the present time.

What is it then, a human life, human society?
The Bible says four streams ran
from paradise; where are we?
Body, spirit, Holy Ghost,
the language is dumb almost.
Who really knows his origin
or whose image we are made in?
Adam was sweating and digging
three centuries in paradise;
I sweat and dig for the same price,
and sing as loud as the birds sing;
but this is not the first garden;
monastic heaven is broken.

When Adam worked in the sun
his tree was lost, he hated light,
he loved shade, so he grew one
like a fresh garden of delight:
Adam was nine hundred and blind
when this great tree grew in his mind.
All those paradises are over.
Work goes on. There is no cover.
I have this simple attitude:
God gives the tree, waters the root,
God gives the tree and the fruit,
the fresh apple of solitude.
Say what is a human spirit?
God gives the bread that feeds it.

Spirit in heaven, white dove
inspire what God has created,
with water-springs of heaven’s love
till soberly intoxicated
I can see my own origin,
the unknown image I am in.
The dove of heaven is alone,
his breasts are water his voice stone,
once in history he defied
nature and man for a virgin
building his streams for ever in
the snowy heaven of her side;
every monk and abbey is
a kind of monument of this.

It ends in death, the old land.
Darkness climbs into the sky.
There is nothing left in your hand.
It gives you no guide to go by.
Or nothing that a stinging-nettle
on a bleak stone will not unsettle.
You who believe my true story
are not protected from history.
What can I say about death;
their death is hidden from my eyes:
but I believe that the dead rise,
having been roused by the strong breath
of my God who is in heaven,
when the trumpet tears earth open.

Before they died death was present,
in such a death all life survives,
this is to die human and content,
at peace and delightful in their lives:
and there and nothing lamentable,
even death can be serviceable.
Under the earthly limestone crown
in grave after grave they lay down.
Here death was never quite at home,
in fields not chosen for dying
they simply slept and lie sleeping
and shall lie till the crack of doom.
And I hope to be one who dies
with simple ruins in his eyes.

Water is running in my head
cold as the water from Christ’s side,
cold as the voices of the dead
and of those who have never died,
they live in words, they are still speaking,
they have found what I have been seeking.
Ailred of Rievaulx and Bernard,
was it only on wood so hard
your ripe, sound apples could grow?
Under the coarseness of time
under lichen, rain, grime,
ruins are all that I know:
and your words speaking from the page;
the Word is in words, age after age.

The rain has blotted out the stone.
Try to understand its message.
I take the stone’s life for my own
these ruins for a hermitage:
here I shall contemplate that truth
which must consume my age and youth,
and put words to that only good
that chimes so well with solitude.
The foolish letters of poor names
are written on this holy stone,
but reading them I am at one
with the Arabian bird in flames:
death in the amber-weeping tree
whose life is what my life shall be.