What do Matt Groening and Jack Clemo have in common?

What do Matt Groening and Jack Clemo have in common?

At the beginning of 1994, the year of Jack Clemo’s death, the active but ailing poet received a surprise letter from Neustadt in Germany. It was from a man named Rainer Böhlke, who wrote to say that he was a great admirer of Clemo’s work and that he would very much like to help Jack with his writing. Böhlke said he was a lonely and wealthy man and that he would like to bequeath Clemo his ‘considerable fortune’. He did not want anything in return for the money, he said, except perhaps a couple of handwritten lines from the author and an autograph. Innocently, Jack replied at length to Böhlke, thanking him for his generous offer and explaining that he could not commit to any large sum of money at his age. He said such an amount would be too much of a responsibility and would only complicate affairs for him and his wife this late in life. He said that he and Ruth lived modestly and comfortably on their pensions, so that ‘I would have no personal use for a large bequest of money: I might even die before you do’.

      Today, an approach like Böhlke’s would make most of us suspect a scam. And we would be correct. Rainer Böhlke sent a great many such letters, including to musician Frank Zappa, novelist Amy Tan, Nobel-winning DNA discoverer James Watson and The Simpsons creator, Matt Groening. According to newspaper reports, Groening used the fraudulent approach and the character of Böhlke in his comic strip series, Life in Hell, while Tan incorporated the character into her ‘The Year of No Flood’, an unpublished novel she was working on in 1993.

      Böhlke can be looked up online, and with a little persistence you might find many writers and artists who were sent similar letters from Neustadt. Many saw through the scam immediately and either ignored the letters, engaged facetiously or responded creatively. Others fell for it and replied. To my knowledge, Jack Clemo is the only one to have naively and open-heartedly accepted the authenticity of the sender and then declined the bequest. One wonders what ‘Böhlke’ thought when he read it: double the fool or double the saint?

The Writing Desk of Jack Clemo

The writing desk of Jack Clemo is a humble piece of furniture, less impressive than the desks of St Austell cohabitants Sir Arthur Quiller Couch and Daphne du Maurier. It is a small bureau with three simple drawers underneath. No room for clutter, no need for ornament. It is plain and cramped, as it had to be. Clemo did not have his own study, but sat squashed in the corner of the living room, writing while village children, evacuees and visitors drifted in and out. Jack would hand the children old drafts of manuscripts to draw on or to practise their homework. It was a rented four-roomed, two-bedroomed clay workers’ cottage, which housed not only Jack and his mother, but also her sister Bertha and usually two or three children through the 1940s and 50s. When they first moved in, during the First World War, the Clemos fetched their water from a pump down the road at Goonamarris, or from the spring when the pump ran dry. It was not until the 1930s that a tap was fitted to the outside of the garden wall, and not until 1968, when Jack was 52 and due to marry, that he and his mother thought about getting a toilet attached to the house.

It was at this desk that Clemo wrote Wilding Graft, his award-winning clayscape romance, as well as his striking autobiography, Confession of a Rebel, and the poetry for which he is now best remembered, including The Map of Clay, Cactus on Carmel, The Echoing Tip and Broad Autumn. His volatile emotional history all played out here, with the photographs of romantic attachments and lost loves propped up on its top, beneath the portraits of Browning and Powys. He would write his emotionally charged diaries here, as well as long, intense and argumentative religious love letters to potential partners, such as those sent to Eileen in 1949. Clemo’s correspondence was extensive and important to him, his only connection with the life outside of the villages. He was already deaf and unable to join in normal conversation, and by the time he was writing to Eileen, the view out of the window over the road, field and works, was blurring palely as his eyesight was beginning to fail. In later years, when he was blind, Clemo’s mother would sit beside him, much as Ruth sits beside him here in the photograph, writing out correspondence in capital letters into the palm of his hand.

It was also at this desk that Jack greeted the Beat poet Kenneth Rexroth, as well as Charles Causley, George MacBeth and Lionel Miskin, who painted Clemo several times in front of it, slouching lugubriously. Most people who visited Clemo recall their first impression of him, small, silent and hunched at his bureau.

The top photograph, taken by Paul Broadhurst for the Cornwall Courier, shows Ruth and Jack Clemo in 1980. You can see the modern electric fire covering the old coal and wood fireplace, for which Jack used to go out gathering smutties on the Slip as a young man. Over the fire is a 1979 painting, made by a friend of Jack’s foster-sister, Betty Penver, and over the desk to the right is a photograph of Billy Graham, whose missions had so impressed Clemo in the 1950s. On the top of the desk is a newspaper article with a headline about the BBC film recently written and directed by Norman Stone, dramatizing Clemo’s early life. It was made at the end of 1979 and shown on Good Friday, 1980. Just out of sight, behind Jack’s shoulder, is a miniature of the 1957 clay bust of Clemo that is now kept in the Royal Cornwall Museum.

The Clemos were splitting their years at this time between the cottage at Vinegar Point and the Peaty house at Weymouth, and Ruth had constructed a similar space and desk at which Clemo could work in their suburban seaside retreat. When they finally moved, in 1984, they left the little bureau behind, with a good deal of other unneeded furniture. For the past twelve years, the desk has been kept in the Jack Clemo Memorial Room at Trethosa Chapel, a lovingly constructed and maintained space that has disappeared with the chapel’s closure. Wheal Martyn Museum and Park at Carthew, near St Austell, have taken the bureau now, though years of being stored in the cold and damp mean it requires some sensitive conservation work. The second image above, taken by Matt Shepherd of the BBC, shows the bureau's current condition. The lid is tied shut because one hinge is missing while the other is damaged and weak. The left lid-support, which pulls out, has a pin working as a handle, and the damage to the top drawer is evident. There are similar details of wear and damage all around the piece, inside and out, and as this year marks the twentieth anniversary of Clemo’s death – on 25^th July – we thought it would be a good idea to get it restored and out on permanent display. It has been estimated that £300 will do the job and we’re appealing for donations. Feel free to get in touch with me or with Wheal Martyn if you might like to contribute.

Clemo remains overlooked and undervalued, and the display of his writing space might be a good way for many new people to engage with him and his work. It is an evocative piece of literary and Cornish history and seems to reflect the poverty of his upbringing and the unusualness of his story. It could also be considered a neat symbol of that juxtaposition between the tininess of his worldly experience, the reduced landscape and his sensual enclosure, and the immense personal vision and talent with which he wrote.

Update: Following our brief media campaign, the £300 target has been reached and surpassed. Any further donations will go towards the accompanying bookcase, which is also in the photograph (top) and held by Wheal Martyn.

Top photograph courtesy of Paul Broadhurst and the Special Collections Library, University of Exeter. Bottom photograph courtesy of Matthew Shepherd/BBC Online.

Mahogany

William Hogarth's Gin Lane

In 1781, Boswell and Johnson were in Devon, visiting their friend Joshua Reynolds. It was ‘a most agreeable day’ and many acquaintances were present, among them the Cornishman Edward Craggs-Eliot, who would become the first Baron Eliot of Port-Eliot three years later. Of the few details recounted of this meeting by Boswell in his Life of Johnson, the following caught my attention:

Mr. Eliot mentioned a curious liquor peculiar to his country, which the Cornish fishermen drink. They call it Mahogany; and it is made of two parts gin, and one part treacle, well beaten together. I begged to have some of it made, which was done with proper skill by Mr. Eliot. I thought it very good liquor.

That’s what we’re about here: Mahogany. It sounded curious so I thought I'd make my own. To mix the treacle effectively with the gin, at least one of the ingredients has to be warmed. Treacle would be more difficult to clean off, so I’m warming the gin instead. As it gently warms, I thought I might consider the drink's history.

In Cornwall, it is mentioned several times, including once in 1865 by Robert Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England, where it is mentioned in passing with other 'Peculiar Words and Phrases'. Fred Jago, who lived in Bodmin and wrote The Ancient Language and the Dialect of Cornwall in 1882, included Mahogany in his glossary, describing it simply as ‘Gin sweetened with treacle’. In both sources, Mahogany is placed in Cornwall.

A variation of the drink is mentioned in nineteenth century American literature too. Mark Twain, for example, in an 1863 article for The Golden Era passingly references gin and molasses as a sort of tonic, one of several brews the writer uses to cure his cold. Similarly, in the 1851 Moby Dick, a young sea-hand also suffering from a cold is given ‘a pitch-like potion of gin and molasses’ at The Spouter Inn, by the old man Jonah, ‘which he swore was a sovereign cure for all colds and catarrhs whatsoever, never mind of how long standing, or whether caught off the coast of Labrador, or on the weather side of an ice-island.’

Eliot did not mention it as a medicine – or, at least, Boswell did not mention Eliot mentioning it – though given the histories of the ingredients it might have cured almost anything one could pick up at sea.

The history of treacle seems to start with the Greek word theria, meaning ‘wild animals’. The word is present not only in the modern word treacle but also in zoology, the Theria being a subclass of mammals that includes all mammals that give birth to live young – so everything other than the monotremes/prototheria. From theria came the word theriac, a type of medicine used to counteract bites from these ‘wild animals’. In the early seventeenth century Edward Topsell, compiler of some fantastic bestiaries, suggested that the word came to be used as much for its inclusion of these wild animals in its list of ingredients as for its use counteracting their poison. In antiquity, the theriac developed out of its role as a curative for venomous bites and became almost a panacea, appropriate for treating ailments diverse as asthma and the plague.

Pliny refers to a complicated ‘Mithridatic’ recipe for theriac containing fifty-four ingredients. Galen’s brew went further, with more than seventy components, including viper flesh, opium and honey. Honey was used partly for its own healing properties, but also to make the medicine more palatable. Here we have the sweet element of the cure-all treacle, but the treacle we now know is a by-product of sugar rather than honey. The story of sugar in Europe started in India, where it was grown and from where it spread. Medieval Arab traders took it to Islamic countries and then European crusaders in the twelfth century brought it back with them and the Venetians in particular started developing and trading. The by-product of raw cane sugar is molasses, and the by-products of refining sugar are the various grades of treacle.

In the eighteenth century, when theriac had become discredited as a cure-all, it retained a shadow of its curative glory as a vague tonic, a sweet, syrupy salve. Johnson and Boswell were naturally aware of both meanings (though the only mention of treacle in Johnson's dictionary, I believe, is in a medicinal context, under the entry for ‘Salve’), but Boswell is using ‘treacle’ in its more common and modern form, as a by-product of sugar refinement.

Gin too had transformed into something more palatable, though its history was recent. It is said to be Dutch in origin, developed through the seventeenth century when it was sold as a medicine and introduced to England. Relaxed rules on household distilleries meant that homemade gin became cheap, readily available, copiously drunk and a bit of a problem. This was the ‘gin craze’ reflected in Hogarth’s 1751 engraving, Gin Lane. The craze led to a 1736 ‘Gin Act’, intended to make it prohibitively expensive to produce and so to buy. Samuel Johnson opposed the law, as did the poor, leading to the ‘gin riots’. The 1736 Act was repealed and replaced in 1751 with a more plausible version that led to gin production and drinking becoming respectable and the booze better quality. It was following this gentrification of gin (gintrification?) that brands such as Gordon’s began with their thrice-distilled method. Bombay Sapphire also claim that their recipe dates back to the period. It seems unlikely that all of the private stills disappeared, so probably the cheaper, murkier sugar-sweetened forms were available at the same time. The original fishermen’s Mahogany would likely have been made with the rougher stuff, and although Eliot’s gin of choice is not known, it would have been a finer, drier drink. (It would not have been a ‘Plymouth gin’, the first firm across the river being founded the following decade, in 1793.) For my own brew, I’ve followed the Boswell-Eliot model, using Gordon’s, though if I were to serve it in a bar I might insist on one of the new Cornish brands like Tarquin’s or Elemental. Two parts Gordon’s to one part Lyle’s Black Treacle.

The red treacle tin is a lovely design, with its iconic dead lion and swarming bees. It is meant to remind us of the lion Samson killed near the vineyards of Timnah. The lion came bowling up to Samson roaring, so Samson killed the lion and tore it to bits before going down into Timnah to speak to a woman. He went on to marry this woman, and on his way to the wedding came across the lion again, which now had bees nesting in the carcass. Naturally, Samson stuck his hand in and ate the dead lion honey, sharing it with his parents. Later, he would infuriate guests at a feast by turning the occasion into an unfairly impossible riddle and betting that the revelers would not get it. They did not, until they bullied Samson’s (unnamed) new wife to betray him. She did, a blood bath ensued and Samson left his first wife.

I’m unsure what to take from the metaphor. Lyle took: ‘Out of the strong came forth sweetness’.

The drink is ready, and even the colour is medicinal, a bog-murk brown-black with jaundiced iodine viscosity. The smell is like molasses. On first sip, it is not as bad as expected. Sweet as tonic wine from the treacle but with a lingeringly sharp acid and juniper. I wonder how other styles of gin would improve it – the orange blossom, pine and cardamom of Tarquin’s, or the coriander and citrus of Elemental. 

It becomes less pleasurable the more one drinks. The longer aftertaste is of golden sugar, and while you might say the overall impression is ‘medicinal’, the sense I get is that I’m doing something rather bad to myself.

There was, incidentally, a footnote to the story of Boswell and Johnson and Mahogany, when in 1805 a piece of writing appeared entitled Dialogues of the Dead. Boz and Poz in The Shades. It was tacked onto the end of a critical work written by William Mudford about Samuel Johnson, though apparently it was not written by Mudford. Boz, of course, is Boswell, and Poz is Johnson. Both men are dead, in the play as in life, with Boswell having died from ‘Mahogany’, drinking himself to death, for which he is mocked. Boswell explains to Johnson that he had been introduced to the drink by ‘several of my friends, and I could not refuse them the pleasure they seemed to derive from seeing me drink it.’ When questioned further, he says:

Why, sir, I thought that as each ingredient was good in a separate state, they could not be bad in union. Gin, they told me, was at least wholesome, if not palatable; and what schoolboy, they asked, has not licked his lips over a roll and treacle?

As I persist, I wonder how I could have made the drink better. A drier gin? Or molasses? Maybe a different ratio? But I can’t imagine the proportions of treacle to gin ever being what I’d consider ‘right’, and now I’m looking at the last drop in the bottom of the flask with a little apprehension. I know I shall finish it, but following the Boswell story there’s a sense of mutuality, a sickly feeling that the Mahogany might finish me too.

Mining for Meaning

Some of the work I enjoy most in Exeter’s archives is this sort of excavation, finding the rougher forms of Jack Clemo’s polished poems. Occasionally there are four or five drafts, spanning thirty years or more, as Clemo returned to the crude ore of earlier work to dig out a shade – a theme, place or structure – to refine.

A good example might be ‘The Brownings at Vallombrosa’, a poem published in the 1971 collection The Echoing Tip but first drafted in 1946 as ‘Rebel Love’. The original poem was not about ‘The Brownings’ at all, but about the narrator (loosely, Clemo) and his loved one. The importance of the difference becomes clear when it is recalled that Clemo believed his personal life had some intimate parallel or connection with the lives and romance of Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Without the reader knowing it, Clemo has laid the story of the Brownings over his own story, interweaving the two. He secretly draws the parallel tighter.

The Echoing Tip is rich in this sort of evolutionary material, and the following is a simpler example. The poem started out as ‘School of Clay’ in 1969, when it was printed in a local exhibition brochure for Kernow 70. Five years later it was revised into ‘The Harassed Preacher’ and then published in the 1975 Broad Autumn. To make comparison easier, I’ve placed the poems side by side:

School of Clay (May 1969)                            The Harassed Preacher (1974)

Now summer has come to the clay lands,           Now that summer has brimmed on the uplands

The dunes gleam white in the sun,                           White mine-crusts seed in the sun,

And over the slag and the outcast crag                And around each pit and its outcast grit

A tangle of green is spun.                                        A gabble of green is spun.

                                                                          Soon silenced by bomb and gun.

Bushes have burst into blossom,                          Bushes have bragged into blossom,

Flicked by the dancing sand;                                   Flicked by the teasing sand;

There are milk white brooks in the valley nooks   Milk-wan streams vein the valley’s dreams;

And larks in a lunar land.                                         Larks lilt where the tip-beams stand.

                                                                          Faith’s dream and song are banned.

Our forefathers dug in the field here,                    Our forefathers dug in the field here,

Built us a house of God,                                          Built us a preaching place,

So his truth might spread from the big clay bed    So that truth might spread from the ringing bed

Deep in the spirit’s sod.                                          Ruled by the Galilee base.

                                                                          Too distant now – no trace.

A hundred summers have ripened                        A hundred summers have panted

Around these village lanes                                       Along our zigzag lanes

Since that hungry gang of children sang                Since the first raw crowd of converts bowed

Inside our window panes.                                        Inside these window panes.

                                                                           But the analyst explains. . . .

The seats were clumsy benches;                           The seats were rough bare benches;

No piano struck the tunes;                                        No organ spun a tune;

The bare bleak room held a stuffy gloom               The squeaky hymns and unwashed limbs

Even in those boiling Junes.                                       Made a meagre mock of June.

                                                                            The new age mocks the boon.

But grains from the Holy Scriptures                       Grains from the towering scriptures

Were flicked by the winds of prayer;                         Were flicked by the winds of prayer:

In our sheltered nook these children took              In our grit-ringed nook those drab lives took

New shape in Christian air.                                        Fresh shape in Wesley’s air.

                                                                            Now shapeless atoms wear. . . .

Midsummer is the season                                      We toil in a fevered season;

When the clay shines white on the hill;                       Soul-crusts lie hard on the hill.

Our tools advance, but we catch the glance           Do our tools ring true? Don’t we signal through

Of that shining Potter still.                                          To a ruling Potter still?

                                                                            Our super-egos spill. . . .

                                                                            A plague on the heckling voices

                                                                                That would check my sermon’s flight!

                                                                            It’s eleven o’clock and here’s my flock –

                                                                                Five villagers, old and bright,

                                                                            Knowing their faith is right.

In the first instance, Clemo has written a ballad very much in the style of his good friend Charles Causley, who had been Best Man at his wedding only six months earlier. See, for example, Causley’s ‘Song of the Dying Gunner AA1’:

Oh ‘Cooks to the galley’ is sounded off

And the lads are down in the mess

But I lie done by the forrard gun

With a bullet in my breast.

Or even Causley’s ‘Homage to Jack Clemo’:

Turn, Cornwall, turn and tear him!

    Stamp him in the sod!

He will not fear your cry so clear –

    Only the cry of God.

Both poems are in Picador’s Collected Poems 1951-2000, where the ballad form is well represented. Causley is known for the stoical forms he uses for his tragedies, juxtaposing misery and tragedy against bouncy ballad rhymes. The Causley ballad form Clemo borrows is a contrast to his earlier Francis Thompson or Coventry Patmore sorts of odes, and the poem gaily marches along.

This is altered in the second version of 1974, where the tone is bleaker and the heaps of alliteration and lengthening of vowels slow the pace while giving a greater texture to the language and a little menace. The most obvious change, however, is the extra line Clemo has added to the end of each stanza, which he has italicized. The italicized line is the voice of modernity, further undermining the buoyant ballad. This simple idea deepens the piece, dramatizes it and allows for the final stanza’s triumph, where the form is reclaimed and the italics gone.

Where the idea for this came from is uncertain. Elsewhere in the same volume, Clemo has used italicized Latin, self-consciously playing with Ezra Pound, but it is more reminiscent here of the dramatic repetitious endlines of Poe or the metaphysical poets. What it does show is the difference a second draft makes. Blind and deaf at this point, Clemo composed and revised poems in his head before committing them to paper. He had an exceptional memory, and appears to have held this old draft sufficiently well over the five years that he could still play with it there five years later. The method is interesting, but the layers of significance the poem gains in the reworking, I think, are even more so.

(Both poems appear courtesy of University of Exeter's Special Collections Library.)

Jack Clemo's Jukebox

It might seem a peculiar idea to be considering the music a deaf man listened to, but bear with me. Before he went deaf, and then blind, Clemo enjoyed music. He and his mother both played their little pump organ in the cottage quite competently, and Clemo loved the old Sankey hymns. He had a good memory, and even when he was deaf he would play these hymns in his head over and over, like a favourite record. That organ was destroyed in 1951, and Clemo’s blindness overwhelmed him soon after. His health was so poor – his ears, eyes and heart – that doctors prepared him for the worst and he believed he was going to die. Initially, he sank into a terrible gloom. Instead of getting better, as he had expected, his suffering increased, and instead of getting married, he was distanced further from society and conversation. This was not what his faith had led him to expect.

Then the American ‘hot gospel’ movement of the mid-1950s penetrated the darkness, with news of Billy Graham’s dramatically successful ‘Crusade’ at Harringay, followed by the healer Oral Roberts’ ministries in England and the evangelical child star Renee Martz’s vibrant tours with her trumpet. In the midst of such an optimistic mood, Clemo made a leap of faith and spent £13 on a gramophone. He was ‘stone deaf' when he bought it, he writes in his diary, and it was really the only extravagant purchase he had made. Most of their life Jack and his mother had lived poorly and frugally on her war widow’s pension, until Jack published his first novel, autobiography and a small volume of poetry. £13 was a considerable sum to spend on such a thing, especially as he could not hear.

Nevertheless, they set it up by the sofa, and Jack’s mother went to St Austell to buy the 7” single of Renee Martz’s first release, ‘The Song that God Sings / The Large, Large House’, and a record by George Beverly Shea, probably another 7” single, ‘How Great Thou Art / America the Beautiful’. Shea’s baritone was a regular feature of the Billy Graham Crusades, and Clemo found that when he pressed his ear against the machine and turned it up, he could just about hear the rumbling of Shea’s hymn. Martz, meanwhile, was just a little squeak. But then:

One day in November, when I had a cold, I blew my nose and felt a squelching sensation deep inside my ear – and I heard myself cough. I hurried to fetch Renee Martz’s record, and a few minutes later stood spellbound, listening to her clear strong voice soaring amid a thunder of jazz.

That Clemo was able to hear the music was remarkable, though there was no real ‘thunder of jazz’. ‘The Song that God Sings’ is straight pop gospel, though ‘The Large, Large House’ had an upbeat, swinging accompaniment. This is Clemo’s only experience of jazz, it seems, which is relevant to his writing. In the poem ‘Lunar Pentecost’ we find ‘God’s jazz-drums’ and ‘The beating jazz-fire’, while in ‘Homeland’ we read of ‘Christ’s ragtime sacrament’. Does it make a difference to the poetry that Clemo did not know of real jazz? Perhaps not much, but reading the verses with a sense of the syncopated rhythms of ragtime is a different experience from reading them with the tamer pop gospel and hymnal jazzy rhythms in mind. He wrote these poems in the heydays of Thelonious Monk, John Coltrane, Sonny Rollins and Miles Davis. Clemo invoking jazz in this age is as generically offbeat as a contemporary poet invoking G-Funk or grime to make a point when their awareness of rap begins and ends with Pete McSweet.

Anyway, Jack loved the gramophone and from archival references, the following is the peculiar playlist of vinyl I’ve built so far:

Renee Martz - The Song that God Sings / The Large, Large House

Renee Martz – Revivalist Songs

George Beverly Shea - How Great Thou Art / America the Beautiful

Jo Stafford and Gordon McRae – Whispering Hope / A Thought in My Heart

Redd Harper – I’m a Christian Cowboy

The Harringay Choir – To God be the glory, great things He hath done

Beethoven – Ninth Symphony

Beethoven - Missa Solemnis

Japanese Folk Songs – (likely ‘Katsumasa Takasago – Flower Dance (Japanese Folk Melodies)’)

Bach - Unknown

He had, in addition, a great number of hymns on vinyl by unspecified choirs and singers, with favourites including ‘Just as I am’, ‘And can it be’, ‘My Redeemer Liveth’ and ‘Breathe on me, Breath of God.’ The last of these was played at his funeral and memorial services in 1994.

The folk music is probably the surprise entry, and this was sent to Jack by his friend, the poet and travel writer James Kirkup, in 1968, when Kirkup was living in Japan. It was certainly not Jack’s favourite album.

The record player was an important character in Clemo’s life. The Martz records were played in the hope that a connection with the divine might be reinforced and healing effected. On New Year’s Eve, often he would stay up after his mother had gone to bed, playing those gospel tunes in the granite cottage and praying. And it had another function. You could vary the volume of a record player, so Clemo could listen to things he would otherwise be unable to hear. In the early sixties he would ask a girlfriend to record her voice onto vinyl, and later he would record noises in the landscape on his tape player, so he could play them back at volume, his head against the speaker, listening to the sounds of people and places normally withdrawn from him. In a typically unique way, Jack’s gramophone reconnected him with the world.

The Poetry of Sister Mary Agnes

I’ll assume you don’t know Sister Mary Agnes. She was a contemplative nun of the Poor Clare monastery at Lynton in Devon during the 1970s, so no reason why you would. But she was also a poet. During her time at the monastery, Agnes put out three slim volumes: Daffodils in Ice (1972), No Ordinary Lover (1973) and A World of Stillnesses (1976). They were published on small, modest presses, Workshop (who published Andrew Motion’s debut collection the same year as Agnes’s) and Thornhill, and they were well-received. The television seemed to enjoy the novelty of Agnes being a nun, with both the BBC and Westward Television airing features. Meanwhile, the literary establishment welcomed her too, Cecil Day Lewis and John Betjeman both expressing admiration, as well as the children’s writer Elizabeth Goudge (said by JK Rowling to have been a direct influence on the Harry Potter series). Goudge wrote the foreword to Daffodils in Ice.

I came across Sister Mary Agnes through her correspondence with Jack Clemo, now held in the University of Exeter’s Special Collections. The letters suggest she left the monastery in 1976, around the time of her third and final collection, A World of Stillnesses, following a breakdown. She writes first from hospital, then from several different addresses around London and Oxfordshire.  A few years later, she tells Clemo that she is unable to return to the convent and she is considering writing her autobiography. Her feeling of contact with God, she says, remains as real and intimate as ever.

The poetry is almost all nocturnal or crepuscular – night-thoughts of intimacy, loss and abandonment – melancholia of the old thermoscopic sort – with beautiful symbolic imagery and a strong sense of mystical longing.  Although there are only three volumes to compare, the writing changes markedly. The sense of loneliness heightens, and the sense of identity seems to weaken. The poems themselves shed their titles more often than not, and it becomes uncertain where one ends and the next begins. It is difficult not to read these later poems in the context of Sister Mary Agnes’s breakdown.

The following three poems are from Daffodils in Ice. They will not give an adequate sense of the potent quietude and depth of each little volume, but perhaps they give enough to intrigue. 

Daffodils in Ice

Frost, moon, snow – silent fall, soul-musical.
Christ's hand, outstretched to bless,
sheds silver over all.
His scars, his ring – his marriage band
are daffodils
in ice.


All Night I have Lain Awake at Your Side

All night I have lain awake at your side,
                  God of night.
The moon's pale course
has been as the turning of a leaf,
or as the breath of a moth
over my lashes
before the first bird
burst like a bud the crystal empire
and dispersed the clarity of mystery.

For the taste of night
was delicious to my mouth
and the stars, as cones
sprinkled over the dark conifer of night's folds.
Now there remain
whispers of the hillside
murmuring through my ears,
as, blind,
I wander through the valley of day.


Song

I met you in the morning, when rays were long,
and sealed my patterns in mist;
we left at night,
our day being all compressed
as breath on glass, or as diamond of frost.
The sinking sun blessed its approaching sleep;
shadows of trees arose to dance,
and, whispering in my ear before I slept,
caused me to dream you had crept
to my side.
But when day came
I was alone and wept.