Sunday Afternoon Service in St. Enodoc Church, Cornwall

Come on! come on! This hillock hides the spire,

Now that one and now none. As winds about

The burnished path through lady’s finger, thyme

And bright varieties of saxifrage,

So grows the tinny tenor faint or loud

And all things draw towards St. Enodoc.

Come on! come on! and it is five to three.

Paths, unfamiliar to golfers’ brogues,

Cross the eleventh fairway broadside on

And leave the fourteenth tee for thirteenth green,

Ignoring Royal and Ancient, bound for God.

    Come on! come on! no longer bare of foot,

The sole grows hot in London shoes again.

Jack Lambourne in his Sunday navy-blue

Wears tie and collar, all from Selfridge’s.

There’s Enid with a silly parasol,

And Graham in gray flannel with a crease

Across the middle of his coat which lay

Pressed ’neath the box of his Meccano set,

Sunday to Sunday.

                   Still, Come on! come on!

The tinny tenor. Hover-flies remain

More than a moment on a ragwort bunch,

And people’s passing shadows don’t disturb

Red Admirals basking with their wings apart.

    A mile of sunny, empty sand away,

A mile of shallow pools and lugworm casts,

Safe, faint and surfy, laps the lowest tide.

    Even the villas have a Sunday look.

The Ransom mower’s locked into the shed.

“I have a splitting headache from the sun,”

And bedroom windows flutter cheerful chintz

Where, double-aspirined, a mother sleeps;

While father in the loggia reads a book,

Large, desultory, birthday-present size,

Published with coloured plates by Country Life,

A Bernard Darwin on The English Links

Or Braid and Taylor on The Mashie Shot.

Come on! come on! he thinks of Monday’s round—

Come on! come on! that interlocking grip!

Come on! come on! he drops into a doze—

Come on! come on! more far and far away

The children climb a final stile to church;

Electoral Roll still flapping in the porch—

Then the cool silence of St. Enodoc.

My eyes, recovering in the sudden shade,

Discern the long-known little things within—

A map of France in damp above my pew,

Grey-blue of granite in the small arcade

(Late Perp: and not a Parker specimen

But roughly hewn on windy Bodmin Moor),

The modest windows palely glazed with green,

The smooth slate floor, the rounded wooden roof,

The Norman arch, the cable-moulded font—

All have a humble and West Country look.

Oh “drastic restoration” of the guide!

Oh three-light window by a Plymouth firm!

Absurd, truncated screen! oh sticky pews!

Embroidered altar-cloth! untended lamps!

So soaked in worship you are loved too well

For that dispassionate and critic stare

That I would use beyond the parish bounds

Biking in high-banked lanes from tower to tower

On sunny, antiquarian afternoons.

    Come on! come on! a final pull. Tom Blake

Stalks over from the bell-rope to his pew

Just as he slopes about the windy cliffs

Looking for wreckage in a likely tide,

Nor gives the Holy Table glance or nod.

A rattle as red baize is drawn aside,

Miss Rhoda Poulden pulls the tremolo,

The oboe, flute and vox humana stops;

A Village Voluntary fills the air

And ceases suddenly as it began,

Save for one oboe faintly humming on,

As slow the weary clergyman subsides

Tired with his bike-ride from the parish church.

He runs his hands once, twice, across his face

“Dearly beloved…” and a bumble-bee

Zooms itself free into the churchyard sun

And so my thoughts this happy Sabbathtide.

    Where deep cliffs loom enormous, where cascade

Mesembryanthemum and stone-crop down,

Where the gull looks no larger than a lark

Hung midway twixt the cliff-top and the sand,

Sun-shadowed valleys roll along the sea.

Forced by the backwash, see the nearest wave

Rise to a wall of huge, translucent green

And crumble into spray along the top

Blown seaward by the land-breeze. Now she breaks

And in an arch of thunder plunges down

To burst and tumble, foam on top of foam,

Criss-crossing, baffled, sucked and shot again,

A waterfall of whiteness, down a rock,

Without a source but roller’s furthest reach:

And tufts of sea-pink, high and dry for years,

Are flooded out of ledges, boulders seem

No bigger than a pebble washed about

In this tremendous tide. Oh kindly slate!

To give me shelter in this crevice dry.

These shivering stalks of bent-grass, lucky plant,

Have better chance than I to last the storm.

Oh kindly slate of these unaltered cliffs,

Firm, barren substrate of our windy fields!

Oh lichened slate in walls, they knew your worth

Who raised you up to make this House of God

What faith was his, that dim, that Cornish saint,

Small rushlight of a long-forgotten church,

Who lived with God on this unfriendly shore,

Who knew He made the Atlantic and the stones

And destined seamen here to end their lives

Dashed on a rock, rolled over in the surf,

And not one hair forgotten. Now they lie

In centuries of sand beside the church.

Less pitiable are they than the corpse

Of a large golfer, only four weeks dead,

This sunlit and sea-distant afternoon.

“Praise ye the Lord!” and in another key

The Lord’s name by harmonium be praised.

“The Second Evening and the Fourteenth Psalm.”