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| | e-Pistle News from the University Church |
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Well, there’s no family Service this month because so many people are away. On the other hand this Sunday sees the last of our summer Choral Evensongs at 5pm, a sadness to me since I love that service. Last Sunday 129 people were present, equally divided between the chancel and the nave. For Sunday morning I still have to decide exactly what to speak about: I am much taken with Bonhoeffer’s suggestion that ‘God is the beyond in the midst of our lives,’ and also the idea that theology is close to the spoken voice, very obviously in preaching, discussion groups, the songs and poems of the Bible, and even jokes. Perhaps I’ll begin with a few jokes, than.
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| | Services this Week
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12.15pm Lunchtime Eucharist
Sunday 2nd August Trinity 10
10.30am Sung Eucharist
Address: Canon Brian Mountford
5pm Choral Evensong (with the University Church Choir)
Readings: PSALM 88, Job 28.12-end, Hebrews 11.17-31
Responses: Humphrey Clucas
Canticles: Howells, The Gloucester Service
Anthem: 'Agnus Dei' from Rheinberger, Mass in E flat Op. 109 |
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Forthcoming Events
Thursday 30th July, 1-2pm: Poetry Seminar (Roy Fuller)
Throughout the summer, we'll be running a family craft stall on Thursday afternoons. Pop in for colouring, sewing, stained glass-design.
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Forthcoming Concerts
None in August. TBC in September |
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| | Ride and Stride, 12th September
The annual RIDE AND STRIDE in aid of Oxfordshire Historic Churches Trust, will take place on Saturday 12th. September. If you would like to take part on either feet or bicycle, please contact Margaret Chaundy - margaret.chaundy2@btinternet.com Alternatively, if you can spare an hour on the day to welcome visiting participants, your help would be much appreciated. |
| Poetry Corner
The Bay
The semi-circular and lunar bay
Where the grey stones fall to untidily,
The grey volcanic waves: no man, no tree
Break the cold greenness of the bitten lea –
The scene the orator of memory
Already knew: forbore till now to say.
But on the hill the gun’s black twig, the moan
Of the convoy home from seas instinct with steel,
The hidden spies. The bomber’s slanting keel
As slowly it takes the wind – all these remain
Unwished, undreamed, unknown. They are the days,
The escaping seconds, terrible and real,
Through which I live; which memory will seal
To keep and smear for ever future bays.
- Roy Fuller (1912-1991)
Roy Fuller, born and brought up in Lancashire, was Oxford Professor of Poetry from 1968-1973.
In this poem the familiar is not allowed to remain so: the bay is “lunar”; the syntax is twisted and displacing. The “grey stones fall to untidily / the grey volcanic waves” – they are, Fuller suggests, made of the same stuff. It is not a human place, with “no man, no tree”; it is a place of overlapping memories, encompassing the times both before and after the scene is altered, irrevocably, by the wartime convoy. We don’t have a tree but we have the “gun’s black twig”, the birdlike “slanting keel” of the bomber – threats yet to materialise and to “smear” the speaker’s view of the bay ever after. The memory of landscape suffers from the imposition of war’s accoutrements.
We’ll be discussing a selection of his poetry on Thursday 30th July at 1-2pm, this time in the Old Library.
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