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| | e-Pistle News from the University Church |
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Silver Candle holders, by Stella Campion
We are trying to raise £5000 to buy two silver candle holders for the nave altar to match the modern chalice designed and made by Stella Campion in memory of former churchwarden Bill Adams. We already have £1220 (£1525 with gift aid) and are now looking for a big community effort to raise the remaining £3500. Gifts however large or small will be welcomed and can be given direct to the Vicar or to the church office.
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| | Services this Week
Tuesdays & Thursdays
12.15pm Lunchtime Eucharist
Sunday 9th August Trinity 10
10.30am Sung Eucharist
Address: Revd Alan Ramsey
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Forthcoming Events
Monday, 10th August, 6-7pm: Poetry Reading Evening in the Old Library
Wednesday 12th August, 1-2pm: Poetry Seminar (Robert Graves) in the Old Library
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
from Dover Beach
The sea is calm to-night.
The tide is full, the moon lies fair
Upon the straits; - on the French coast the light
Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,
Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.
Come to the window, sweet is the night-air!
Only, from the long line of spray
Where the sea meets the moon-blanch'd land,
Listen! you hear the grating roar
Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,
At their return, up the high strand,
Begin, and cease, and then again begin,
With tremulous cadence slow, and bring
The eternal note of sadness in.[…]
- Matthew Arnold (24 December 1822 – 15 April 1888)
Matthew Arnold has several links to Oxford University. His godfather was John Keble, a progenitor of the Oxford Movement; his father, Thomas Arnold, admired Keble’s spiritual verse collection, The Christian Year; though he grew exasperated with Keble’s High Church leanings as the Oxford Movement developed.
Matthew Arnold himself went on to become Professor of Poetry at Oxford, and was Queen Victoria’s Inspector of Schools – a position he found to be full of drudgery. His poetry was pessimistic, too, in contrast to other Victorian verse of the 1850s. Comparison of the opening to his most famous poem, ‘Dover Beach’, to Robert Browning’s ‘Home Thoughts, from Abroad’ (written at roughly the same time) reveals Browning to be a much more avuncular, reassuring figure: ‘Oh, to be in England / Now that April’s here…’. Browning’s enthusiasm for the absent homeland is nostalgic and somehow joyous, quite unlike Arnold’s deep-set melancholia found at England’s extremity. Would the two poets be better suited temperamentally if they were to swap places?
The melancholy creeps slowly into this poem, but it becomes overwhelming. Indeed, the scene is ‘tranquil’, the night-air ‘sweet’; but it’s the sound that infects the speaker’s thoughts. ‘Only… Listen!’ he urges, to the ‘grating roar’, that ‘eternal note of sadness’. By the end of the poem he’s invoking the listener to ‘be true to one another’ in the face of ‘ignorant armies’. And he wrote this on his honeymoon. |
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