Malcolm Guite is a beloved poet, singer-songwriter, Anglican priest, and scholar whose work explores the rich interplay between faith and the arts. He studied at Cambridge and Durham, and later served as chaplain and fellow of Girton College, Cambridge. His academic interests include writers such as J. R. R. Tolkien, C. S. Lewis, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, alongside broader questions of imagination and belief. Guite is the author of a number of poetry collections, including Sounding the Seasons: Seventy Sonnets for the Christian Year, The Singing Bowl, and Love, Remember: 40 Poems of Loss, Lament and Hope, as well as books on theology and literature such as What Do Christians Believe?, Mariner: A Voyage with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Lifting the Veil: Imagination and the Kingdom of God—all marked by a desire to be both thoughtful and beautiful. He also performs as a musician with the band Mystery Train and regularly shares reflections on poetry, faith, and culture. To read (and hear) more, visit his website at https://malcolmguite.wordpress.com/, or watch his videos at https://www.youtube.com/@MalcolmGuitespell.
We often remember poets for their words. But sometimes it is their way of seeing—and of helping others to see—that leaves something just as lasting. In this conversation, Malcolm Guite reflects on his friendship with Luci Shaw, a poet whose work (quietly, and persistently) attends to the small, the ordinary, and the easily overlooked. What follows is part tribute, part theological reflection, and part invitation: to recover attention in a distracted age, to rediscover rootedness in a restless one, and to notice the ways grace so often arrives unannounced. Along the way, Guite offers stories, poems, and insights into the kind of literary friendship that doesn’t demand imitation—but instead helps another voice become more fully itself.
Names mentioned:
C. S. Lewis Foundation, Madeleine L’Engle, Luci Shaw, Regent College, Jeremy Begbie, Iain McGilchrist, Rowan Williams, William Shakespeare, Edward Muir, Scott Cairns, Diana Pavlac Glyer, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, John Keats, John Donne, George Herbert, Annie Dillard, Joy Davidman, Charles Williams, Simon Barrington-Ward, Magdalene College, Geoffrey Chaucer, Matthew Arnold, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins.
Books / Works mentioned:
Faith, Hope and Poetry (by Malcolm Guite)
Waiting on the Word (by Malcolm Guite)
Parable and Paradox (by Malcolm Guite)
The Company They Keep (by Diana Pavlac Glyer)
Bandersnatch (by Diana Pavlac Glyer)
Pilgrim at Tinker Creek (by Annie Dillard)
Biographia Literaria (by Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
Lyrical Ballads (by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge)
The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions and the Unmaking of the World (by Iain McGilchrist)
Book of Common Prayer (Church of England) “O Radix” (by Malcolm Guite)
“Kenosis” (by Luci Shaw)
“Rocky Mountain Railroad Epiphany” (by Luci Shaw)
“For Luci Shaw” (by Malcolm Guite)
“God’s Grandeur” (by Gerard Manley Hopkins)
Radix: You probably hear this often, but truly—you have been such an inspiration in making words and poetry come alive to so many people; and especially for people who might not be properly educated into it. Thank you so much for this gift. To begin, when did you first meet Luci? How did you come into contact with her, and what were some impressions?
Malcolm Guite: It was actually quite some time ago now. I think it was around 2002—perhaps even a little earlier, but certainly in the early 2000s. What happened was that the C. S. Lewis Foundation, which is based in California but hosts international events, used to run a gathering every three years called Oxbridge, where they would have a week in Oxford followed by a week in Cambridge. They would bring people over from abroad, but also include local speakers.
At that particular gathering, I was leading one of the morning devotions. That was really my first involvement with them; I had actually been introduced to the foundation through one of my students. Anyway, it was also the year that Madeleine L’Engle was to receive a kind of lifetime achievement award from the foundation, which would have been marvelous, as I have long been a great admirer of hers. But Madeleine was not well enough to come, and of course Luci was a close friend of hers, so Luci Shaw was there to receive the award on her behalf.
The award was presented while we were in Cambridge, and because Luci was there, she also gave a poetry reading. I was not a keynote speaker at that point—I was simply leading one of the morning devotions—but Luci had liked what I offered and came over afterward to say hello. I had also attended her poetry reading during the same event and was deeply taken by her as both a poet and a person. She also spoke beautifully about Madeleine and about their friendship, and she accepted the prize on Madeleine’s behalf with such grace.
So anyway, I very much felt like the unknown young poet in the room, and deeply impressed by her. So I gathered my courage and handed her a little self-produced chapbook of poems I had brought with me. At that point I had no proper publisher—just this small booklet containing a few poems I thought she might appreciate.
It is rather funny now, because many people do the same thing with me at conferences: they hand me poems and hope I might read them. I understand now what a task that can be: to remember each one, to find time to read them carefully, to track down an address if it is included, and then to respond. One does one’s best, but of course it is not always possible.
But Luci did respond. She wrote to me and said, “I really like these poems.” She also told me that, in addition to being a poet in residence at Regent College, she was serving as poetry editor for Radix Magazine. When she mentioned that, I was immediately struck by the name. I have always loved Radix—the Latin word for “root.” It is, of course, the root of words like radical, and I have long felt that Christianity is, in the truest sense, a radical religion: one that takes us back to the roots of what it means to be human. The Beatitudes, and indeed the parables of the Kingdom, offer a profound critique of so much of the way we now live. I also loved the theological resonance of the word—the Advent antiphons, in which one of the titles of Christ is O Radix Jesse, O Root of Jesse, drawn from Isaiah.
Around that time I had written a sequence of seven poems based on those Great O Antiphons, one of which was “O Radix.” In that poem I was thinking about Christ as root in an even deeper sense: the Word through whom all things are made, the source and sustaining life of creation itself. At one point in the poem I call him “the stock and stem of every living thing.” I sent that poem to Luci. I can read it to you if you’d like.
Radix: I’d love to hear it.
MG: As a little introductory note, I did not know at the time quite how much Luci loved green and growing things—gardens, plants, all of that life. So in a sense I was lucky: I sent her a poem that was likely to resonate deeply with her, even though I did not yet know that.
By then I had begun reading some of her poetry myself. I believe I had bought one of her books at that event, and happily, since then, we met many times, corresponded often, and over the years developed a kind of poetic friendship. She would kindly send me books and sometimes ask me to write little blog pieces, and I would send poems to her as well. There was a genuine sense of shared vocation. At that point, though, I was still very much the comparatively unknown aspiring poet.
Anyway, here is the poem I sent her:
“O Radix”
All of us sprung from one deep hidden seed,
rose from a root invisible to all.
We knew the virtues once of every weed,
but severed from the roots of ritual
we surf the surface of a widescreen world
and find no virtue in the virtual.
We shrivel on the edges of a wood
whose heart we once inhabited in love.
Now we have need of you, forgotten Root,
the stock and stem of every living thing,
whom once we worshipped in the sacred grove;
for now is winter, now is withering.
Unless we let you root us deep within,
under the ground of being, graft us in.
In that final line I’m riffing there on the extraordinary and very beautiful metaphor that Paul is using in Romans 11: the image of the natural olive and the wild olive. Paul is reflecting on how the Gentiles come to be gathered into God’s saving purpose, a purpose that was originally given through Israel for the blessing of the whole world. He is wrestling with that profound and painful question of how it is that many among the established people of Israel at the time of Jesus did not recognize or receive him.
And so he gives us this extraordinary image: the natural olive tree, a branch severed from it, and then a new branch grafted in. It is a deeply suggestive metaphor. Indeed, it is deep in Paul because it is already deep in the Scriptures Paul knew and loved. The image of the tree runs all through the biblical imagination. It is there, of course, in Eden—in the tree of life and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil in paradise. It is there again in the opening of the Psalms, where the blessed person is described as one who “has not walked in the counsel of the ungodly,” but is instead like a tree planted by streams of water, bringing forth fruit in due season, whose leaf does not wither.
That image of rootedness, fruitfulness, and life sustained by hidden waters goes very deep. I think it also runs directly into Paul’s thought, and appears again in that astonishing prayer of blessing in Ephesians, which was very much in my mind when I wrote the poem. There Paul prays for the Ephesians that they may be rooted and grounded in love, and that they may have power, together with all the saints, to comprehend what is the length and breadth and height and depth, and to know the love of Christ which surpasses knowledge, so that they may be filled with all the fullness of God.
That language of being rooted is immensely powerful. It suggests not only stability, but nourishment, belonging, and a life that draws its strength from what lies beneath the visible surface. That was very much in my mind as I wrote the poem: this sense that we are meant to be grafted back into life itself, rooted once more in love, in grace, and in the deep sustaining life of God. And I was saying that I wanted to be rooted like that.
At the time I was serving as a college chaplain, and I was acutely aware of how rootless many young people felt. I had the sense that this was a generation severed from the roots of ritual, unsure where they came from, uncertain what might ground them. In some ways that still feels true. And perhaps that is why we are now seeing in the UK—and, I suspect, elsewhere—many younger people are returning to churches that possess ritual, depth, and historical rootedness. They are looking for something lasting. Something eternal. They want roots. Though not merely in the ordinary sense of settling down, but in the deeper sense: to be grounded in something permanent, something true. All of that was woven into the poem in one way or another.
Anyway, Luci wrote back and said, “I really like this.” And then, delightfully, she added that since it was called “O Radix,” and she was the poetry editor of Radix, it seemed especially fitting to include. So I was thrilled. In that sense, I have always thought of her as something of a patron, even a mentor. What moved me most was that, though she was certainly far better known than I was at the time, she treated me graciously as a fellow poet—as someone within that circle. I have never forgotten that.
Radix: I’ve heard it said by a number of people that she deeply believed in nurturing relationships, and especially in helping other poets flourish—anyone working in that field. That seems to have been very important to her.
MG: Absolutely. And I think nurture and flourish are exactly the right words. She probably saw us as little potted seedlings that needed to be planted in deeper ground and watered a bit. It is a lovely metaphor, and a true one.
Some years later, I think perhaps around 2008, my relationship with Regent College began. I believe Jeremy Begbie kindly suggested that I might be a good person to come and speak about theology and the arts, particularly as my book Faith, Hope and Poetry was either forthcoming or had just appeared. The book was published in 2010, so it would have been around that period. From there, a long relationship with Regent began. I have been back many times since, and have also taught online courses for them.
At some point during one of those visits, I was very much hoping to see Luci, knowing that she was poet-in-residence there. I do not think I saw her on the first trip—she was living in Belmont, I believe—but by the second visit she wrote to say that she would be at Regent while I was there. What followed was more or less impromptu. She suggested, “Let’s do a poetry reading together.” I was thrilled.
So we did this reading together at Regent, and it went wonderfully well. I still remember how striking she looked: wonderfully chic, wearing a leather jacket, with that beautifully close-cropped silver hair and the fine-boned elegance of her face. She was, to my mind, immensely cool.
Radix: [Laughter]
MG: We read poems back and forth, gesturing to one another, passing the evening almost like a conversation in verse. What it did was to give me the strong sense that we were indeed working in the same vineyard—to continue the horticultural metaphor. That was a deeply happy moment.
But for me, the absolute apotheosis came later, when, to my surprise and great honour, I was invited by Regent College to deliver the Laing Lectures, a major three-part lecture series endowed by Richard Laing. Some truly distinguished figures had delivered them before me, including Iain McGilchrist, so I felt profoundly honoured to be asked. The lectures were on imagination and the Kingdom of God, and I divided them into three parts: the poetic imagination, the moral imagination, and the prophetic imagination.
When it came to the lecture on the poetic imagination, I knew I wanted to use one of Luci’s poems—what I consider one of her finest—her poem “Kenosis.”By that time I had already included it in an anthology I edited for Canterbury Press, a book of daily readings for Advent, Christmas, and Epiphany called Waiting on the Word. I decided to do a close reading of the poem as part of the lecture, because it so perfectly illuminated what I wanted to say about incarnation and poetic imagination. I was drawing, in part, on William Shakespeare’s famous account of the poetic imagination—how it “bodies forth the forms of things unknown” and gives “to airy nothing a local habitation and a name.” Poetry incarnates. It gives body to what would otherwise remain abstract. And that, I think, is one of the great reasons poetry is so necessary, particularly in the life of the Church.
The danger for theology is always the temptation to flee from the body, from rootedness, from the incarnate, into abstraction. As Edward Muir—forgive me, I may be conflating voices here in memory—once put it, there is the danger that “The Word made flesh here is made word again.” Luci’s “Kenosis” brilliantly resists that danger.
Kenosis is itself an abstract theological term—the Greek word we use for the self-emptying described in Philippians: though Christ was in the form of God, he did not cling to equality with God, but emptied himself. Likewise, incarnation is an abstract doctrinal word. But the genius of Luci’s poem is that it immediately draws us away from abstraction and gives us an image: Christ suckling at the breast of Mary, the movement of his infant mouth, the astonishing intimacy and vulnerability of the scene. It is so bodily, so tender, so real.
I have often felt it is a poem only a woman could have written in quite that way. The image of the child at the breast carries a depth of embodied knowledge that is extraordinary. And then, with remarkable delicacy, the poem moves through images of rough wood and laid grain, already hinting at the Passion and the suffering he will bear for us. It is, to my mind, very nearly a perfect poem.
So, as I prepared the lecture, it suddenly occurred to me: the poet herself is still with us, why not ask Luci to come and read the poem before I expound it? Happily, she agreed. And I still regard that as one of the golden moments of my life.
On the day of, I introduced Luci, she stood and read the poem, and then—after she sat down, blushing a little—I had the immense pleasure of speaking to this large audience about why, line by line and word by word, it was such a brilliant poem. There was a deep joy in doing that in front of her. Partly this is because when a person writes a poem, they layer meaning into it—images, rhythms, echoes, intuitions—and the writer never quite knows whether anyone will truly see what they were trying to do. There is a particular joy when a reader genuinely gets it. And I wanted Luci to have that joy: to know that this rather random Englishman had read her poem closely and had, at least to some degree, understood what she was doing. I wanted her to hear that admiration spoken aloud.
When someone has done something truly beautiful, one wants the pleasure of telling them not only that it is beautiful, but why. I thank God that I had the chance to do that with Luci.
Radix: I remember being there that night, actually. I still remember the feeling of it. The way she walked down with such composure, almost regal in her presence. I cannot honestly say I remember every detail of what was said, but I very much remember the feeling of the evening. It has stayed with me.
MG: I’m so glad you were there. It was a very special moment, and I’m happy to share that memory with you.
So, by that point, Luci and I had really come to know one another. We were following each other on Facebook and staying in touch in all the contemporary ways, but more importantly, we had begun sending poems back and forth. She would send me new work, and I would send mine to her, and over time it deepened into a genuine literary friendship.
Around then I noticed that her birthday was coming up, and I decided to write a birthday poem for her. She had recently written some poems that beautifully extended her long-standing love of gardening and the natural world—poems about poetry and cultivation, about the attentiveness and care of the gardener. That prompted me to write a poem for Luci, one that was eventually published in my collection Parable and Paradox. It is simply called “For Luci Shaw.”
In some ways, it probably says as much about what I felt about her as a person as it does about her poetry. And the two, for Luci, were never disconnected. There was no mismatch between the person and the poet. The person you encountered in the poem and the person you encountered in life were recognizably the same: kindly, generous, observant, and at times possessed of that slightly arched wit and perceptive intelligence that one also hears in her lines.
This was my tribute to her. In that same book I wrote tributes to two contemporary American poets—Luci and Scott Cairns—but this one remains especially dear to me.
“For Luci Shaw”
I love the gift you have for green,
green fingers in your garden,
a green art in writing too,
a feel for life and growth,
kindly encouragement, and yet
a keen eye for the form,
for what needs weeding out
to give a poem room
to breathe and grow.
I sense your patience
when that growth is slow,
knowing that slow growth
bears a fuller fruit.
I love your eye for detail too,
the rich particularity
of earthy things,
the way you strike
the right note till it sings,
and all you have withheld
is within reach.
The poem opens for us
and makes room
for fleeting apprehensions
to come home.
That final phrase, “fleeting apprehensions,” is itself a kind of echo of Shakespeare—his sense that imagination apprehends more than cool reason ever comprehends, and that poetry gives those apprehensions “a local habitation and a name.” So the image of coming home is very much tied to that. In many ways, that poem encapsulates why I think Luci is such a fine poet, and what, in particular, I most admire in her work.
Radix: A few years ago you gave a presentation, perhaps more of an interview, around the little fiftieth-anniversary pamphlet Luci wrote on the Inklings. One thing that struck me is how much our understanding of the Inklings has changed, especially through the work of Diana Pavlac Glyer. For a long time there was this idea that each of them simply became who they were individually. But Glyer’s work really challenges that and shows how deeply they formed one another. So I wonder whether Luci also deeply valued friendship in that sense—that creative and inward flourishing that simply would not have been possible without a circle of trusted friends around her.
MG: Oh, I think that is absolutely true. Diana Glyer’s work is brilliant. The Company They Keep is an extraordinary book, and I am also very fond of the little companion volume she later did, Bandersnatch, which is wonderfully suited to reading groups. One of the things Diana does so well is identify the different roles that friends can play within a literary friendship—not only encouragement, but critique, challenge, and response.
One of the roles she describes is that of the “resonator.” To some degree, C. S. Lewis was a resonator for J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis understood what Tolkien was doing at a time when almost no one else did. Tolkien himself said that for a while Lewis was effectively his only real reader—the one saying, “Give me more of this.” I would say Luci was very much that for me. Right from the beginning, when I first sent her that poem, she got it.
At the time, I was having difficulty finding readers in England who really understood what I was trying to do—partly because I was writing in classical forms, which were rather out of fashion in the poetry magazines of the day, and partly because I was writing quite explicitly as a Christian, which was also somewhat out of favour in what could be a fairly secular, and at times aggressively secular, literary establishment. For me, it often felt like two strikes and you’re out.
Luci, of course, shared my Christian faith, but more than that, she understood the poetry itself. Even though her own style is very different from mine—she does not always use formal structures, though she certainly can when she wishes, and she often works with wonderfully subtle half-rhymes, as in “Kenosis”—she understood what I was doing. And she fed that understanding back to me. She resonated at the same frequency. She was saying, in effect, yes—more of that. That is a rare gift.
Some poets are so enclosed within their own style that they can only encourage younger writers insofar as they begin to sound like them. Luci was not like that. I do not write like her. My work comes more out of John Keats, and even more deeply out of John Donne and George Herbert. Luci loved Herbert as well—she wrote a wonderful poem about him. But what mattered is that she recognized the thing itself. If Diana Glyer were ever to write about Luci and me, as she did about Lewis and Tolkien, I think she would certainly recognize Luci as a resonator in my life.
Radix: One other thing that always struck me about her is this remarkable ability to attend to the small things. In our age—perhaps especially in North America—we are so often drawn toward the big, the spectacular, the dramatic, the bang, and the boom. And in that, the small, the everyday, even the domestic can so easily be overlooked. But Luci seemed able to make the mundane, the simple, and the domestic luminous.
MG: Yes, absolutely.
She has many poems about little things: things one could almost pick up and hold in one’s hand, objects others might simply dismiss. There is that lovely poem of hers about the pumice stone, for example, which she uses as a metaphor for the patient polishing of one’s craft.
Another poem of hers that I included in Waiting on the Word is “Rocky Mountain Railroad Epiphany.” It is, on the surface, simply about a train journey: looking out the window, catching glimpses of passing things, a sequence of ordinary sights. But that is precisely where her genius lies. It embodies that old principle of good writing: show, don’t tell. Do not tell me that I am meant to feel awe. Do not announce, “I shall now experience the sacred.” Rather, write something so beautifully, and show it so vividly, that awe becomes the natural response. Luci does that magnificently.
She offers a sequence of details—things others might never have noticed, little glimpses from a railway carriage window—and yet they gradually build toward something sacramental. They gather into a realization that the ordinary world can become translucent with grace. By the same principle through which Christ is present in bread and wine, the world itself may become a site of discernment. Once the inner eye has been trained, one begins to perceive differently.
If we take the classical Anglican understanding of a sacrament—as an outward and visible sign of an inward and spiritual grace, as articulated in the Book of Common Prayer and the Thirty-Nine Articles—then of course bread and wine remain a special and covenantal form of grace, a uniquely holy presence. But it is also a principle of perception. Once you have learned to discern Christ there, you may begin to discern him elsewhere. The most immediate “elsewhere,” of course, is in the poor—in those who need you, in the thirsty whom you may give drink, in the hungry whom you may feed.
Christ himself is explicit about this in the Gospel of Matthew whatever you do for the least of these, you do for me. In that sense, he is sacramentally present in the beggar one might otherwise be tempted to walk past. But the principle extends even further. Once one has learned that kind of discernment in the Church, it begins to flash upon the inward eye—if I may borrow a phrase from William Wordsworth—even while the outward eye is looking upon things another person might never notice.
Luci was brilliant at that.
Radix: You mentioned Iain McGilchrist earlier. In The Matter with Things, close to the beginning, he has that beautiful line: “Attention changes the world. How you attend to it changes what it is you find there.”
MG: Yes, absolutely. That is deeply true of Luci. She is a great poet of attention, and she helps her readers learn how to attend.
This goes back much further, of course. I have had the pleasure of speaking with McGilchrist, and one of the places where we connect is through Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Coleridge uses the word attention very deliberately when speaking about what poetry offers. In Chapter 14 of Biographia Literaria, reflecting on what he and Wordsworth believed they were doing in that annus mirabilis when they produced Lyrical Ballads, he writes that their aim was “to awaken the mind’s attention.” He goes on to say that poetry removes “the film of familiarity” which selfishness and habit cast over the world. That is such a profound insight. He is not saying that poetry offers us a compensatory fantasy, some pretty inward decoration to distract us from a grim and meaningless world. That is, in fact, one of the great misunderstandings of the Romantics.
For years, the standard line was that the modern world had become disenchanted through industrialism and empiricism, and so the poets gave us beauty as a kind of consolation prize. But that is not what Coleridge is doing at all. On the contrary, he is saying: I am helping you to see what is actually there. I am awakening your attention so that you may behold the world almost as if for the first time. That insight remains enormously important, and it lies at the heart of almost all good poetry.
A poet who answers perfectly to what Coleridge describes is Gerard Manley Hopkins. Take his poem “God’s Grandeur.”“The world is charged with the grandeur of God.” There it is, right? And then Hopkins asks why we do not see it. “Why do men now not reck his rod?” Why do generations tread and tread until everything is smeared with toil, dulled by habit, numbed by over-familiarity? His line, “nor can foot feel, being shod,” is especially striking. What he means, I think, is that we no longer feel the holiness beneath us. We ought to take off our shoes, as Moses did before the burning bush, because the place on which we stand is holy ground. The whole world may blaze with that presence. That is what poetry does. It awakens the mind’s attention.
And if that is one of poetry’s deepest purposes, then Luci Shaw stands right at the center of that vocation, because so much of her poetry is devoted to exactly this: helping us see again. She herself possessed the extraordinary gift of attention—both to people and to the world around her—and in her poems she gives that gift to others.
Radix: In terms of your own practices, what daily practices would you suggest for the average person? Perhaps someone who is not an avid reader, someone busy with work and children, but who still wants to open themselves a little more to the world and to grace. What might you suggest for the everyday person?
Malcolm Guite: Well, if it is at all possible, the thing I try to do every day—twice if I can, three times on a particularly good day—is simply to go for a walk. And I mean quite literally to go out and walk, and not to be listening to music or a podcast through headphones while doing so, but to allow oneself actually to hear the birds, the wind, the small sounds of the world.
I often walk in a wood near me called Sadler’s Wood, a place with which I have become very familiar. But each time I go, I try to look again. It is rather the sort of practice that Annie Dillard describes in Pilgrim at Tinker Creek: one goes and one really looks. For me, it is the practice of walking without an agenda. It is not exercise in the utilitarian sense, nor is it undertaken with the thought, perhaps I shall get a good poem out of this. Rather, it is the practice of presence. Some people find it helpful to do this by consciously moving through the five senses and asking themselves: What can I see? What can I hear? What can I feel?
Somewhere along the walk I will usually sit down. There are little benches scattered through the wood, and I will stop for a while, take in the sounds around me, notice the movement of a breeze on my skin, the shifting light, the smell of damp earth or leaves. I do not do this as a means to an end. I do it as an end in itself. I do it on the assumption that one of the things God does in and through each of us is to grant myriad moments of vision of his cosmos. Each of us experiences the world slightly differently, and those slight differences of perception contribute to the rich, multifaceted nature of reality itself.
I often think here of C. S. Lewis’s epitaph for Joy Davidman, adapted in part from something he had earlier written about Charles Williams. Lewis says that when he buried her, he buried the sun and the stars and the sky and the fields as they had been seen by her. That has always struck me deeply. There was a particular way the world had existed in her sight, and that vision was now absent. And yet, in the Christian hope, it is not finally lost.
So simply to look at God’s world as one of his creatures—one uniquely given this particular vantage, this particular angle of seeing—is already a kind of prayer. To notice what is before you, and in God’s presence quietly to say, Glory be to the Father, and to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit, is already to fulfill something of the meaning of creaturehood. One has been given this particular view.
I am reminded of a story from Cambridge that I have always loved, because Cambridge is full of these long continuities of memory. For a time, my spiritual director there was Simon Barrington-Ward, who by then was a retired bishop but had once been the young chaplain at Magdalene College, Cambridge when Lewis was there. In other words, he had actually been Lewis’s chaplain, and he had many lovely stories. Anyway, he told me that Lewis would sometimes take him for walks. Simon, being a young man and rather in awe of Lewis, naturally wanted to say impressive things as they walked together.
Radix: [Laughter]
MG: Years later, Simon and I were taking one of the most famous walks in Cambridge—the walk from the city out to the village of Grantchester along Grantchester Meadows, a path people have been taking since the days of Geoffrey Chaucer. As we were walking, a pair of swans came into view, caught in a shaft of sunlight. Simon turned to me and said, “Do you know, this very thing happened to me when I was walking with Lewis? In almost exactly the same place, the swans had appeared in just this way as they are now. And wanting to say something suitably literary, I quoted Matthew Arnold: ‘Look, your last on all things lovely.’” “Well,” he said “Lewis seized me, and he shook me! And he said “No: ‘Look, your first on all things lovely. You and I are the first people ever to have seen these swans at this moment, in this light. Look you first on all things lovely.”I have always loved that because it was such a wonderful moment.
It returns us again to attention, to seeing, to the irreplaceable singularity of each moment. And perhaps that is why Luci’s poetry matters so much. She has left us a series of beautiful moments of vision. To borrow my own phrase, in her poems there is so often a lifting of the veil. The film of familiarity is removed. Through her poetry, we are enabled to look at the world through her eyes. That is something very much worth doing.