Edith Sitwell*

Edith Sitwell (1887–1964) is a modernist poet and critic. She received the Benson Medal in 1934 from the Royal Society of Literature, and in 1953 was made a Dame Commander of the Order of the British Empire (DBE).

She and her two younger brothers — Osbert and Sacheverell who both also experienced literary success — experienced a childhood of mistreatment and neglect by their parents. In 1918 she met and became friends with the poet and war hero Siegfried Sassoon. According to her biographer Richard Greene she fell in love with Sassoon, even though she knew that he was a homosexual. Similarly, she later fell in love with the gay Russian painter Pavel Tchelitchew, whom she helped both financially and through her influence . Edith Sitwell never did marry, but lived for many years in the company of her former governess Helen Rootham. Her flat became a meeting place for writers, several of whom she helped to become established.

In the 21st century Dame Edith Sitwell is best known for her poem “Still Falls the Rain” — a poem about the Blitz of London during WWII.

Dirge for the New Sunrise

Fifteen minutes past eight o’clock, on the
morning of Monday the 6th of August, 1945

Bound to my heart as Ixion to the wheel,
Nailed to my heart as the Thief upon the Cross
I hang between our Christ and the gap where the world was lost

And watch the phantom Sun in Famine Street
— The ghost of the heart of Man…red Cain,
And the more murderous brain
Of Man, still redder Nero that conceived the death
Of his mother Earth, and tore
Her womb, to know the place where he was conceived.

But no eyes grieved —
For none were left for tears:
They were blinded as the years

Since Christ was born. Mother or Murderer, you have given
or taken life —
Now all is one!

There was a morning when the holy Light
Was young…The beautiful First Creature came

To our water-springs, and thought us without blame.

Our hearts seemed safe in our breasts and sang to the light —
The marrow in the bone
We dreamed was safe…the blood in the veins, the sap in the tree
Were springs of the Deity.

But I saw the little Ant-men as they ran
Carrying the world’s weight of the world’s filth
And the filth in the heart of Man —
Compressed till those lusts and greeds had a greater heat than
that of the Sun.

And the ray from that heat came soundless, shook the sky
As if in search for food, and squeezed the stems
Of all that grows on the earth till they were dry.
The eyes that saw, the lips that kissed, are gone
— Or black as thunder lie and grin at the murdered Sun.

The living blind and seeing dead together lie
As if in love…There was no more hating then —
And no more love: Gone is the heart of Man.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Edith Sitwell: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Jonathan Chan

Jonathan Chan is a Singapore poet and translator whose second book bright sorrow has just appeared from Landmark Books. Born in Manhattan to a Malaysian father and a South Korean mother, educated at Cambridge and Yale, he was raised in Singapore and has returned there after his years at university. His first collection going home (Landmark Books, 2022). was a finalist for the Singapore Literature Prize in 2024. Part of what he explores in that book is the sense of what home is when a single locale may or may not be the home one is going to.

He is Managing Editor for the poetry archive Poetry.sg. His poetry is widely published; I personally have selected his poems for Ekstasis, and for Poems For Ephesians, as well as for a forthcoming anthology of Christmas poems in the Poiema Poetry Series.

Jonathan Chan has said, “matters of faith are integral and inherent to my writing” — while Christian Wiman has said, “Jonathan Chan’s poems are distinctively musical, acutely observed, and existentially engaged at the deepest level. They are bracing to discover.”

The following poem is from bright sorrow.

eternity

after Marilynne Robinson

and so the old man said
eternity is a thing we have

no hope of understanding.
things happen the way

that they do. a note follows another
in a song. a song is itself and

not another. a song is a song
itself. eternity holds space for

all these songs. for a song is
like a life, resounding in a kind

of tune. lives are what they were
and have been. lives are not merely

every worst thing. a mother prays
for her scoundrel son to be taken

up into heaven. Lila thinks this
an injustice to the scoundrels

with no mothers. people try
to get by. people are good

by their own lights. people take
all the courage that they have

to be good. for in eternity,
to eternity, eternity is just

a thing.

Posted with permission of the poet.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Peter Levi*

Peter Levi (1931―2000) is a poet, translator, novelist, and scholar. He wrote more than 60 books, including fiction, biography, poetry, and travel writing. He was raised in a devout Catholic family, where all three siblings chose a vocation within the church — he and his brother became Jesuit priests, and his sister a Bernadine nun.

He was a classics tutor at Campion Hall, Oxford from 1965 to 1977, then left the Jesuit order for marriage and a literary life. When asked why, he replied, "It was love."

In an interview with the Paris Review around the time he left the priesthood he was asked about his experience and his view of the sermon as a creative medium. He replied,
------"Oh I think it’s very interesting. Donne’s sermons are wonderful.
------An opportunity not open to most human beings of having a captive
------audience. I think it is much unexploited and I think it has
------thrilling potentialities, but of course only if you happen to
------believe what you’re saying. And it so happens that I did. I mildly
------regret not being able to preach any more sermons."

Peter Levi was Professor of Poetry at Oxford from 1984 to 1989. The following excerpts are from his long poem “Ruined Abbeys.”

From Ruined Abbeys

------Monastic limestone skeleton,
------threadbare with simple love of life
------speak out your dead language of stone,
------the wind’s hammer, the sun’s knife,
------the sweet apple of solitude;
------there is a ninth beatitude:
------a child in his simplicity
------is more than a just man can be.

It is not a poem that is easy to analyse, dwelling in the physicality of abandoned stone structures, and in Levi’s experience of how words take on a life of their own.

------Watching all this in an armchair
------consider what these ruins are,
------desolate spirits in the air
------singing in their stone languages
------what religion is not and is,
------not a museum but a stone
------no man can understand alone:

The stanza I would particularly like to highlight is the following — from toward the end of this 417-line poem.

------It ends in death, the old land.
------Darkness climbs into the sky.
------There is nothing left in your hand.
------It gives you no guide to go by.
------Or nothing that a stinging-nettle
------on a bleak stone will not unsettle.
------You who believe my true story
------are not protected from history.
------What can I say about death;
------their death is hidden from my eyes:
------but I believe that the dead rise,
------having been roused by the strong breath
------of my God who is in heaven,
------when the trumpet tears earth open.

To read the entire poem, follow this link.

*This is the second Kingdom Poets post about Peter Levi: first post.

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.

Toyohiko Kagawa

Toyohiko Kagawa (1888—1960) is a Japanese reformer, activist, pacifist, poet, and novelist. He was orphaned at age four, and was cared for by American missionaries. Once he declared his faith in Christ, he was disowned by his extended family. In 1909 he moved into a slum in Kobe, Japan, in order to serve the people, but found it hard to make a difference there.

He became active in various reforms, frequently facing rebuke from government authorities, such as being arrested twice in 1921 and 1922 for his part in labour strikes. Similarly, after writing an apology in 1940 to China for Japan’s invasion, he was twice arrested for “antiwar thoughts”.

After WWII, however, he was influential as an advisor to the transitional government, seeing such reforms as the legalization of unions, women’s suffrage, and land redistribution.

Kagawa wrote more than one hundred fifty books, including bestselling novels. He was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature, and four times for the Nobel Peace Prize.

Discovery

I cannot invent new things
Like the airships
Which sail
On silver wings
But today
A Wonderful Thought
In the dawn was given
And the stripes on my robe
Shining from wear
Were suddenly fair
Bright with a Light
Falling from heaven
Gold, Silver and Bronze
Lights from the windows of Heaven
And the Thought was this:
That a Secret Plan
Is hid in my Hand
Big,
Because of this plan,
That God
Who dwells in my hand
Knows this secret plan
Of the things He will do for the world
Using my Hand!

Entry written by D.S. Martin. He is the author of five poetry collections including Angelicus (2021, Poiema/Cascade), and three anthologies — available through Wipf & Stock. His new book The Role of the Moon, inspired by the Metaphysical Poets, is forthcoming from Paraclete Press.