Cosmic Poetry: 2017 Seatonian Prize
Winning the Divinity School Seatonian Prize is becoming something of a Pembroke habit.
Christopher Smart won it three times. Colin Wilcockson has won it three times, most recently in 2016 with his villanelles inspired by Smart’s Jubilate Agno. And now Professor Randall Johnson has won it for the second time with his cosmic take on the theme ‘O God, enfold me in the sun’.
Johnson’s poem is an intriguingly scientific response for a competition for the best English poem on a sacred subject, focusing more on the sun than on the divine. The poem is an astronomical exploration the birth and death of stars, and of the subsuming of planets by a dying sun. The structure of this poem is unusual, too; it is a Pindaric Ode. Named for Pindar, a Greek lyrist of the 5th century BC, Pindaric odes use a three-part structure consisting of a strophe, antistrophe and epode , or statement, response, and summation. This style of writing is another Pembroke link: Thomas Gray also wrote Pindaric Odes such as The Bard and The Progress of Poesy.
The resulting poem is a three part history of the solar system, from the birth of the sun, to the creation of Earth, culminating in the reunification of earth and sun. The three parts are titled Patris, Filii and Spiritus Sancti, to reflect the Holy Trinity.
Patris
God is existence, all else filled with naught
All space, vacuum, absence: all that is cold
But to take part, an omnipresent thought
A divine mass, an always moving fold.
God collects, and in gathering warms
Until collected mass creates the light
Sharply defeats cold; for a space and time
Within light dark stuff forms
And drifts out in gusty, abandoned flight
To new-thought planets, and potential rhyme.
Filii
Combining light breathes an involved new dust
Which gathers at a distant point, accretes
Silently. Growing, held by gravity’s trust
Binding the molecules small complex cheats.
Rebellious eddies form in the darkness
And reform themselves. First unfaithfully
And then with fidelity’s tireless lust
A creation careless
And without thought: it grows on needlessly
And fills its small sphere with a sinful crust.
Spiritus Sancti
A sun knows when it feels death, and grows out
To recapture its untoward children
with a slowly divine, releasing shout
of stardust. Cosmic consideration.
And now within the light all is captured
Amalgamated as the fire dies in
And left in the cupboard of widest space
So that matters mattered.
All that’s left without now enfolds within
The last light reveals a spot; a god’s trace.