Poems

Rowan Williams’ Winterreise: for Gillian Rose, 9 December 1995

I’ll begin with a poem written in the middle ’90’s. It’s a poem in memory of a friend of mine, Gillian Rose, a great philosopher who died on the ninth of December, 1995. I was travelling to visit her in hospital that day and arrived to find that she’d died just a little while earlier and that to the considerable surprise of myself and many of her friends, she’d been baptized on her deathbed. A very passionate and articulate Jew, she had finally made a journey that puzzled, bewildered, offended some, but found herself at last at home in a place she’d never expected to be. And the poem, Winterreise for Gillian Rose, ninth of December, 1995 falls into three sections: morning, afternoon and night. Shaped by a train journey on a very foggy winter morning up through Gloucester in the Midlands towards Coventry, and an extremely disruptive journey back, sitting around in Swindon for what felt like an eternity because, thanks to the events of the day, I’d missed all the connections I’d planned.

Here is the first section, “Morning”:

This morning, through, the thick and chest-constricting
light, the level, rose-grey clouds and the remains
of icy fog stand between fields and water.

And the horizon has to be a steep edge, has to be
the cliff where Gloucester fell that never-to-be measured
drop from his body to the ground.

And down, a long way down, below the frost,
must be soft embers sending up the light
from fires the night-fog has muffled but not killed.

The complete poem – as well as Williams’ commentary on it – remains available on this archived website.

Geoffrey Hill’s “In memoriam” (Poetry 189.3, pp. 187-191):