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Malcolm Guite: Poet’s Corner

22 April 2022

At compline in King’s College, Cambridge, Malcolm Guite recalls lines of Wordsworth’s

HAVING led compline in that underground car park in Dallas whose acoustic was so generously compared to that of King’s College Chapel, in Cambridge (8 April), I found myself in that very chapel only a fortnight later, attending a beautiful service of compline.

I forbear to make any direct comparisons between the sound of the two services; but the atmosphere and setting, the sense of place, the beauty of what lay before one’s eyes — that is another matter. I slumped my tired body into one of those beautiful old wooden stalls, and let the continuous miracle of music and litany do its work, as George Herbert promised it would: “Now I in you without a bodie move, Rising and falling with your wings.”

Jet-lagged as I was, I felt myself lifted by the music floating up toward the wonderful tracery of that fan-vaulted roof, and, in that lifting, I felt my soul breathe and expand.

As I contemplated that ceiling, another poem stirred in my memory, to give me words for what I was experiencing:


These lofty pillars, spread that branching roof
Self-poised, and scooped into ten thousand cells,
Where light and shade repose, where music dwells
Lingering — and wandering on as loth to die;
Like thoughts whose very sweetness yieldeth proof
That they were born for immortality.


Those last six lines of Wordsworth’s sonnet, “Inside of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge”, lift towards the sublime from a poem that, quite frankly, begins with the banal.

“Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense” is not a promising start. Any line that opens with “tax” and ends with “expense” is not likely to woo or enchant the reader.

Wordsworth, to be fair on him, was responding to a sniping account of the chapel in William Gilpin’s Picturesque Tours, a book that Wordsworth otherwise admired. After visiting the chapel, Gilpin had written: “Its disproportion disgusts. Such height and such length, united by such straightened parallels, hurts the eye. You feel immured. Henry the Sixth, we are told, spent twelve hundred pounds in adorning the roof. It is a pity he had not spent it in widening the walls.”

No wonder Wordsworth responded as he did:


Tax not the royal Saint with vain expense,
With ill-matched aims the Architect who planned —
Albeit labouring for a scanty band
Of white-robed Scholars only — this immense
And glorious Work of fine intelligence!


There was little sign of that “scanty band of white-robed scholars”, or, nowadays, black-robed scholars, for whom the chapel was built during that particular compline, apart from the white-surpliced choir itself; but we were, nevertheless, a gathering of scholars. I was there as part of an international colloquium on theology and the arts, and there could scarcely have been a better place for such a gathering. If ever there was a work of human art which gives outward and visible expression to the deepest mysteries with which theology is concerned, then it is the chapel in which our intellectual efforts were, on that first evening, consecrated with prayer.

And, whatever the outcome of our deliberations, when they finally find expression as a book, we can aspire only to make, like those who made that chapel, such a “glorious Work of fine intelligence”.

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