MY ROOM is such a clutter of so many things — books, paintings and photographs, pens and paper, stones, bits of driftwood, favourite old pipes, all of them the locus, the portal, the tangible storehouse of particular memories, and moments of significance — that it’s hard to pick only three when so many suggest themselves. Let me take three that come to hand.

We’ll start with a beloved book, which happens to be on my desk now. It’s G. K. Chesterton’s Orthodoxy, first published in 1908: the book in which he describes how he discovered, or rather rediscovered, his Christian faith. I was fortunate to read this book while still an atheist, shading perhaps into an agnostic, beginning to wonder if I should be sceptical about my scepticism. I will never forget reading for the first time that passage towards the end of the book, when he writes of the Passion: “In this indeed I approach a matter more dark and awful than it is easy to discuss. . . But in that terrific tale of the Passion there is a distinct emotional suggestion that the author of all things (in some unthinkable way) went not only through agony, but through doubt. . . God was forsaken of God. . . let the atheists themselves choose a god. They will find only one divinity who ever uttered their isolation; only one religion in which God seemed for an instant to be an atheist.”

My copy is an edition of 1943, much worn, its green card covers and coarse paper a witness to wartime economy. The inscription in it comes from the year after the war: “To Ralph from Harold, Christmas 1946.” My father had given it to his youngest brother, just as he — like me, 30 years later — was going up to university. After my father died, my uncle passed this copy on to me as a keepsake, knowing how much the book meant to me, and had meant to him when, like me, he had read it in his twenties.

Also among the clutter on my desk is a little wooden box with a sliding lid, the letters “WB” inscribed on it. Inside is a fragment of Portland stone, and, beside it, a little scroll signed by Lida Cardozo Kindersley. The stone is an off-cut from the same piece of Portland stone which she shaped into the beautiful new gravestone for William Blake, when his body was “rediscovered”. Her inscription on that gravestone, cut in the beautiful lettering for which her workshop is renowned, has these lines from Blake’s prophetic poem “Jerusalem”:
 

I give you the end of a golden string;
Only wind it into a ball,
It will lead you in at Heaven’s gate,
Built in Jerusalem’s wall.
 

My whole life, and certainly my poetic and spiritual life, has been following the thread of that golden string, noticing that the moments of insight and revelation — the moments when you sense the light behind the veil, when the things of this world are transfigured, as the veil is lifted — are not random or disconnected, but threaded together; “a pattern of timeless moments”, as another poet put it. One of those timeless moments was when I stood in Bunhill Fields at the unveiling of the stone. I was one of the speakers on that occasion, which was how I came to be given my little fragment of Portland stone; but it was a joy to see how diverse a crowd was drawn to that event: people from every walk of life, from all faiths and none, finding common ground in visionary Blake, a prophet for our times.

My third article, also tied in closely with a great visionary writer, is a card that I was sent, as a thank-you for giving an address in Hereford to the Traherne Society. The card shows Tom Denny’s astonishing memorial window to Traherne in Hereford Cathedral: a radiant sun illuminates and transfigures the poet and the whole valley in which he stands with upturned palms, giving praise. To stand in front of that window is to see, as Traherne did, all the ordinary things of the world transfigured in the light of heaven: “The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. . . The dust and stones of the street were as precious as gold . . . all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared which talked with my expectation and moved my desire.”