I HAVE recently enjoyed a little boat tour out from Seahouses and around the Farne Islands, an experience in which many pleasures are mutually enfolded.

For an admirer of St Cuthbert, there is the sheer proximity to his “Inner Farne”, the island of his hermitage, and the sense you get that, for all the intervening centuries, you are enjoying the same views as he saw, hearing the same cry of the seabirds, watching, as he must have watched, the gannets and guillemots, the herring gulls and kittiwakes, and, of course, the comic little puffins. Tommy Noddies, they call them here, just as they call the eiders Cuddyducks for St Cuthbert. We saw them all, floating calmly on the waves, or skimming and skittering so close across the surface of the sea.

We see the same birds as he saw, but, perhaps, not in the same way. For us, in our post-Cartesian world, all the truth, the consciousness of the meaning in the cosmos, is supposed to be isolated “in here” in the concavity of our skulls, and, in contrast, the other life “out there” is supposed to be a blind, purposeless mechanism.

But, in the age of Cuthbert, meaning, message, consciousness, was as much out there as in here. The wind that bore the seabirds was also the breath and spirit of God; their cries and songs were voicing creation’s praise: they were omens and emblems and messengers, just as the sea otters that came to warm Cuthbert’s feet were, in their wild way, drawn to his holiness; and, in God’s wider providence, they, too, were God’s ministers, ministering comfort to Cuthbert, their fellow minister. Perhaps, though, as we leave the land behind, we can edge a little closer to that earlier, more participative way of seeing the world.

The poets, too, bring us closer. When Hopkins sees the Windhover, he finds the world within him yearning to the world without, in a kind of recovered kinship and correspondence: “My heart in hiding Stirred for a bird.”

Back at the farmhouse where we are staying, we were drawn, again, to the life of the birds: a pair of swallows flitting and skimming back and forth out of the eaves and over the lawn in front of us. The poet of Psalm 84 has changed for ever the way in which we see swallows; for just the sight of them summons those beautiful lines: “Yea, the sparrow hath found her an house, and the swallow a nest where she may lay her young: even thy altars, O Lord of hosts, my King and my God.”

Indeed, there were sparrows on the lawn, as well as swallows swooping and darting above it, and I found myself forming a poem in that lovely Northumbrian evening light:

Swallows

In early summer still they come
And bless us with their song,
Circling and wheeling like our thoughts,
Their flight tugs at our restless hearts
That we might leave all harms and hurts
To be where we belong.

And come September they will fly
And skim the autumn air
Whilst we in “swallow-flights of song”
Give wing to prayers through which we long
To be where saints like swallows throng
Round heaven’s haven there.

Sure as “the swallow finds her nest
Where she may lay her young”
Our songs and sighs like swallows fare,
Dipping and skimming through the air,
And every sigh becomes a prayer
And every prayer a song.