36. On Crossing That Final Border.

Dearly Beloved,

Sarah Collister gave a poetry workshop at St Clement's. Here is one of the poems she selection for us to ponder:

Crossing the Bar.

Sunset and evening star,

And one clear call for me!
And may there be no moaning of the bar,
When I put out to sea,

But such a tide as moving seems asleep,
Too full for sound and foam,
When that which drew from out the boundless deep
Turns again home.

Twilight and evening bell,
And after that the dark!
And may there be no sadness of farewell,
When I embark;

For tho' from out our bourne of Time and Place
The flood may bear me far,
I hope to see my Pilot face to face

When I have crost the bar.

(Alfred, Lord Tennyson 1889)

Our lives and our deaths are full of bars and borders. This letter is written from the land of the Angelus. At seven in the morning, again in the evening and at midday the church bell on the hill opposite chimes the hours, then the Angelus follows in all its complexity.

To get here, where we hope to spend half the year, I passed a border, produced a visa and three attestation, sworn statements about my infective status for Covid-19, then motored for two days. Inevitably upon arrival I discovered shoulder high grass untended for almost a year, but the reward was that as a result of the absence of humans the garden, fields and gallery woodland along the river were full of wildlife. Stepping outside the back door at dusk I saw a dozen tiny bats circling back up over the roof. Bats can be seen whirling in tight circles over the river too. The houses, barns and, doubtless, the older trees here are full of cracks and crevices and these are full of bats of various species from the smallest pipistrell to the largest. the European noctulid – bigger than a blackbird – one of which flopped onto a barn roof one May morning, probably out feeding in daylight because it of the demands of suckling its young. 

One evening we watched twelve or so medium sized bats emerging from a narrow space between the roof and the supporting wall. At dawn the black redstart leads off the dawn chorus from the roof of the barn with its rather weak reedy song, striking up an orchestra of hundreds. At midday the Serin has arrived to flaunt its yellow chest and sing from the top of a pseudo acacia tree, from which a succession of Serin's have sung for as long as I can remember. At evening the swifts and swallows take their last meal just as the bats emerge so they fly together for just a few minutes each day. 

Everything is breeding. Butterflies are joined in flight and clinging to vine leaves. Everywhere one risks disturbing families of birds feeding their young. On the trellis supporting a grape vine is a spotted flycatcher. In a week or so it will be accompanied on the same trellis by young who will watch their parent give a demonstration of how to spot and catch insect prey on the wing. Walking through the long grass I put up three still fluffy young birds with white borders to their tails, probably the offspring of  a masked male curl bunting, (mocking our Covid restrictions) with a beak full of food. And then there are the butterflies, everything from meadow browns to a gracefully swooping swallowtail. At evening, overhead, a pair of falcons, Merlins, wheel. These birds are said to be capable of catching a swift on the wing but are more often to be seen catching insects over the river at evening. This year, close to the river, there are more damsel flies than I have every seen -- I counted 30 in one area -- many dragon flies and beautiful luminous blue beetles, jewelry for the riverside plants.

This is the Earthly paradise. When we have crossed the bar, or like Dante, climbed higher, what wonders will await us then?


Photo: Paul Munton.

Hoplea caerulea; a beetle that bejewels riverside plants 

(Note: If readers are not familiar with any of the species named above then there will be lots of photos of each on Google images.)


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