August 18, 2025 • 24 mins
In this collection of conversations, Ben Palpant, author of Letters From The Mountain, has compiled his intimate, one-on-one interviews with seventeen powerful poets of the 21st century. These conversations cover an entire range of life experience, including grief, hope, culture, the writing craft, family life, and the imagination. Each poet speaks with remarkable candor and joy. Taken together, these interviews are a powerful reminder that poetry remains an essential expression of what it means to be human.
Franz Kafka famously said that "a book must be the axe for the frozen sea within us." And the words and thoughts contained here aim to wake up much that has become silent in each of us. They contain wisdom that may inspire, instruct, and strengthen, confronting us with the reality that words matter, that poetry matters, and that we matter.
You can purchase a copy of An Axe for the Frozen Sea in the Rabbit Room Store.
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S1 (00:00):
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter four Malcolm Guite. Many
years ago, one of my daughters went through a difficult season.
Walking with a child through the valley of the shadow
of death is a daunting journey that accentuates one's dependence
(00:37):
on God. At least it did so for me. Feeling
my limitations rather acutely, one day I decided to take
her on an overnight camping trip to the Saint Joe River.
I had two modest goals for the trip first, to
enjoy the mountain air and what Wendell Berry called the
peace of wild things. And second, to memorize Malcolm Gates
(01:00):
singing bowl. That's why, to begin our conversation, I thank
Malcolm for the poem and for giving me the words
I needed when I needed them. Words that could minister
to my daughter when my own words had run their course.
As he lights his pipe, he says, well, you know,
at the time I wrote that poem, I thought I
was writing a poem about how to write poetry, but
(01:22):
it turned out to be a poem about prayer and
living a life open to God. It was a bit
of a revelation to me, because I was feeling a
bit of a tug between my vocation as a priest
and my vocation as a poet. I was wondering if
I was sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul. One
of the effects of that poem was to help me
realize that, no, these are really two sides of the
(01:43):
same coin. What is your most popular poem, I ask?
Well let's see. It's probably my poetry is jamming your machine.
Of course, if I'm measuring strictly on grateful correspondence, I
get quite a bit of responses to a couple of
poems I wrote about darkness, difficulty, and depression. The first
(02:03):
one is the third fall and the other is the
Christian plummet. People from all walks of life share how
the poem touched them in particular ways that surprise me.
You know, one of the things about poetry is that
it's always about more than you think it's about. That's
almost my definition of a poem. I usually have some
idea of what I'm going to write about, but if
I write it down and it turns out to be
(02:23):
exactly what I set out to write about and nothing more,
then I don't think it's a poem. It's a note
to self. It has to quicken itself in the making
and push back against me a little and take some
sort of living form. It has to resist me a
bit in order for me to know that it's a poem.
You bring up depression, I say. Many of your poems
(02:43):
are helpful companions during dark times. When your poems touch
on difficulty, they do so as one who has experienced it.
And yet you're such a jolly man. How is that? Ah, yes. Well,
a couple of things about that. He laughs. As you know,
these are things we all share in common. One of
the things I consciously resist and rebel against is the
(03:04):
idea of poetry as just personal self-expression. The idea of
the lonely romantic genius in his weird, peculiar place, whom
everyone has to make allowances for, leads to this kind
of confessional poetry, which gets worse and worse and more
and more obscure. What does it amount to? Another strange
adventure in the little world of me. I don't buy
(03:25):
that at all. No, I want to be the bard
of a tribe, to tell the great collective stories that
bind us together. But of course, I tell them as
they've happened to me. Whatever is personal of mine is
most emphatically not in the poems as purely self-expression. Confessional
poetry becomes very tedious after a while. The poetry I
(03:46):
want to write, and that I enjoy reading, articulates the
joys and sorrows of life. As to the jollity, I
suppose I would say that anyone with lighter emotions who
hasn't experienced any pain is in danger of sentimentality. I
trust them about as much as I trust a trusted
Thomas Kincaid painting. You know, there's a term J.R.R. Tolkien
coined eucatastrophe you means good. So it's a good catastrophe.
(04:10):
But a catastrophe still means catastrophe in some sense. The
eucatastrophe at the end of the Lord of the rings
is trustworthy, because we've been with these characters to the
very edge of the crack of doom. That's why I
trust the resurrection, because the church doesn't backpedal on Good Friday.
While we're on the topic, I say, who called depression
(04:32):
the black dog? Was that Winston Churchill? Churchill used it,
but it comes from Samuel Johnson, who was, as you know,
a great Christian. But he had terrible periods of darkness.
He was doggedly latched on to Christianity, though it's a
very helpful metaphor, because a dog is both a domestic
thing as well as a potentially dangerous thing. In my
(04:52):
own life there have been times when depression was quite severe.
I'm glad I'm not alone, I say. Here's something interesting,
he says. I've always been an enthusiast for sailing. Someone
once asked me what floats my boat? And I said, well,
it's quite literally floating on a boat. I remember ardently
reading a book about cruising around on small boats and
(05:13):
the chapter on seasickness. It had pages upon pages of
apparently useful information, at the end of which it said
most of this would probably not work, but the last
words of the chapter were, in the end, the best
you can do is keep your face into the wind
and endeavour to remember that it can't last forever. I
thought that was brilliant, and I've applied it to the
black dog of depression. I particularly like the phrase endeavour
(05:37):
to remember because obviously when you are actually feeling seasick,
you can't imagine anything except nausea. It's a totalizing experience,
but you can endeavour to remember. You can try to
want to remember. One of the best cures for my
dark seasons is turning my face to the wind. Endeavouring
to hope means, I suppose, learning to hope. I say, yes, Well,
(06:01):
you know, hope is a kind of gift of the spirit.
Hope has one foot in heaven already. It's about the
inbreaking of heaven into time. It's not about believing that
nothing bad is ever going to happen. Your comments have
brought something to mind. This question might seem out of
the blue, but I promise I'm going somewhere with it.
Is Malcolm actually your first name? Ah, I see where
(06:25):
you're going with this. No, Malcolm is actually my middle name.
My first name is Ayodeji. It's a tribal name from Nigeria.
Eyo means joy and Deji means again. So a double joy.
I was born in Nigeria in 1957, but I was
very nearly not born due to some complications. At my birth,
(06:47):
things came to a kind of crisis. I was getting
strangled by my umbilical cord. It was nearly the end
for my mother and for me before I had even
seen the light of day. Anyway, there was only one
person who was able to make the necessary interventions, and
he was just leaving the compound in his car. A
nurse ran out and stopped him, and he performed a
fairly swift caesarean section, which saved both my mother and me.
(07:10):
My mother, being obviously very grateful to the nurse, asked
her what to name me, and the nurse said Ayodeji,
because it is a traditional name for a second child,
which I am, and because it was very nearly a
sorrow rather than joy. But joy was granted, which makes
it a double joy. That's an incredible story, I say.
(07:33):
Yes it is, he replies. G.K. Chesterton said that there
are people who will point to a man who had
great promise in life, but who was a failure in
the end, and say, that man is a great might
have been. Chesterton resists this phrase. He believes everything hangs
by so thin a thread that every one of us
is a great might not have been. The fact that
(07:55):
we exist at all is a cause for great rejoicing.
It's so helpful to think of one's life as an
unexpected bonus rather than a deserved certainty. That perspective would
change how we enter each day. I say. I'm amazed
that you have so thoroughly lived into your name's meaning.
That probably happens to people a lot more than we realize.
Do you agree? Oh, yes. Absolutely. You know, my middle name, Malcolm,
(08:18):
has become more and more significant to me. It was
chosen by my grandmother. The first meaning of my name
is I'm a disciple of Saint Columba who evangelized Scotland,
which in terms of Celtic Christianity, suits me just fine.
But its deeper meaning is that I'm a servant of
the spirit. That leaves us with my last name, which
is rather inexplicable. My father's family came over, probably from
(08:41):
the south of France, with the Huguenots after the Edict
of Nantes. I can find no meaning for it, except
for a Provencal dialect word that means madman. So I
think that fits fairly well. We're both laughing so hard
that it takes me a moment to collect my wits. Finally,
I say, talking to you reminds me of a quote
from the book One Long River of song. Brian Doyle writes.
(09:05):
I walked out so full of hope. I'm sure I
spilled some at the door. That's you in a nutshell.
Your mother couldn't have known that that was the little
boy she was bringing into the world. But it seems
to me that it's what you continually do. Well, everything
comes and goes, he says. But I am essentially hopeful
(09:26):
because of the great saying of Jesus from the cross.
It is finished. A corner has been turned. Darkness has
been defeated because people like a rehearsed testimony. They ask
if I know on what day I was saved and
I say, yes, it was Good Friday, same as you. Amen, brother,
I reply. I think we're entitled to joy. A real joy,
(09:49):
not a naive optimism, he says. Vaclav Havel writes somewhere
that hope is not the certainty that things will turn
out well, but that they will make sense, that they
will mean something. Okay, I say, I'm going to yank
the steering wheel and veer off of this road and
onto a new one. Yes, fine, fine, he says. What's
(10:11):
your take on the fact that the reincarnation of Bilbo Baggins,
if I may call you, that, has nearly 100,000 followers
on YouTube. He laughs and ruffles his hair. I'm just
being me. There's nothing more than that. It began more
or less during the first couple of days of the
Covid 19 lockdown in 2020. I was still engaged at
(10:33):
Cambridge as chaplain as well as teacher, but I was
stuck in my little village and my students were stuck
wherever they were and none of us could meet. My
entire mode of being chaplain was about presence and about
being glad to welcome people. Insofar as I had a
spiritual discipline, it was a ministry of presence. My golden rule,
the thing I prayed to be given was to be
glad to be interrupted. Whatever I was doing when someone
(10:56):
knocked on my door, even if I was right in
the middle of a particularly delicate sentence. I would remind
myself that this is a good thing. And I would say, come.
Come in. That's how I start every video. So that
little video thing was my way of pretending that we
could still meet, you see? It was meant only for
my students and a handful of friends. I suppose I've
(11:17):
become a bit of what they call an influencer, but
I would have been voted boy most unlikely to become one.
He chuckles. I find it amusing that people who take
YouTube seriously, who work really hard at it and have
fewer followers, are writing to ask about my strategies about
all this technical stuff lighting schedule, staging, and all the rest.
(11:37):
God help us all people, he shouts. There is no strategy.
So why the following, I ask? I think social media
and YouTube have become such contested, nauseating and poisonous places
that what I offer is something. A very large number
of people need this quiet little haven, and a feeling
(11:57):
that some sense of truth, beauty and simplicity has been
restored to them. Honestly, my hope is that my videos
will help people stop watching YouTube altogether and go read
a book. That's the whole game of it. What we're
happily accepting is the illusion that there are no screens
involved in this encounter at all, and you're just delighting
in what you enjoy, namely good books, I say. It's
(12:20):
hospitality and boyish enthusiasm. Yes, exactly. When I spoke to
the poet James Matthew Wilson, I say he described a
crisis he faced during his post-grad work. The very thing
that drew him to study the humanities, the love of
good writing and of good stories, was replaced by deconstruction
and political theory. It's really true, he says. I'm glad
(12:42):
I got out of academia before all of that really
took off. It won't last. I mean, theory tends to
eat itself in the end. All of the structuralism, post-structuralism,
and critical deconstruction has already begun to deconstruct itself. People
have started returning to reading with the grain of the
text rather than against the grain. That's what you're doing
on your YouTube channel, I say. And it's refreshing. I
(13:06):
hope so, he replies. Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been a
major influence on your life. When did you first encounter
his work? Coleridge is huge. You know, if you read
at all widely, you're bound to find writers who feel
like kindred spirits with whom you resonate. Coleridge is very
much that for me. I empathize with him enormously. I
(13:27):
met his poetry first because my mother had a huge
fund of poetry memorized by heart, from which she would
pull as the occasion arose. When I was a kid,
we spent a great deal of time traveling by sea,
you know, returning to England from Nigeria every year to
quite a long time back in those days. It was
always quite a moment when the ship would leave the harbor,
and we would watch the furrow in the wake of
(13:48):
the boat, and she would quote the rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner saying, we were the first to burst into
that silent sea. And of course, I would want to
hear more. So I knew that poem quite well. I
started diving into his work more seriously later in high school,
reading his prose and so on. I found him very interesting.
He gazes out the window for a moment, takes a
(14:10):
puff from his pipe, and then continues. When I began
to make the intellectual and imaginative journey back into Christianity,
having rejected it in my teens, I had this memory
that Coleridge had quite a bit to say about this.
So I went back to him and found that he
had written this wonderful, mature, and philosophically deeply grounded return
(14:30):
to a fully Trinitarian faith. I looked again at the
textbooks we've been given about Coleridge, and there's nothing at
all about that. They just portray him as this romantic ruin,
as it were. There's a lot about opium, but almost
nothing about God. Secular historians tend to airbrush out what
they're not interested in, to see religious faith as a
kind of background noise to action. So I resolved that
(14:52):
one day I would write an account of Coleridge that
restored the full picture. That book became Mariner, in which
I set out to make a case for his relevance
and our need for him in the cultural crisis we
enter today. I found in him a companion, especially when
it came to his view of the imagination as a
truth bearing faculty. Coleridge has been more than a companion.
(15:14):
I say he has strengthened your foundations. Yes. And now
I find him at my side again. One of my
childhood dreams was to write an Arthurian, as it's called.
I was searching for the poetic form and found it
in the ballad form which Coleridge remade, making it capable
of carrying great weight. He kept all of the ballad forms, lucidity,
(15:36):
and readability, but he also allowed it to become a
vehicle for something beautiful and luminous and permanent. I'm not
saying that I'm going to achieve that, you know, but
at least I can try. How ambitious is this project?
If I live long enough to complete the whole thing,
it'll be four volumes, each volume consisting of three books,
so that it becomes a proper 12 book epic. So
(15:59):
something modest in length, I say, as in the tradition
of Virgil and John Milton. He laughs. The whole idea
is a little outrageous, I know. It's not, as Jonathan
Swift would say, a modest proposal. But, you know, I'm
working on it. I love it, I say. You've given
yourself a project that gets you up in the morning
(16:20):
with an eager step. Absolutely. The imagination is like any
other faculty. You have to exercise it. I'm daunted by
the project, of course, but I'm also excited by it.
I don't know which day will be my last, but
I can only do the work in front of me.
I'm in the hands of God. As someone says, in Narnia,
we're always between the lion's paws, you know? In the end,
(16:41):
I just hope that whatever God allows me to complete
will be of some good in the world. I want
to write something that satisfies every age. George MacDonald said
he wanted to write fairy tales for everyone who loves them,
from 5 to 55. I don't want to simply preach
to the choir, as it were. What I really want
is for some future C.S. Lewis, a brooding atheist teenager,
(17:03):
to pick up my Arthur poems and love them just
for themselves, and then for him to find that they
have given him something with which or through which to
discover the truth in Christianity. I want my poems to
have snuck past the watchful dragons of our secularism and
the immanent frame, and actually open something up inside him.
That's a wonderfully rare vision for one's work, I say.
(17:26):
It's so wonderful to imagine that you made me forget
my next question. He ruffles his hair and grins. I apologize.
Thinking about C.S. Lewis as a brooding teenager, I say
reminds me that he said his imagination was baptized. An
interesting way of looking at it. McDonald's work did the
heavy lifting, of course, but his walks with Tolkien helped
(17:49):
as well. Indeed, he says, I continue. We bought some
acreage a few years ago that we hope to build
a house on someday. The first thing we did was
cut a footpath, which we called Addison's Walk, based on
the path that Lewis and Tolkien walked in Oxford. People
often ask, Who is Addison? So we get to tell
them the story. Very good, he says. And of course,
(18:11):
they ought to ask, who is Addison? Joseph Addison was
an English poet and essayist who wrote a brilliant essay
in the early 1700s on gratitude and the need to
restore the sense of gratitude. In the course of that essay,
he presents a poem that has become a great hymn
of the Christian church. It begins like this. When all
thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul. Surveys transported
(18:33):
with the view I am lost in wonder, love and praise.
Now that wouldn't be a bad verse to put up
on your Addison's walk. Not bad at all. That's a
great idea, I say. It's a fitting verse for your
work too. Well, you know, Maggie and I chose that
as the opening hymn to our wedding, and I timed
it so that when I turned to see the bride,
(18:55):
I was singing with everyone else, transported with the view.
I'm lost in wonder, love and praise. That's absolutely beautiful,
I say. How long have you two been married? We're
going on 40 years of marriage. What a gift. Yes,
she has been a gift, you know. She kind of
holds the kite strings. Maybe we could close this conversation,
(19:19):
I say, with a poem from your book, Sounding the Seasons.
One of the things I love about your poetry is
the sense of a blessing that comes at the close
of the poem. Many of your poems resolve in a
kind of grace. I was hoping you would read Jesus
Weeps because I think it's fitting for our time. Which
is to say, I think it's fitting for any time.
I'd be happy to read it. He says, Jesus comes near,
(19:42):
and he beholds the city and looks on us with
tears in his eyes and wells of mercy, streams of
love and pity flow from the fountain whence all things arise.
He loved us into life, and longs to gather and
meet with his beloved face to face. How often has
(20:02):
he called? A careful mother and wept for our refusals
of his grace. Wept for a world that, weary with
its weeping benumbed, and stumbling, turns the other way fatigued.
Compassion is already sleeping, whilst her worst nightmares stalk the
light of day. But we might waken yet and face
(20:24):
those fears if we could see ourselves through Jesus's tears.
I guess I was playing with two ideas in that poem,
he says. I wanted to challenge the idea that people
are blinded by tears. Since tears are a sign of love,
maybe they actually clarify our vision. To know that you've
(20:44):
been wept for is to know that you've been loved.
The other thing I was trying to wake us up
from was compassion fatigue. Is that a phrase used in America? Yes.
I say it's a very real concern, especially for teachers
and those in the medical field. Yes. Well, I played
with the idea that if compassion, already so weary, falls asleep,
(21:05):
then we're in a really bad spot, totally incapable of
response while our worst nightmares parade around. So what is
the solution to the problem of compassion fatigue? It seems
to me that if we weep with Jesus, if we
see ourselves in the world through his tears, then we
start seeing people through the compassion of Jesus. We might awaken. Yet,
(21:26):
you know, Jesus renews in us the capacity for compassion,
but also the capacity for tears. I think about the
great phrase in Virgil's Aeneid, Lacrimae rerum, the very tears
of things. The fallen world itself is worthy of tears
and analogy. I mean, if the answer to that cliche
(21:47):
question what would Jesus do is to cry, then you
should cry. And I add, as you so often remind us,
if Jesus were to laugh in a given moment, then
we should laugh as well. Yes, he says indeed. Here's
one of my favorite poems by Malcolm Guite Maundy Thursday lockdown,
(22:13):
Maundy Thursday all the world is still the plane's weight,
grounded by departure gates. The street is empty and the
shopping mall deserted, padlocked. The playground waits against the day
that children play again. Till then, our sad refrain is
just refrain. Maundy Thursday all the world is still and
(22:36):
Jesus is at supper with his friends. No longer in
the upper room, that hall in Zion where the story
starts and ends. For he descended from it long ago
to find his new friends in the here and now,
Maundy Thursday. All the world is still, and Jesus is
at supper with his friends. Our doors are locked for fear,
(22:59):
but he has skill in breaking barriers with ease. He
bends our prison bars, slips past the sentry post, and
joins us as the guest who is our host. Maundy Thursday.
All the world is still but in cramped quarters on
the 15th floor, in lonely towers made of glass and steel,
(23:19):
and in the fierce favelas of the poor, touching with
wounded hands the wounds he tends. Christ Jesus is at
supper with his friends.
S1 (23:32):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant. 2024 music by Chris Badeker.
The following is brought to you in partnership with Oasis Audio.
Welcome to Rabbit Room Press Presents, a podcast series of
great audiobooks, one chapter at a time.
S2 (00:16):
An axe for the Frozen Sea by Ben Pallant. Read
for you by the author. Chapter four Malcolm Guite. Many
years ago, one of my daughters went through a difficult season.
Walking with a child through the valley of the shadow
of death is a daunting journey that accentuates one's dependence
(00:37):
on God. At least it did so for me. Feeling
my limitations rather acutely, one day I decided to take
her on an overnight camping trip to the Saint Joe River.
I had two modest goals for the trip first, to
enjoy the mountain air and what Wendell Berry called the
peace of wild things. And second, to memorize Malcolm Gates
(01:00):
singing bowl. That's why, to begin our conversation, I thank
Malcolm for the poem and for giving me the words
I needed when I needed them. Words that could minister
to my daughter when my own words had run their course.
As he lights his pipe, he says, well, you know,
at the time I wrote that poem, I thought I
was writing a poem about how to write poetry, but
(01:22):
it turned out to be a poem about prayer and
living a life open to God. It was a bit
of a revelation to me, because I was feeling a
bit of a tug between my vocation as a priest
and my vocation as a poet. I was wondering if
I was sort of robbing Peter to pay Paul. One
of the effects of that poem was to help me
realize that, no, these are really two sides of the
(01:43):
same coin. What is your most popular poem, I ask?
Well let's see. It's probably my poetry is jamming your machine.
Of course, if I'm measuring strictly on grateful correspondence, I
get quite a bit of responses to a couple of
poems I wrote about darkness, difficulty, and depression. The first
(02:03):
one is the third fall and the other is the
Christian plummet. People from all walks of life share how
the poem touched them in particular ways that surprise me.
You know, one of the things about poetry is that
it's always about more than you think it's about. That's
almost my definition of a poem. I usually have some
idea of what I'm going to write about, but if
I write it down and it turns out to be
(02:23):
exactly what I set out to write about and nothing more,
then I don't think it's a poem. It's a note
to self. It has to quicken itself in the making
and push back against me a little and take some
sort of living form. It has to resist me a
bit in order for me to know that it's a poem.
You bring up depression, I say. Many of your poems
(02:43):
are helpful companions during dark times. When your poems touch
on difficulty, they do so as one who has experienced it.
And yet you're such a jolly man. How is that? Ah, yes. Well,
a couple of things about that. He laughs. As you know,
these are things we all share in common. One of
the things I consciously resist and rebel against is the
(03:04):
idea of poetry as just personal self-expression. The idea of
the lonely romantic genius in his weird, peculiar place, whom
everyone has to make allowances for, leads to this kind
of confessional poetry, which gets worse and worse and more
and more obscure. What does it amount to? Another strange
adventure in the little world of me. I don't buy
(03:25):
that at all. No, I want to be the bard
of a tribe, to tell the great collective stories that
bind us together. But of course, I tell them as
they've happened to me. Whatever is personal of mine is
most emphatically not in the poems as purely self-expression. Confessional
poetry becomes very tedious after a while. The poetry I
(03:46):
want to write, and that I enjoy reading, articulates the
joys and sorrows of life. As to the jollity, I
suppose I would say that anyone with lighter emotions who
hasn't experienced any pain is in danger of sentimentality. I
trust them about as much as I trust a trusted
Thomas Kincaid painting. You know, there's a term J.R.R. Tolkien
coined eucatastrophe you means good. So it's a good catastrophe.
(04:10):
But a catastrophe still means catastrophe in some sense. The
eucatastrophe at the end of the Lord of the rings
is trustworthy, because we've been with these characters to the
very edge of the crack of doom. That's why I
trust the resurrection, because the church doesn't backpedal on Good Friday.
While we're on the topic, I say, who called depression
(04:32):
the black dog? Was that Winston Churchill? Churchill used it,
but it comes from Samuel Johnson, who was, as you know,
a great Christian. But he had terrible periods of darkness.
He was doggedly latched on to Christianity, though it's a
very helpful metaphor, because a dog is both a domestic
thing as well as a potentially dangerous thing. In my
(04:52):
own life there have been times when depression was quite severe.
I'm glad I'm not alone, I say. Here's something interesting,
he says. I've always been an enthusiast for sailing. Someone
once asked me what floats my boat? And I said, well,
it's quite literally floating on a boat. I remember ardently
reading a book about cruising around on small boats and
(05:13):
the chapter on seasickness. It had pages upon pages of
apparently useful information, at the end of which it said
most of this would probably not work, but the last
words of the chapter were, in the end, the best
you can do is keep your face into the wind
and endeavour to remember that it can't last forever. I
thought that was brilliant, and I've applied it to the
black dog of depression. I particularly like the phrase endeavour
(05:37):
to remember because obviously when you are actually feeling seasick,
you can't imagine anything except nausea. It's a totalizing experience,
but you can endeavour to remember. You can try to
want to remember. One of the best cures for my
dark seasons is turning my face to the wind. Endeavouring
to hope means, I suppose, learning to hope. I say, yes, Well,
(06:01):
you know, hope is a kind of gift of the spirit.
Hope has one foot in heaven already. It's about the
inbreaking of heaven into time. It's not about believing that
nothing bad is ever going to happen. Your comments have
brought something to mind. This question might seem out of
the blue, but I promise I'm going somewhere with it.
Is Malcolm actually your first name? Ah, I see where
(06:25):
you're going with this. No, Malcolm is actually my middle name.
My first name is Ayodeji. It's a tribal name from Nigeria.
Eyo means joy and Deji means again. So a double joy.
I was born in Nigeria in 1957, but I was
very nearly not born due to some complications. At my birth,
(06:47):
things came to a kind of crisis. I was getting
strangled by my umbilical cord. It was nearly the end
for my mother and for me before I had even
seen the light of day. Anyway, there was only one
person who was able to make the necessary interventions, and
he was just leaving the compound in his car. A
nurse ran out and stopped him, and he performed a
fairly swift caesarean section, which saved both my mother and me.
(07:10):
My mother, being obviously very grateful to the nurse, asked
her what to name me, and the nurse said Ayodeji,
because it is a traditional name for a second child,
which I am, and because it was very nearly a
sorrow rather than joy. But joy was granted, which makes
it a double joy. That's an incredible story, I say.
(07:33):
Yes it is, he replies. G.K. Chesterton said that there
are people who will point to a man who had
great promise in life, but who was a failure in
the end, and say, that man is a great might
have been. Chesterton resists this phrase. He believes everything hangs
by so thin a thread that every one of us
is a great might not have been. The fact that
(07:55):
we exist at all is a cause for great rejoicing.
It's so helpful to think of one's life as an
unexpected bonus rather than a deserved certainty. That perspective would
change how we enter each day. I say. I'm amazed
that you have so thoroughly lived into your name's meaning.
That probably happens to people a lot more than we realize.
Do you agree? Oh, yes. Absolutely. You know, my middle name, Malcolm,
(08:18):
has become more and more significant to me. It was
chosen by my grandmother. The first meaning of my name
is I'm a disciple of Saint Columba who evangelized Scotland,
which in terms of Celtic Christianity, suits me just fine.
But its deeper meaning is that I'm a servant of
the spirit. That leaves us with my last name, which
is rather inexplicable. My father's family came over, probably from
(08:41):
the south of France, with the Huguenots after the Edict
of Nantes. I can find no meaning for it, except
for a Provencal dialect word that means madman. So I
think that fits fairly well. We're both laughing so hard
that it takes me a moment to collect my wits. Finally,
I say, talking to you reminds me of a quote
from the book One Long River of song. Brian Doyle writes.
(09:05):
I walked out so full of hope. I'm sure I
spilled some at the door. That's you in a nutshell.
Your mother couldn't have known that that was the little
boy she was bringing into the world. But it seems
to me that it's what you continually do. Well, everything
comes and goes, he says. But I am essentially hopeful
(09:26):
because of the great saying of Jesus from the cross.
It is finished. A corner has been turned. Darkness has
been defeated because people like a rehearsed testimony. They ask
if I know on what day I was saved and
I say, yes, it was Good Friday, same as you. Amen, brother,
I reply. I think we're entitled to joy. A real joy,
(09:49):
not a naive optimism, he says. Vaclav Havel writes somewhere
that hope is not the certainty that things will turn
out well, but that they will make sense, that they
will mean something. Okay, I say, I'm going to yank
the steering wheel and veer off of this road and
onto a new one. Yes, fine, fine, he says. What's
(10:11):
your take on the fact that the reincarnation of Bilbo Baggins,
if I may call you, that, has nearly 100,000 followers
on YouTube. He laughs and ruffles his hair. I'm just
being me. There's nothing more than that. It began more
or less during the first couple of days of the
Covid 19 lockdown in 2020. I was still engaged at
(10:33):
Cambridge as chaplain as well as teacher, but I was
stuck in my little village and my students were stuck
wherever they were and none of us could meet. My
entire mode of being chaplain was about presence and about
being glad to welcome people. Insofar as I had a
spiritual discipline, it was a ministry of presence. My golden rule,
the thing I prayed to be given was to be
glad to be interrupted. Whatever I was doing when someone
(10:56):
knocked on my door, even if I was right in
the middle of a particularly delicate sentence. I would remind
myself that this is a good thing. And I would say, come.
Come in. That's how I start every video. So that
little video thing was my way of pretending that we
could still meet, you see? It was meant only for
my students and a handful of friends. I suppose I've
(11:17):
become a bit of what they call an influencer, but
I would have been voted boy most unlikely to become one.
He chuckles. I find it amusing that people who take
YouTube seriously, who work really hard at it and have
fewer followers, are writing to ask about my strategies about
all this technical stuff lighting schedule, staging, and all the rest.
(11:37):
God help us all people, he shouts. There is no strategy.
So why the following, I ask? I think social media
and YouTube have become such contested, nauseating and poisonous places
that what I offer is something. A very large number
of people need this quiet little haven, and a feeling
(11:57):
that some sense of truth, beauty and simplicity has been
restored to them. Honestly, my hope is that my videos
will help people stop watching YouTube altogether and go read
a book. That's the whole game of it. What we're
happily accepting is the illusion that there are no screens
involved in this encounter at all, and you're just delighting
in what you enjoy, namely good books, I say. It's
(12:20):
hospitality and boyish enthusiasm. Yes, exactly. When I spoke to
the poet James Matthew Wilson, I say he described a
crisis he faced during his post-grad work. The very thing
that drew him to study the humanities, the love of
good writing and of good stories, was replaced by deconstruction
and political theory. It's really true, he says. I'm glad
(12:42):
I got out of academia before all of that really
took off. It won't last. I mean, theory tends to
eat itself in the end. All of the structuralism, post-structuralism,
and critical deconstruction has already begun to deconstruct itself. People
have started returning to reading with the grain of the
text rather than against the grain. That's what you're doing
on your YouTube channel, I say. And it's refreshing. I
(13:06):
hope so, he replies. Samuel Taylor Coleridge has been a
major influence on your life. When did you first encounter
his work? Coleridge is huge. You know, if you read
at all widely, you're bound to find writers who feel
like kindred spirits with whom you resonate. Coleridge is very
much that for me. I empathize with him enormously. I
(13:27):
met his poetry first because my mother had a huge
fund of poetry memorized by heart, from which she would
pull as the occasion arose. When I was a kid,
we spent a great deal of time traveling by sea,
you know, returning to England from Nigeria every year to
quite a long time back in those days. It was
always quite a moment when the ship would leave the harbor,
and we would watch the furrow in the wake of
(13:48):
the boat, and she would quote the rhyme of the
Ancient Mariner saying, we were the first to burst into
that silent sea. And of course, I would want to
hear more. So I knew that poem quite well. I
started diving into his work more seriously later in high school,
reading his prose and so on. I found him very interesting.
He gazes out the window for a moment, takes a
(14:10):
puff from his pipe, and then continues. When I began
to make the intellectual and imaginative journey back into Christianity,
having rejected it in my teens, I had this memory
that Coleridge had quite a bit to say about this.
So I went back to him and found that he
had written this wonderful, mature, and philosophically deeply grounded return
(14:30):
to a fully Trinitarian faith. I looked again at the
textbooks we've been given about Coleridge, and there's nothing at
all about that. They just portray him as this romantic ruin,
as it were. There's a lot about opium, but almost
nothing about God. Secular historians tend to airbrush out what
they're not interested in, to see religious faith as a
kind of background noise to action. So I resolved that
(14:52):
one day I would write an account of Coleridge that
restored the full picture. That book became Mariner, in which
I set out to make a case for his relevance
and our need for him in the cultural crisis we
enter today. I found in him a companion, especially when
it came to his view of the imagination as a
truth bearing faculty. Coleridge has been more than a companion.
(15:14):
I say he has strengthened your foundations. Yes. And now
I find him at my side again. One of my
childhood dreams was to write an Arthurian, as it's called.
I was searching for the poetic form and found it
in the ballad form which Coleridge remade, making it capable
of carrying great weight. He kept all of the ballad forms, lucidity,
(15:36):
and readability, but he also allowed it to become a
vehicle for something beautiful and luminous and permanent. I'm not
saying that I'm going to achieve that, you know, but
at least I can try. How ambitious is this project?
If I live long enough to complete the whole thing,
it'll be four volumes, each volume consisting of three books,
so that it becomes a proper 12 book epic. So
(15:59):
something modest in length, I say, as in the tradition
of Virgil and John Milton. He laughs. The whole idea
is a little outrageous, I know. It's not, as Jonathan
Swift would say, a modest proposal. But, you know, I'm
working on it. I love it, I say. You've given
yourself a project that gets you up in the morning
(16:20):
with an eager step. Absolutely. The imagination is like any
other faculty. You have to exercise it. I'm daunted by
the project, of course, but I'm also excited by it.
I don't know which day will be my last, but
I can only do the work in front of me.
I'm in the hands of God. As someone says, in Narnia,
we're always between the lion's paws, you know? In the end,
(16:41):
I just hope that whatever God allows me to complete
will be of some good in the world. I want
to write something that satisfies every age. George MacDonald said
he wanted to write fairy tales for everyone who loves them,
from 5 to 55. I don't want to simply preach
to the choir, as it were. What I really want
is for some future C.S. Lewis, a brooding atheist teenager,
(17:03):
to pick up my Arthur poems and love them just
for themselves, and then for him to find that they
have given him something with which or through which to
discover the truth in Christianity. I want my poems to
have snuck past the watchful dragons of our secularism and
the immanent frame, and actually open something up inside him.
That's a wonderfully rare vision for one's work, I say.
(17:26):
It's so wonderful to imagine that you made me forget
my next question. He ruffles his hair and grins. I apologize.
Thinking about C.S. Lewis as a brooding teenager, I say
reminds me that he said his imagination was baptized. An
interesting way of looking at it. McDonald's work did the
heavy lifting, of course, but his walks with Tolkien helped
(17:49):
as well. Indeed, he says, I continue. We bought some
acreage a few years ago that we hope to build
a house on someday. The first thing we did was
cut a footpath, which we called Addison's Walk, based on
the path that Lewis and Tolkien walked in Oxford. People
often ask, Who is Addison? So we get to tell
them the story. Very good, he says. And of course,
(18:11):
they ought to ask, who is Addison? Joseph Addison was
an English poet and essayist who wrote a brilliant essay
in the early 1700s on gratitude and the need to
restore the sense of gratitude. In the course of that essay,
he presents a poem that has become a great hymn
of the Christian church. It begins like this. When all
thy mercies, O my God, my rising soul. Surveys transported
(18:33):
with the view I am lost in wonder, love and praise.
Now that wouldn't be a bad verse to put up
on your Addison's walk. Not bad at all. That's a
great idea, I say. It's a fitting verse for your
work too. Well, you know, Maggie and I chose that
as the opening hymn to our wedding, and I timed
it so that when I turned to see the bride,
(18:55):
I was singing with everyone else, transported with the view.
I'm lost in wonder, love and praise. That's absolutely beautiful,
I say. How long have you two been married? We're
going on 40 years of marriage. What a gift. Yes,
she has been a gift, you know. She kind of
holds the kite strings. Maybe we could close this conversation,
(19:19):
I say, with a poem from your book, Sounding the Seasons.
One of the things I love about your poetry is
the sense of a blessing that comes at the close
of the poem. Many of your poems resolve in a
kind of grace. I was hoping you would read Jesus
Weeps because I think it's fitting for our time. Which
is to say, I think it's fitting for any time.
I'd be happy to read it. He says, Jesus comes near,
(19:42):
and he beholds the city and looks on us with
tears in his eyes and wells of mercy, streams of
love and pity flow from the fountain whence all things arise.
He loved us into life, and longs to gather and
meet with his beloved face to face. How often has
(20:02):
he called? A careful mother and wept for our refusals
of his grace. Wept for a world that, weary with
its weeping benumbed, and stumbling, turns the other way fatigued.
Compassion is already sleeping, whilst her worst nightmares stalk the
light of day. But we might waken yet and face
(20:24):
those fears if we could see ourselves through Jesus's tears.
I guess I was playing with two ideas in that poem,
he says. I wanted to challenge the idea that people
are blinded by tears. Since tears are a sign of love,
maybe they actually clarify our vision. To know that you've
(20:44):
been wept for is to know that you've been loved.
The other thing I was trying to wake us up
from was compassion fatigue. Is that a phrase used in America? Yes.
I say it's a very real concern, especially for teachers
and those in the medical field. Yes. Well, I played
with the idea that if compassion, already so weary, falls asleep,
(21:05):
then we're in a really bad spot, totally incapable of
response while our worst nightmares parade around. So what is
the solution to the problem of compassion fatigue? It seems
to me that if we weep with Jesus, if we
see ourselves in the world through his tears, then we
start seeing people through the compassion of Jesus. We might awaken. Yet,
(21:26):
you know, Jesus renews in us the capacity for compassion,
but also the capacity for tears. I think about the
great phrase in Virgil's Aeneid, Lacrimae rerum, the very tears
of things. The fallen world itself is worthy of tears
and analogy. I mean, if the answer to that cliche
(21:47):
question what would Jesus do is to cry, then you
should cry. And I add, as you so often remind us,
if Jesus were to laugh in a given moment, then
we should laugh as well. Yes, he says indeed. Here's
one of my favorite poems by Malcolm Guite Maundy Thursday lockdown,
(22:13):
Maundy Thursday all the world is still the plane's weight,
grounded by departure gates. The street is empty and the
shopping mall deserted, padlocked. The playground waits against the day
that children play again. Till then, our sad refrain is
just refrain. Maundy Thursday all the world is still and
(22:36):
Jesus is at supper with his friends. No longer in
the upper room, that hall in Zion where the story
starts and ends. For he descended from it long ago
to find his new friends in the here and now,
Maundy Thursday. All the world is still, and Jesus is
at supper with his friends. Our doors are locked for fear,
(22:59):
but he has skill in breaking barriers with ease. He
bends our prison bars, slips past the sentry post, and
joins us as the guest who is our host. Maundy Thursday.
All the world is still but in cramped quarters on
the 15th floor, in lonely towers made of glass and steel,
(23:19):
and in the fierce favelas of the poor, touching with
wounded hands the wounds he tends. Christ Jesus is at
supper with his friends.
S1 (23:32):
An axe for the Frozen Sea is published by Rabbit
Room Press. The audiobook is published by Oasis Audio. Copyright
by Ben Pallant. 2024 music by Chris Badeker.
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