THE SUNDAYS AFTER TRINITY

The Sundays after Trinity are a peculiarly English phenomenon. The Roman Catholic Church calls them the Sundays after Pentecost; other churches don't call them anything much. But in the Church of England they are a long, lazy period from the end of the Easter season to the beginning of Advent. Thinking of them makes me long for the churches, not of my childhood but of my early Anglican days, churches like the Dorset village church above, in the days before villages sported BMWs and when churches were allowed to be customary without being deserted. A world of Matins and Evensong, of Women's Institutes and summer cricket, in whites. So when I found the poem below in the recesses of my computer, I thought I would put it up here. The author was a businessman, a poet, and also the novelist who wrote Moonfleet. His father was a reclusive clergyman, of a type the Victorians seemed to breed, in the far reaches of the Dorset combes.

AFTER TRINITY        
John Meade Falkner

We have done with dogma and divinity,          
Easter and Whitsun past,      
The long, long Sundays after Trinity          
Are with us at last;      
The passionless Sundays after Trinity,          
Neither feast-day nor fast.        

Christmas comes with plenty,          
Lent spreads out its  pall,      
But these are five and twenty,          
The longest Sundays of all;      
The placid Sundays after Trinity,          
Wheat-harvest, fruit-harvest, Fall.      

 Spring with its burst is over,        
 Summer has had its day,      
The scented grasses and clover          
Are cut, and dried into hay;      
The singing-birds are silent,          
And the swallows flown away.        

Post pugnam pausa fiet;          
Lord, we have made our choice;      
In the stillness of autumn quiet,          
We have heard the still, small voice.      
We have sung Oh where shall Wisdom?          
Thick paper, folio, Boyce.        

Let it not all be sadness,          
Not omnia vanitas,      
Stir up a little gladness          
To lighten the Tibi cras;      
Send us that little summer,          
That comes with Martinmas.        

When still the cloudlet dapples          
The windless cobalt blue,      
And the scent of gathered apples          
Fills all the store-rooms through,      
The gossamer silvers the bramble,          
The lawns are gemmed with dew.        

An end of tombstone Latinity,          
Stir up sober mirth,      
Twenty-fifth after Trinity,        
Kneel with the listening earth,      
Behind the Advent trumpets          
They are singing Emmanuel’s birth.

photo: Lynda Franklin