Poems for Bede

Today is the day when the Anglican Church remembers the great medieval historian Bede of Jarrow, or the Venerable Bede. I found myself inspired by my reading on him today to write two poems about him, one silly, one serious. Here, for good measure, are they both.

I.

The Venerable Bede, we know,

Was ignorant, but no more so

Than other men of his dim day;

He was too quick inclined to say

That miracles or other such

Had taken place (we moderns blush),

And yet we, on the other hand,

Can say about this tricky man,

His history of the English peoples

Is still today without its equals,

And he was a learned man.

(Thus we find it hard to stand

The ignorance of miracles

And wish he was more skeptical!)

He did some work to make wide known

What the church preferred to own.

He put the Gospel of Saint John

Into the Anglo-Saxon tongue,

And though we moderns don’t much care

For Gospels we have to declare

(Changing the song we usually sing)

That this was probably a good thing,

If we, in our modern way,

Still reserve the right to say

That God should be accessible

(Though miracles improbable).

And so though his veneration

Is not without reservation,

We feel that we can truly say,

Happy Bede of Jarrow Day!

II.

I will not have my pupils read what is untrue, nor labour on what is profitless after my death.

(Saint Bede the Venerable, in Christina Rossetti, Time Flies: A Reading Diary)

He told the stories of a land half-converted;

His tales brimmed with the rising dead,

Tongs for the taunting demons and conversions

Of many, and martyrdoms too.

Though careful, precise, he took as a given

That which our modern minds struggle to digest.

Was his mind clouded with delusion?

Did he not read his notes before he published them?

We now know much better; of that we are sure.

Yet he was faithful in the tales he passed on,

Whatever the contents. A reporter, he gave

Careful accounts while we buried the evidence.

Did bodies rise? Did demons haunt England?

Bede, in his calmness, considered what we

Would hurl to the furnace of empiricist cant.

But outside the presentist parlour of straw men

And medieval horror tales, Bede sits patiently,

Eyes open, history sitting on his lap.