As my mind clears from the haze of this weekend, which ended with a blast of an evensong and a choir party, there are two literary questions that I need answers to. Both of these arose at the party.
Firstly, I was asked about the second verse of the last hymn we sang on the radio yesterday:
For healing of the nations, for peace that will not end.
For love that makes us lovers, God grant us grace to mend.
Weave our varied gifts together: knit our lives as they are spun.
On your loom of life enrol us till the thread of life is run.
O great Weaver of our fabric, bind church and world in one.
Dye our texture with your radiance, light our colours with your sun.
My interlocutor asked me how I could have allowed those first two lines because the phrase God grant us grace to mend seems to suggest that there is something wrong with all the things that come before it. What is wrong with the love that makes us lovers, that needs to be mended?
Now, looking at this today, I find myself wondering whether the grace to mend refers to us, rather than the love of lovers. I’m wondering whether this is using the word mend in a similar way to the way Benedick says, “serve God, love me and mend” in Much ado about Nothing.
In a different conversation, I was asked whether I had read The History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. My answer was in the affirmative. Indeed, I said, it was all the fault of the woodworm.
So far so good, it was without doubt all the fault of the woodworm. However, I then went on to say assertively that part of the book was about the Achilli Lauro tragedy. My second interlocutor could not remember that bit at all and I found myself wondering whether:
a) I was making this up entirely
b) there is a section in the novel about the Achilli Lauro or
c) there is a section in the novel about a similar kind of raid on a cruise ship.
Come the dawning light of day, I cannot find the novel in question to check.
Any of you literary types (perhaps those who read HD or live in Scotland’s literary hub Dunoon or what have you) help me out with either of these questions?
Bet you all wish you went to parties like this. (And pass the paracetamol, whilst you are at it).
I have no recollection of the Achille Lauro in the book. Maybe the party was too well established by then? 🙂
I’m sure it comes early on in the book. Some kind of terror attack on Jewish passengers or a passenger on a cruise liner.
10 years or so since I read it.
Sorry Kelvin, I have the headache, but not the answer (and I wasn’t even at the party.)
But based on passed experience, is it not likely that the answer is (a)?
As for the hymn, ‘us’ is definitely the subject of ‘mend’. Mend as in ‘to reform’ or ‘to heal’, rather than ‘to sew back together’. The image I found jarring was being enrolled on a loom, but maybe that’s because my weaving vocabulary doesn’t go beyond warp and weft.
Oh, I’m quite prepared to believe that I am capable of making things up, but are you really suggesting that I would do so in mid flow at a party? Surely not! What could my motive possibly be?
Cloth leaves a loom on rollers doesn’t it?
Ah. Tricky poetry questions. Excellent.
If one looks at the phrase ‘God grant us grace to mend’ by itself, I would agree with Kimberly that it means us being mended, as in healed – i.e. ‘grant us grace to be mended’. However, it is somewhat complicated by the phrase before it and the pesky comma – if ‘God grant us grace to mend’ doesn’t have anything to do with ‘For love that makes us lovers’ – what is the first phrase doing there? ‘For xxx, yyy’ does imply that the ‘yyy’ has some kind of relationship with the ‘xxx’ otherwise it’s just a dependent clause with no where to go. I’m sure there’s a name for the specific grammatical mistake – but being a lowly literary critic and not a philologist, I’m not sure what it is. And in those terms I would say that ‘to mend’ has to be referring to the prepositional phrase that comes before it, otherwise it’s not a complete sentence.
And the first line isn’t a sentence either – ‘For aaa, for bbb.’ ‘For’ what, I ask you! You can’t just lump a bunch of prepositional phrases together and call it a sentence!
Besides, the whole verse is a mixed metaphor – how can we be woven and knit at the same time? I will grant that spinning could go with either knitting or weaving as being a pre-requiste to both, but one really can’t knit and weave the same thread – unless one undoes the knitting/weaving and re-uses the material to create something else, which sounds more like re-incarnation than the Christian spiritual life to me. Does this give new significance to the term, holy roller? Could it be that weaving is a practice conducive to being slain in the Spirit? Is being dyed in radiance an intimation of speaking in tongues?
As for the second question, I can shed no light, not having read it (although I truly believe that any English lit graduate worth his or her salt should be able to usefully contribute to a discussion without having read the text at hand, I will refrain from contributing something inane about the symbolism of cruise liner’s at this stage).
Now back to HD, whose grammar I wouldn’t dare attempt to untangle (unweave?) lest the dissertation never be finished! Yes, I know, that’s not a sentence either.
Excellent – responses from HD reader and two of the literary minds of Dunoon.
However, I fear that Elizabeth is reading this more as a grammarian than an interpreter of poetry. Is it just a bunch of mixed metaphors or a postmodern commentary on Victorian hymnody?
Does this potted biography of the author help or hinder our quest? Give reasons for your answer.
Can I make a pedantic little plea about apostrophe disease?
Of course you could have just had Shine Jesus Shine!
But I did like the tune.
Ruth, if only there was a “like” optoin here!!
The second story – entitled The Visitors is about the hijacking of a boat by Arabs. So you haven’t made it up although not sure it was actually supposed to be about the Achilli Lauro in particular.
Aha! Thank you Kirstin.
It was published just a couple of years after the Achilli Lauro, if I remember rightly, which is why I conflated the two in my mind. Although I did not remember it quite right, I’m glad that it was not entirely false memory syndrome.