Heaven-haven

Deep within me there hides a contemplative nun, who wants to do nothing in this world but observe its wondrous mysteries and pray for its wellbeing. It’s rather disturbing for a man to find this buried beneath his ingrained habit of action—to be always doing, whether or not it’s reasonable: action for the sake of it. I still have that within me—to play, to learn, to blunder, to survive, to reproduce; but too much more might be mere repetition, and now contemplation begins to seek its place in the sun.

Two of the poets I most revere have imagined themselves nuns. Tennyson’s St Agnes’ Eve has 36 lines, beginning:

Deep on the convent-roof the snows
Are sparkling to the moon
My breath to heaven like vapour goes:
May my soul follow soon!
The shadows of the convent-towers
Slant down the snowy sward
Still creeping with the creeping hours
That lead me to my Lord:
Make Thou my spirit pure and clear
As are the frosty skies
Or this first snowdrop of the year
That in my bosom lies.

Gerard Manley Hopkins’ early poem Heaven-Haven is short enough to reproduce in full:

A nun takes the veil
I have desired to go
Where springs not fail,
To fields where flies no sharp and sided hail
And a few lilies blow.

And I have asked to be
Where no storms come,
Where the green swell is in the havens dumb,
And out of the swing of the sea.

We went on a pilgrimage to Cowes yesterday. K’s had a week off work but we haven’t been able to get away for various reasons; till she had the idea of this day-trip. We drove to Southampton and left the car there, taking the ferry to East Cowes as foot-passengers, as it happens along with hundreds of visitors to some pop festival, each burdened with bedroll and backpack. For ourselves, free of schedule and agenda, we contented ourselves with merely hanging out in Cowes, the heaven-haven where I’d spent my early teens.

Let the pictures speak for themselves.