Poems 13 and 14 of Pirates and Transcendence with Dan Cote Davis

Sarah de Nordwall blog, Uncategorized

It’s wonderful to have you here, as you wend your way to Oxford from Archatheos, (pronounced Ar KAY theos) from the realm of Deliverance to the grave of the Maker of Middle Earth himself, JRR Tolkien. Apparently you were the first Bard of the realm.  That’s got to be good summer camp work!

  So in the midst of this mythopoetic pilgrimage, I’m delighted that you’ve agreed to comment on the next two poems that fall to you… Numbers 13 and 14..

Now, I have to say that this is just a little poem, number 13 and I almost didn’t put it in: 

‘With Tom on the Island of Bol, in the cove below the Monastery’
I just wrote it because I  enjoyed being there in Croatia, but several people have really liked it and I’m wondering what you saw in it.


Well, you say it’s a little poem but it’s sometimes the little things that are the most important!


Let’s hear it first. on soundcloud.

‘There are layers of blue in the grey mist
Sea coloured sky coloured
Wave and deep down pebble coloured
All is one before me.

Pine trees, lightening lime and needle green soft
Tender, spiked at tip
Grace wind-bent trunks
Offering bundled foliage with a
Sheltering care
And underneath
Their shade
We watch the Pirate ship with empty masts
Balance slyly
Along the sharp fine line of the horizon.

One of the things that struck me was the great contrast between praise and those things that take us away from praise.

How exactly?

I see it in the contrast that you continually try and bring between those things that would slyly take us away from the sacramental mind, (the mind that sees things in their true context), such as tenderness or grace found in the sheltering world, but then there’s the slyness of the pirate ship, which is in its own shade, trying to take us away from that horizon of meaning that is grounded in the transcendent and the eternal.

Well I love that!

So this contrast between the transcendent scheme of the oneness that leads us to praise and that which would take us away from true ecstasy – movement outside of itself.

And it’s grounded in the monastic identity, the monks, offering the little prayer that seems meaningless or insignificant, but which is in fact fruitful. Because it is true praise of the creator and in this sense I was touched by the natural imagery rightly understood ..in the  context of praise.

So it did mean something that the monastery was there and that there was a cove?

Sure because a cove is the place of encounter with the sea.And the sea is a symbol of our praise – the incessant nature of the waves.

And the horizon is entering into God, so there is this kind of encounter with the mystery of the eternal.

So now, what about Our Lady of the Pirates?  That is a real Church on the island of Vis. Have a listen.

This contains the previous one but with more depth and also has a human narrative bound within.  The story of Our Lady of the Pirates.

“I saw the Oleander and the Tamarisk tree beside the shore.
You took me there at night,
Where the shutters of the old stone houses
Creaked with age beneath theyellowing moon.

Our Lady of the Pirates – what a tale you told
Of the old church
At the far point of the bay
As we came to the stone well…”

You see the tension between the Life of God and ours …we have pirates in the previous one but in this one they physically make an assault upon an image of Our Lady, but there is a deeper interpretation at play because this attack upon the Holy has been turned into something tremendous and beautiful, so God is writing a deeper narrative beyond the piracy of human history, right?

Well that’s very beautifully expressed.  Indeed, the spring bursts forth when the image is rescued from the sea and placed on the ground.
‘and there the well was built, and now the church’

Pirates steal within the created order, but God is able to reintegrate this theft into a greater and more glorious song. And we have a great joy here in the image of the redemption like a thread that is too bright to see.

The thread too bright for the eye – that is a a line quoted from George Mackay Brown in fact.

And this is one of the key ideas of the divinely planned narrative which is historically manifested in the story of Our Lady of the Pirates, which is in itself an allegory of redemption. Every human life will participate in the theft from God’s creation. Everyone is a thief in some way.


Like Bilbo Baggins?

Everyone is in some way a pirate, but God sends us Our Lady of the Pirates to help bring us all home.  As Tolkien says, the shipwreck is continually happening, we just have to find companions for the shipwreck!

And that is a comforting thought in an adventurous kind of a way.  But in the poem, I’m not so sure that the pirates make it home – ‘All that was drawn up from the wrecked boat, was this image.’.  hopefully they do, in the end, perhaps as a result of the ‘polyphonic voices of the women dressed black’.

I’m also intrigued by what is gained by trying to make the ‘meaning of a poem’ explicit and what is lost.. Perhaps it’s the resonance in the heart that matters most.  So that anyone from any tradition can be nourished and awoken to the sound of their own soul.  But that’s probably a conversation for another post.

So thank you so much Dan and all the best on your pilgrimage to the Eagle and Child with Tyrrell and to the tomb of JRR himself, on the very anniversary of his death. I know that you are committed to the cause of his canonisation and have written a prayer for that intention?  Do put it in  the comments later!  I think some people would be keen to see it.

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If you’ve enjoyed these this,  you might enjoy these too –

 1) The Audio book, out now on Audible for only £5.59 or free if you join Audible.  The only reason it’s so cheap is that they price according to length, which isn’t too sensible for poetry. However it is the length of 3 albums – at 2 hours and 35 mins.  But it does mean that the book and audio together are very affordable, which was the point of making the audio, so that you could listen and then read if you wanted to remember or study one poem in particular.  You can also listen as you read;

2)  My Poetry and Prosecco night at the St Michael’s Festival on 4th October 2018 at 7.30pm for only £12.50 including the Prosecco!  Invite friends and let’s have a poetry party with plenty of discussions afterwards.  You can book here – Books will also be available to buy on the night. Places limited.
The Artistic Director of the Festival writes on the Eventbrite page –

An evening of seemlessly blended sparkle, profundity and joy, with performance poet and inspirational story-teller Sarah de Nordwall, back at the 2018 Festival by popular demand.
Sarah held us spellbound last year with her wisdom and wit, poetry and sheer delight at the universe, and StMaf18 is thrilled she has agreed to come back to charge our glasses for a second time…

7 Comments

  2. I just accidentally rediscovered a conversation Dan and I had online about Tolkien. It's worth posting, because I was a bit shocked that the exhibition in Oxford allegedly fails to mention that Tolkien was a catholic and that this was a huge inspiration in his life and work, informing the sense of enchanted imagination throughout… a luminous presence of a grace so heartwarming, that generations return to its warmth and healing touch. https://rcdow.org.uk/vocations/blog/bilbobagginsjourney/

  3. Oh no! I've discovered that the beautiful island of Komiza that the poem describes in Our Lady of the Pirates, is the one used in the new Mama Mia film. I somehow can't bear the thought of this window on wild heaven being overrun in the future by movie fans. Ah well, that's perhaps a bit selfish of me, as I was merely blessed to have discovered it because I asked a friend in the travel business to suggest a soulful and remote place for our Bard School Pilgrimmage and holiday for artists. I took him up on it because i discovered the church Our Lady of the Pirates in the blurb! Kind of happy to know that the beach we went to won Best Beach in Europe in 2016.. Out of that trip emerged many of the poems I treasure the most such as Swimming in the Falling Star cave. Our task was to allow its beauty to change us. Let's hope the influx of visitors don't change it's beauty.

    https://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/destinations/europe/croatia/articles/the-beautiful-croatian-island-that-is-starring-in-mamma-mia-two/

    The paradox of tourism! The joy of organic vinyards with wines as yellow as the moon. And we got to stay there really cheap as well piled into a small apartment by the sea. I wonder what it would cost now?

    Just one final thing.. we got to hear fishermen just relaxing on the shore, playing mandolins and lute type instruments singing together their own language which is a mixture of Italian and Croatian. Remarkable harmonies and a taste of art and life combined rather than commercialised. I wonder if it's going to remain like that.

  4. Sarah,

    you have such energised the souls of so many young people in your continued work to build a temple in time to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with the "Living Voice of the Bard."

    Here is the tale I spun at Arcathēos to explain the magnitude of the artistic charism of the Bardschool…

    …"Bard was sent to the land of the giants, armed only with the Shield of Patience and the Sword of Poetry. And the giants, so lofty were there own sight that they could not envision him, soon despised him and cast him to the pits. Slinging the dirt upon to bury him, they threw dust upon dust into the pit as they walked in endless journeys, in their lofty heights, but never moving beyond the smallest circles. But Bard place his Sword on His Shield, and as the dust was thrown… he arose slowly through the generations until he stood in the vision of the giants; in their heights. They were amazed to see Bard, so full of life and greening and energy! And there they froze! Astonished!

    So Bard stands above the giants, still greening, still vital, His Spirit resounding in the heights of the Looming Mountains.

    *adapted from a parable about a Donkey.
    ** in the spirit of Chesterton's poem:
    The Donkey
    BY G. K. CHESTERTON
    When fishes flew and forests walked
    And figs grew upon thorn,
    Some moment when the moon was blood
    Then surely I was born.

    With monstrous head and sickening cry
    And ears like errant wings,
    The devil’s walking parody
    On all four-footed things.

    The tattered outlaw of the earth,
    Of ancient crooked will;
    Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
    I keep my secret still.

    Fools! For I also had my hour;
    One far fierce hour and sweet:
    There was a shout about my ears,
    And palms before my feet.

  5. OH wow Dan. I loved reading this. And I can just picture you're telling of it at Archatheos in your wonderful cloak. We need a picture of that! Thank you for this encouragement for all artists as they struggle to find their stature and to grow up in their own eyes, in spite of all their weaknesses to a place and moment of being heard and being a part in the healing puzzle to which they have been called and for which they are equipped. Thank you! I was inspired!

  7. Sarah,

    you have such energised the souls of so many young people in your continued work to build a temple in time to worship the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob with the "Living Voice of the Bard."

    Here is the tale I spun at Arcathēos to explain the magnitude of the artistic charism of the Bardschool…

    …"Bard was sent to the land of the giants, armed only with the Shield of Patience and the Sword of Poetry. And the giants, so lofty were there own sight that they could not envision him, soon despised him and cast him to the pits. Slinging the dirt upon to bury him, they threw dust upon dust into the pit as they walked in endless journeys, in their lofty heights, but never moving beyond the smallest circles. But Bard place his Sword on His Shield, and as the dust was thrown… he arose slowly through the generations until he stood in the vision of the giants; in their heights. They were amazed to see Bard, so full of life and greening and energy! And there they froze! Astonished!

    So Bard stands above the giants, still greening, still vital, His Spirit resounding in the heights of the Looming Mountains.

    *adapted from a parable about a Donkey.
    ** in the spirit of Chesterton's poem:
    The Donkey
    BY G. K. CHESTERTON
    When fishes flew and forests walked
    And figs grew upon thorn,
    Some moment when the moon was blood
    Then surely I was born.

    With monstrous head and sickening cry
    And ears like errant wings,
    The devil’s walking parody
    On all four-footed things.

    The tattered outlaw of the earth,
    Of ancient crooked will;
    Starve, scourge, deride me: I am dumb,
    I keep my secret still.

    Fools! For I also had my hour;
    One far fierce hour and sweet:
    There was a shout about my ears,
    And palms before my feet.

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