Elegies without consolation

An elegy is a poetic lament for the dead. It is above all about loss and sorrow. This timely collection of elegies mourns the death of the Church of England. Its editor, Kevin J. Gardner of Baylor University, points out that only 2 percent of the British population currently attend weekly services. In poem after poem by poets such as Geoffrey Hill, Sir John Betjeman, C. Day-Lewis, Philip Larkin, Donald Davie, R. S. Thomas, and Ted Hughes, readers find deserted churches, abbey ruins, overgrown churchyards, lame words from the pulpit, empty vicarages, even 15 churches fallen into the sea—in short, as one poet writes, “resurrection encased in sleep.”

This book displays more than the death of church buildings; these elegies are largely about the death of the church and the resultant death of faith. Philip Larkin’s prescient poem, “Church Going,” is in­cluded in this collection and alluded to in several of the poems by other authors. In this poem the speaker, bicycling in the countryside, happens upon a church and steps inside, “once I am sure there’s nothing going on.” He finds “silence, / Brewed God knows how long.” He looks around, steps into the pulpit to say, “Here endeth,” and leaves, having found nothing “worth stopping for.”

Yet stop I did: in fact I often do,
And always end much at a loss like this,
Wondering what to look for; wondering, too,
When churches fall completely out of use
What we shall turn them into. . . .