Malcolm Guite: A Wounded King, a Barren Land, and the Spear That Heals

**Lee C. Camp** (0:02)
I'm Lee C. Camp. This is No Small Endeavor, exploring what it means to live a good life.

**Malcolm Guite** (0:10)
There was a sense in which we were effectively selfish, self-replicating genes and unwinding enzymes which had accidentally acquired consciousness, but the consciousness added up to nothing. You better just whistle in the dark and make the best of it.

**Lee C. Camp** (0:22)
That's Malcolm Guite. Malcolm is an Anglican priest, poet, and life fellow of Girton College at Cambridge. Here he's talking about the education he received at an all-boys boarding school in the UK. The son of a British Methodist preacher and medieval historian, Malcolm had spent his early years outside of England and Nigeria, Rhodesia, and Canada where his mother recited poetry to him by heart and taught him the myths and legends of ancient Europe, including the stories of the Grail and Arthur and Camelot.
But when Malcolm turned 14, his father decided that his son was insufficiently formed in his British identity and sent him back to school in England. There he would live in a boarding house with about 60 or 70 other boys. The experience for young Malcolm was, well, I was very unprepared for the loneliness.

**Malcolm Guite** (1:12)
I was unprepared for some of the bullying that went on and other forms of oppression in this kind of school.
The full on application of, if you like, the secular narrative, which was that belief in Christianity belonged to the childhood of mankind. That was a view I began to hold and, of course, it gave you the immense advantage of being superior to everybody else in the past, including your parents.

**Lee C. Camp** (1:36)
A drift and a culture he could not recognize as his own, Malcolm withdrew, grew sullen, and tried his best to assimilate into the stiff upper lip ethos of British boarding school life. Until one day at 16, he visited the home of the great English poet John Keats on a sightseeing trip, and there for the first time he read the poem, Ode to a Nightingale.

**Malcolm Guite** (2:00)
I was very grumpy and moody and depressed when I was dragged there by an aunt of mine. You know, I was reading the poem on the wall because there's nothing better to do while she went around all the exhibits.
It starts very unpromisingly, you know, my heart aches and a drowsy numbness pains my sense as though of hemlock I had drunk or emptied some dull opiate to the drains one minute passed and lethally words had sunk so like dull egg sunk lethally, you know, I was there.

**Lee C. Camp** (2:33)
Keats had written the poem in a period of deep despair shortly after the death of his brother to tuberculosis.

**Malcolm Guite** (2:40)
Malcolm seemingly recognized something of his own depths of depression in that of Keats and then the poem suddenly lifts off into this transcendent beauty and he doesn't even tell you that he's heard a nightingale singing. It just says, Tis not through envy of thy happy lot, but being too happy in thine happiness, that thou, light-winged dryad of the trees, in some melodious plot of beach and green and shadows numberless, singest of summer in full-throated ease. And I'm reading this and be like, what was that?

**Lee C. Camp** (3:16)
Something began to awaken in Malcolm, something beyond boarding school and homesickness and the cynicism of his peers.

**Malcolm Guite** (3:24)
And then he's kind of calling for wine in the poem, you know, saying, oh, for a draft of vintage full of the warm south. I was just amazed. But of course, he goes further. And then he realizes this beauty is confronting his mortality. And yet there is something immortal going on here. Thou must not born for death, immortal bird. And then out of nowhere, suddenly appears the Biblical figure of Ruth.
And he imagines Ruth hearing a nightingale just like he is. The song follows her into the sad heart of Ruth. When sick for home, she stood in tears amidst the alien corn.
The poem was making me admit I was sick for home, but not just home that I knew. Towards the very end of the poem, he has this extraordinary image where he imagines the song of the bird, opening something, kind of at the back of the poem. There's a window. He says, the song hath charmed open magic casements, opening on perilous seas and fairy lands forlorn.
Then he comes back to himself, but he can still hear the bird is getting further away. The poem ends with this completely open question. It says, Fled is that music. Do I wake or sleep?