Then, he lived at an awkward time (1858-1932): a Victorian until middle age, far too old to fight in the Great War. His prose has the vigour of Stevenson; his poetry has no modernist tricks. (Ballades still figure among his collected poems, on Burford and the Lincoln Wold.) To seek for autobiographical clues in the poetry, of course, is not an obligation. It is just that, since we know he was a man unlike others, there is some point in not taking, or leaving, the poetry quite at face value.
Sometimes he reminds us of Betjeman, and not only in his verse form and his English churchy vocabulary. A. N. Wilson points out in his introduction that the reference in ‘After Trinity’ would be impenetrable to present-day Anglican theological students: ‘We have sung, O where shall wisdom?/ Thick paper, folio, Boyce.’ True enough. I saw a three-volume 19th-century edition of William Boyce’s Cathedral Music on sale the other day in the SPCK shop by Westminster Abbey cloisters. They wanted £900 for it, so it must seldom nest on the melamine shelves of theological students.
Falkner’s subjects are historical and topographical — the seaside ruin of Bridlington Priory; a Roman villa at Chedworth; a forgotten photographer of Oxford. (Falkner had written Murray’s Guide to Oxfordshire and a history of the county too.) He was a mediaevalist and palaeographer, and by a strange provision in his will he left Pope Pius XI £500.
In ‘Cistercians’ (which he sent in 1920 to the forbidding St Loe Strachey, for long the editor of The Spectator, with a stamped envelope in case it was not wanted), Falkner pictures the cultivated landscape and the regular way of life these reformed Benedictine monks brought.
Compline with Qui cisternas,In one of his helpful notes, Kenneth Hillier, the secretary of the John Meade Falkner Society (which has printed this book well on good paper), suggests that ‘Qui cisternas’ is a play on the Cistercians’ place of origin, Citeaux, where the Romans had a reservoir. No doubt this is right, but I suspect there is also a reference as obvious to anyone who has sung the Latin hours of the Church as Boyce is obvious to English ecclesiologists. Cisterns are often refer-red to by ancient spiritual writers, in anagogical exegesis of the Old Testament (Jeremiah 2:13, for example), but I cannot find them being taken up in prayers at compline. Perhaps a reader could help, for the second edition.
Exsurge with the lark.
The novice Ad lucernas,
The old monk in the dark.
The old monk dreams and drowses,
The young monk sings the scale;
The grey Cistercian houses
Pack all the wool for sale.
That is a mere puzzle, but no one captivated by the larger enigmas of John Meade Falkner will want to be without his poems.
Christopher Howse has recently edited Prayers for This Life, published by Continuum at £16.99.
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