... are to be sung tonight in Merton Chapel at 8.30, by the Schola Abelis.
Wozzat you say? Vespers of a III class feast displacing a Sunday First Vespers?
I like to think of it as II Vespers of the Titular of S Barnie's sung especially for former members of the Barnie congregation now in Full Communion. Or in memory of them ... sic transit gloria mundi ...
Because what a role Barnie's did play back in those golden days when Anglo-Catholicism seemed triumphant. Not that I ever strayed, myself, far from the Tridentine precision of Mags, unless to cross the Bosporus to Canterbury Road and the Zernovs. Barnie's glory was really of an earlier generation than the Sixties ...
" ... polychromatical lacing of bricks./ Good Lord, as the angelus floats down the road,/ Byzantine St Barnabas, be thine abode.// Where once the fritillaries hung in the grass/ A baldachin pillar is guarding the Mass./ ..."
The power of those anapaests ...
Amphibrachs, surely, Father?
ReplyDeleteI do like the rhyming of graass and maass.
ReplyDeleteI notice that St Barnabas has now swallowed up St Thomas
ReplyDeleteThe long 'a' on grass is standard Southern English: the long 'a' in 'Mass' was Received Pronunciation until very recently, and still is among older, upper- or upper-middle-class Catholics.
ReplyDeleteSt Barnabas is now one parish with St Thomas, its grandmother church. It was merged with its mother parish of St Paul some decades ago.
ReplyDelete