Inside the Spacious Tomb
The white glow from the wakened corpse
brightens the faces of the two
staring angels, one left one right,
and the back of the third, who lifts
lightly the jagged square stone slab
from the tomb’s round-arched opening.
The square never fitted the arch.
The reclining head is too small
and the legs too long. The whiteness
sees with the eyes of lightning things
that don’t fit. It is eager. Soon
it will ambush the blind dawn trees
but already it has cut short
eighteen centuries and startled
Mr Blake in South Molton Street.
Robin Fulton Macpherson
• From A Northern Habitat: Collected Poems 1960-2010, Marick Press, Michigan
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This week’s poem is by the distinguished Scottish poet and translator, Robin Fulton Macpherson. His Collected Poems is a major achievement, enriching the habitat of contemporary letters in our own archipelago and beyond.
New Testament narratives of the discovery of Christ’s empty tomb bustle with social activity. The details vary, but in the traditionally harmonised account, a group of mourners arrives at the burial ground with spices for Christ’s body. They fail to recognise the presence of the angels and are distraught to find the body has disappeared – stolen, they infer. Saint John adds a heart-stopping detail, when Mary Magdalene calls to a figure she believes to be the gardener and asks if he knows where the body could have been taken. He turns to her with a single word: “Mary.” She recognises his voice and exclaims, “Rabboni!”
William Blake is concerned not with external effects but their cause. His subject, in The Resurrection: the angel rolling away the stone from the sepulchre, is the central mystery of the resurrection narrative, a transformation the evangelists omit. He goes inside the sepulchre to try to capture the moment when God intervenes, and a corpse becomes a living man again.
The resultant painting, executed in about 1805 in watercolour and pen and ink, is the subject of Inside the Spacious Tomb, a poem that appears in the second half of Robin Fulton’s collection. This substantial section of more recent work, subtitled Poems 1988-2010, is remarkably cohesive, seamlessly moving between two of the writer’s most characteristic genres, ekphrastic poetry and nature poetry. His poems about music please the eye no less than those about landscape: his elegant versification makes landscapes and artworks sing.
Inside the Spacious Tomb has a particularly melodious beginning. The assonantal echoes in the opening lines (“white”, “wakened”, “brightness”, “faces”, “angels”) help recreate in audio Blake’s chiaroscuro effects, while the rhythm suggests the fluency of line in the painter’s depiction of light-catching cloth and flaring wings. There’s a little change of tempo, though, with “one left one right” – a brisk new march-step enhanced by the absence of commas. It reminds us of the orderliness of design in the painting, its symmetry and rigour. There are guards stationed outside the sepulchre in the gospel narrative. Blake’s angels form the interior guardianship.
The poem’s depiction is spare and lean: geometric relationships seem central to its sharper-angled vision. In the second stanza, a blunt technical appraisal finds misalliance and faulty proportion, but places these flaws at the heart of the epiphany. It isn’t the poet or viewer alone who notes the oddities, but the “whiteness” itself (“the white glow from the wakened corpse”), which “sees with the eyes of lightning” and “is eager”. The caesuras of the fifth line of the second stanza form little jolts of excitement, anticipating a dawn unlike any other, which will “ambush the blind trees”. That image registers the supernatural fierceness and suddenness of the miracle.
Another extraordinary event in the poem, not visual but temporal, is the abrupt compression of time (“eighteen centuries”) referred to in the tercet, after which a swift, slightly ironical transition to the mundane finds “Mr Blake” at home in London. Blake, as we know, was hardly a stranger to angelic visions and visitations. The poem suggests that this time the angel was in the artwork.
I suspect that word “startled” tells us that Blake, as imagined by the poet, found the shock of the resurrection he was inscribing in line and light inseparable from the shock of artistic fulfilment. Any such complexity is subtly, chastely rendered, in a poem that’s the distillation of a distillation, with a further mimetic refinement suggested by its physical presence in dark print on a white page. Inside the Spacious Tomb reminds us that creative artists, too, roll away stones, conjure lightning from darkness, and modestly assist at the resurrection of the dead.