PIHW 7 Holy Saturday in Holy Week - I know what I believe

A badly played electric organ (probably a desperate attempt by a parent to amuse a stir crazy child) wafted into the bathroom and started me thinking.  It was the tune that was being played that interested me, “Greensleeves” – not a particularly remarkable tune, but it seemed slightly odd to hear something so associated with my home country here in Castelldefels.   

     Of course, it is just a well-known tune, and something that electric organs could have pre-programmed inside them, but the ‘arrangement’ if it could be called that that accompanied the inexpertly played melody was anything but traditional or indeed pleasant.   

     My mind drifted to Henry VIII, the golden prince who became the monster king and the belief that he wrote the tune.  I knew that many experts have called such an attribution into question, but Henry VIII was the first thing I thought of when I heard the tune.   

     The belief that Henry wrote the tune is one of those bits of knowledge that you want to be true, like the equestrian statues: if the horse has all four legs on the ground the rider died in his bed; one foot up he died of wounds; two feet in the air and he (it’s usually a he isn’t it?) died in battle.  Not true, but you want it to be true.  At least I do.

     Anyway I played around with the idea of “Greensleeves” and Henry having written it for Ann Boleyn when he was trying to bed her, and linked it in my mind with the statistics that we are daily assailed by.  I have seen more graphs of deaths and infection for individual countries and comparing countries than I think is healthy.  They all look frightening and if they don’t we assume they are lies!

     “Greensleeves”! may not have been written by Henry VIII, and not for Ann Boleyn, but Ann Boleyn lived and died, she was executed by a single stroke of an imported French executioner’s sword.  That was real and true.

     The poem uses ideas of presentation and truth, it responds to the games that we play with evidence, but it ends with the reality of mortality, “And blood.”!

 

 

I know what I believe

Choose your axes; choose your scale;

the colours, thickness of your lines,

and you can show just what you want

and always claim that it is fact.

Mere figures are too bare, too bald –

you need a narrative to link the scraps

and make them fit for taking in.

Machine-like and anaemic sound,

incongruous, but quite distinct,

from way beyond the pine trees’ gloom,

and through the bathroom window’s dust

to me, and unmistakably, “Greensleeves”

picked out, unsteady, note by note,

above insistent electronic bass;

bastardized indeed, but still

a quintessential Englishness,

exotically, beside the Med.

The randy, monstrous, Tudor king

eying Wilshire’s daughter Ann,

a maid of honour to his queen,

tried to woo her with this song

the story goes. 

Fake News!

The style and evidence suggest

a later, and another reign.

But, tradition has it so,

and that, for most, is quite enough

without the inconvenient truth

to spoil that which we have been told.

A fairy tale? 

Well, all of us like fairy tales.

Perhaps.

But, there was a straightened neck;

an executioner’s sharp sword,

and a beheading at the end.

And blood.