Westminster Abbey "Is Not Just A Church"

Bay of Plenty Times, Volume LXXVII, Issue 14930, 18 March 1949, Page 5

Westminster Abbey "Is Not Just A Church"

Living- Museum—“Theatre Of Strange Scenes”

Poets, Statesmen And Heroes Sleep There

Louis MacNeice, the Irish poet is one of the 8.8.C.’s best feature writers, recently gave a talk in the series “Landmarks of Britain.” The landmark of which he spoke was the great church of Westminster

Abbey, dear to every Briton and additionally dear to Londoners as the church where the Kings and Queens of Britain arc crowned and

royal weddings take place and where Her Royal Highness Princess \ Elizabeth and the Duke cf Edinburgh were married a little more than a year ago. The Abbey is very much at the heart of London, close to the Houses of Parliament and Big Ben. "Those

who stand in the centre of it see to the East the tombs of many kings and to the West, fringed by red poppies, the grave of the Unknown Warrior. 'ln the south is Poet’s Corner where so many literary celebrities lie buried, and in the north, the white marble statesmen.

“Four tides inbet at your "feet,” said MacNeice, “and the echoes of history, like spindrift, float up a hundred feet and more past the top of the pointed arches to be trapped in the box of the lantern.” Westminister Abbey lost the roof of that lantern in the blitz but otherwise

it. like St. Paul’s, survived that fearful onslaught. “Sometimes now,” said MacNeice, “I look back to those days of the blitz, with an odd nostalgia as regards those two great churches. For at that time, though both of them were dark and empty and their beauties hidden under sandbags, they seemed —perhaps because they were empty—peculiarly intimate. “The Abbey remains for me an endlessly fascinating building—if building is the right word for something which is much more than stone. Westminster Abbey is very, very English. Westminster Abbey has a certain architectural unity—if wo don’t count Henry the Seventh’s Chapel—and it has a multiplicity of monuments.” He said that these monuments must be studied carefully and individually. “Walk down

one aisle slowly and look at eaoh monument in turn; don’t rush things;—take two or three years over it. “The'Abbey,” he continued, “is not just a church. It is a sort of museum but with more life to it than ordinary museums. If you pre-

fer you can call it frozen history—only bits of that historv may at any moment melt and you’ll find yourself bathed in some distant period. It is also, of course, a theatre where

many strange scenes have been played—not excluding scenes of murder. It w°s here that Wolsev was crowned v/ith his Cardinal’s hat and here that our Kings ere also clowned.” He referred to the lovely church as “this great, stone ocean of historv. This buildirw has lasted seven centuries but there were churches hero before it. Sanctuary For Men “Right back to the days when this piece of land was an island and the great red deer took refuge from the hunters in the thickets. It was always a sanctuary—not only for deer but for men. And so in a spiritual sense—it remains today. The Abbey inspired in the Seventeenth century a poem entitled ‘A Memento for Mortality’— ‘Mortality, behold and fear, What a change of flesh is here; Think how many royal bones

Sleep within this heap of stones . . . Here are sands (ignoble things) Dropt from the ruined sides of kings.’

Yes, quite true —hut for us the rovers of the medal is more important.

These soaring arches still serve as an antidote to material values an dthe whole building and its contents keep our own past alive, remind us that history is continuous and organic. A memento —one might iust os well say—for immortality. For Westminster Abbey after all is not a museum. It is still today something living.”