To the French on April 16th.

Weep a tear, oh sorrowing soul, Pray a psalm upon the toll. Tomorrow in ashes we will see Brothers, sisters, in arms retrieve

The shattered panes, the broken vault, The blacken’d stone like burnt basalt, The columns charred, the littered aisle And gold and silver in defile.

The spire fell in great descent, The fire scorched our hearts’ content, The rafters roared in bloody licks, But our resolve shall not be mix.

Know the pain, feel the shock, But see the stone is more than rock; It bore the brunt, it held it’s form, It endured the frenzied firestorm.

Know sister-towers tolled the land, Brass rung from Lille to Landes; They shrill’d the bronze in tragedy And so felt the French in agony.

But pyre spent where death did not, What was lost can again be wrought. The eternal flame does replenish The never appeasing message.

Cherish the tears for, it is love, Soon will again perch the dove By where fell the Chimera of stone And the portent Strix, all alone.

It is not to be a defining plight Of this ancient City of Light. Weep still, and shed a tear, But always, in Good, persevere.

This poem I wrote the very night the forest burnt above the altar of Notre-Dame de Paris. I saw the footage, I gawped and decided to dwell on the disaster over a pint of bitter at my local pub. I packed my pens, my moleskin and backgammon, and went. So whilst the Parisians descended to watch the pyre of their church burning, I ordered a pint.

I was effected and I was shocked, for I thought I would have been more apathetic. But I wasn’t, I was so moved in grief that I even felt solidarity with the term solidarity – for some reason the term has always rubbed me up the wrong way, probably because I have never really understood what it meant.

I have affinity with the French, I have French blood, I have travelled to France every year from a young age, I have walked across the country and slept in her fields, and I have been living in France. And although I am very much an Englishman, there is one English quality that is lacking: a distain for the French.

The French have charmed me so much, I envy what they are, what they do and how they live. I feel deep satisfaction in their company, in learning their romantic tongue and tapping off their wines. Perhaps all this was reason enough to explain the grief I had for the French on the night of the fire of Notre-Dame.

However, my grief was more than that. As I drank my pint and played backgammon with my friend John, I cogitated on my sentiments for the coming poem. When an object of wonder and beauty is destroyed, is it not as if the fabric of the universe is torn? Does not part of the world seem suddenly distorted? Like harmony shaken to dissonance, I am reminded that change happens, that entropy flows and death is and inevitable to all things. That Notre-Dame is not as permanent as its stones evoke.

But as a dear friend said to me, this tragedy has not lost Notre-Dame, something has remained and something will be renewed. Perhaps like Victor Hugo, who inspired his countrymen with his novel to redress the dilapidation of the Cathedral from the weathering of the Revolution, we can renew our intent to our sacred buildings and remember again why they are precious to us. Our Lady is the phoenix that is reborn in the ashes of death.

I defer to Hugo in his preface, which tells of how he found in an obscure nook in a tower of the Cathedral an engraving of Greek, ANArKH, which means fate. Returning he found the inscription disappeared, scraped down or whitewashed. He writes that ”mutilations come to them from every quarter, from within as well as from without. The priest whitewashes them, the archdeacon scrapes them down; then the populace arrives and demolishes them.”

”Thus, with the exception of the fragile memory… there remains to-day nothing whatever of the mysterious word engraved within the gloomy tower… nothing of the destiny which it so sadly summed up. The man who wrote that word upon the wall disappeared from the midst of the generations of man… the word, in its turn, has been effaced from the wall of the church; the church itself will, perhaps, itself soon disappear from the face of the earth.

It is upon this word that this book is founded”

And as well declared, for it is on this unfortunate destruction of the forest, which for so many centuries has lofted above Paris, that we will found a renewed desire to care and continue remembering the precious buildings around us, moreover the objects and the institutions which have been by some miracle handed down to us not completely lost.

It is the exceptional fragile memory, obscured by time, impotent by lack of usage, which is the kernel of hope, a hope of continuation, that maybe all might not be lost in the end.

Ideas seem to transcend matter. Although the original spoken word of a prophet may be lost in the air, and the papyrus that recorded it broken down to dust, the word was translated invariably into different syntaxes and younger parchments, and done again and again. The idea remained somehow, maybe not absolutely pure to its original meaning, but it remained nonetheless. And as such so will Notre-Dame remain, even after another thousand years, even after another hundred fires, it will still remain.

And this is how my grief has come to pass, for in grief lies remembrance and in remembrance lies a reality, a reality of love, of caring.

We have all been reminded, even though we may not find the words to express it, why we love these buildings like Notre-Dame and why we want to preserve them. They are extensions of ourselves, our culture and our story.