February 10 - Saint Wystan, Poet

Rev. Dr. George Bicknell loved boys.  He’d watch them from his voyeuristic perch in the Worcester Cathedral tower, lips chomping as if young flesh were a fresh invention and not a steady supply from the fathomless pit of lust.  Each Sunday he’d look forward not to the comforting snores of the congregation or the weekly conjugal tedium with his wife at Vespers, but the sight of the choirboys squirming in their confinement while he spewed rote lies about forgiveness into the apathetic air.  One day, he couldn’t take it any more--the hairless salt of sweet boyflesh would be on his tongue by nightfall or he’d end his meaningless failed forgettable life.

There was one … an image of uncooked innocence reading by a gravestone--as if God were complicit in his desperation and had, right now, just for him, created a lamb to be sacrificed on the searing altar of sex.  Laden with the cruel confidence of desire, armed with the subtle words of his profession, he led the boy to a hut by the Severn where he repeatedly stabbed him with passion’s steel tyranny.  Reason, compassion, balance--they were absent … only the dark stench of possession.

When the rampage was over and his blood had fallen to a human temperature, he saw that the boy was dead.  Realizing what he had done, he stumbled to the Cathedral and impaled himself on a cross.  Three days later, on February 21 1907, a passerby looked into the hut and found a newborn baby, whose name was Wystan Hugh Auden, whose words lead to the land of the dead.

Most modern poets have forgotten music.  Their palettes have one or two colors, their kits three or four tools.  They strut their mushy minds, consumed with ejaculating their names into great vats of ears--regardless of the quality of their verse or souls, or the souls of those at the bottom of their narcissistic fountain.  They think the world was created in 1922, that the infinite is a mathematical set and not the impossible wound that bleeds all human song.  Their social conscience is themselves, their moral vision their genitals, their idea of a poetic education an English degree, a few workshops and weekly inebriation at literary readings.  No one can sanely connect their ideas to their behavior.  They’ve lost the knowledge that the world is the poet’s only teacher and they would do better to be friends with prostitutes and gardeners than the literary dilettantes they think are grand.  Perception is analysis, wisdom consensus, progress publication.  Unimaginative, imperceptive, equating eros with coitus, locked in themselves like a garbage barge in a suburban swimming pool, they produce worn photocopies of lukewarm commonplaces in clunky adjective-infested stanzas of stale mediocrity, which they celebrate noisily as divine achievements in their undisciplined cloisters.

St. Wystan was not such a poet.  St. Wystan was not such a man.

He was turned to stone and fashioned into a grotesque on the western side of St. Stephen’s Cathedral on September 28 1973 and elevated by the Council of I to sainthood on April 27 1992.  We honor the saint today because this was the day at the age of 35 that he acknowledged his relationship with Chester Kallman was a failure, making the rest of his life a quiet squeal of pain.  Let us honor the saint today with our souls and flesh.