"Tenebrae" by Theodore Ell [Introduced by Thomas Moody]

Theodore Ell’s first collection of poems Beginning in Sight won the 2022 Anne Elder Award, judged by Gig Ryan, Ella Jeffery and Marjan Mossammaparast. As the book’s title suggests, Ell’s poems are conceived through a gathering of visual details, their accumulation developing atmospheres and meanings that are often vague and indefinite. Part of the appeal of Ell’s poetry is the contrast between the precision of these details and the shadowy effects they create. In “Tenebrae”  the arrival of nighttime into a city apartment is presented with rigorous particularity: “Sky /  in the gaps of a broken comb - the medley / of towers, antennae.” The way the night seems to enter the apartment, to break the distinction between the inside and outside worlds, generates a vulnerability, ominous, that transforms solitude into isolation, reminiscent of some of Pierre Reverdy’s poems. Tenebrae is of course a Catholic service held during Holy Week in the days leading up to Easter, and a tension exists in the poem between “the cold communion” of maintaining this solitude by watching the night pass by from the windowsill and the desire to enter into the world: “Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves – / not dress circles”.

 

 

Tenebrae

 

Nightfall on the sill. Trinkets, hardened dust. Sky
in the gaps of a broken comb – the medley

of towers, antennae. The city: a queue
for dinner at a swish place, or a catwalk.

Thoughts of not doing an evening by halves –
not dress circles or crystal filled in series,

only forgetting the rule of doubt for hours,
leaving morning till morning, whole vacancies. 

This sill, monogrammed by wine rims. A living.
Rest from studying the pavement in silent lines,

from the cold communion, aid. Frail-voiced
nuns chant responses from behind gilt fences

through the workless days. They reach some in the street,
who look in, down a ribcage of coloured light,

high rafters, canopy – a keyhole vision
of dusk between towers, that toothed horizon,

a light that breaks our outline, hides our numbers.

 

Comments

[sarah gelder]

A beautiful poem elucidated beautifully. Thank you.

[MapQuest Route Planner]

This delicate tension between the inner and outer worlds, the holy and the ordinary, gives “Tenebrae” its emotional depth, as the speaker navigates the fragile boundaries of their isolation.