Once-candescent bones

Medieval saints are magnificently wild: often irascible, inflexible, severe, yet also inspiring in their relentless pursuit of transcendence. When I read 'The Self-Illuminated' by Don Paterson, I was sure the saint in the poem must be made up--but no, St Filian is a real early medieval saint, who was born in Ireland in the late seventh century and followed a call to missionary work and monasticism in Scotland. You can see pictures of his bell and his crozier on the National Museum of Scotland website. The story of his life can be found in the Aberdeen Breviary, a sixteenth century collection of lives of Scottish saints and liturgical texts that is one of the earliest books to have been printed in Scotland. You can read it on the National Library of Scotland website here or in a nineteenth-century facsimile here.

The phrase 'once-candescent bones' has lingered in my mind since I first read the poem a few weeks ago. What a lovely find--a new poem about the Middle Ages to add to my collection. Enjoy.

Fife Coastal Path, August 2018

The Self-Illuminated

i.m. Peter Porter

 

As your hand turns white upon the book

we'd biked across so you might see it done,

only you could--at a time like this--

put me in mind of that rum business

with St Fillan of Glen Dochart, whose brief entry

in the Breviarum Aberdonense

tells of the stone he spat when he was born,

and how, denied a candle in his cell,

he found his left arm light up from within

so he could read, till sleep turned out his skin.

His relics are five: the carved head of his crook;

his once-candescent bones; his flying bell;

and two long lost--one, perhaps his psalter,

the other a manuscript or a portable altar.

~ Don Paterson, 40 Sonnets (London, 2015)