The Poetry of Sister Mary Agnes

I’ll assume you don’t know Sister Mary Agnes. She was a contemplative nun of the Poor Clare monastery at Lynton in Devon during the 1970s, so no reason why you would. But she was also a poet. During her time at the monastery, Agnes put out three slim volumes: Daffodils in Ice (1972), No Ordinary Lover (1973) and A World of Stillnesses (1976). They were published on small, modest presses, Workshop (who published Andrew Motion’s debut collection the same year as Agnes’s) and Thornhill, and they were well-received. The television seemed to enjoy the novelty of Agnes being a nun, with both the BBC and Westward Television airing features. Meanwhile, the literary establishment welcomed her too, Cecil Day Lewis and John Betjeman both expressing admiration, as well as the children’s writer Elizabeth Goudge (said by JK Rowling to have been a direct influence on the Harry Potter series). Goudge wrote the foreword to Daffodils in Ice.

I came across Sister Mary Agnes through her correspondence with Jack Clemo, now held in the University of Exeter’s Special Collections. The letters suggest she left the monastery in 1976, around the time of her third and final collection, A World of Stillnesses, following a breakdown. She writes first from hospital, then from several different addresses around London and Oxfordshire.  A few years later, she tells Clemo that she is unable to return to the convent and she is considering writing her autobiography. Her feeling of contact with God, she says, remains as real and intimate as ever.

The poetry is almost all nocturnal or crepuscular – night-thoughts of intimacy, loss and abandonment – melancholia of the old thermoscopic sort – with beautiful symbolic imagery and a strong sense of mystical longing.  Although there are only three volumes to compare, the writing changes markedly. The sense of loneliness heightens, and the sense of identity seems to weaken. The poems themselves shed their titles more often than not, and it becomes uncertain where one ends and the next begins. It is difficult not to read these later poems in the context of Sister Mary Agnes’s breakdown.

The following three poems are from Daffodils in Ice. They will not give an adequate sense of the potent quietude and depth of each little volume, but perhaps they give enough to intrigue. 

Daffodils in Ice

Frost, moon, snow – silent fall, soul-musical.
Christ's hand, outstretched to bless,
sheds silver over all.
His scars, his ring – his marriage band
are daffodils
in ice.


All Night I have Lain Awake at Your Side

All night I have lain awake at your side,
                  God of night.
The moon's pale course
has been as the turning of a leaf,
or as the breath of a moth
over my lashes
before the first bird
burst like a bud the crystal empire
and dispersed the clarity of mystery.

For the taste of night
was delicious to my mouth
and the stars, as cones
sprinkled over the dark conifer of night's folds.
Now there remain
whispers of the hillside
murmuring through my ears,
as, blind,
I wander through the valley of day.


Song

I met you in the morning, when rays were long,
and sealed my patterns in mist;
we left at night,
our day being all compressed
as breath on glass, or as diamond of frost.
The sinking sun blessed its approaching sleep;
shadows of trees arose to dance,
and, whispering in my ear before I slept,
caused me to dream you had crept
to my side.
But when day came
I was alone and wept.