ESC: English Studies in Canada

W. H. A U D E N ’ S H O R A E C A N O N I C A E D O U G LA S L O N E Y McMaster University The Church is consecrated in order that God’s praises may be sung within it. This is done in the seven canonical Hours, namely Matins, Prime, Terce, Sext, Nones, Vespers, and Compline. The Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine -Lhe horae canonicae are seven “hours” or periods of worship in each day, established by ancient tradition as the canonical or authorized times of com­ mon worship in the Christian church. The fathers of the early church pre­ scribed a liturgy of prayers and hymns, readings from the scriptures, and devotions, for each of the “hours,” and in time all of these elements of worship became established as the tradition of divine service in the canonical hours. Commentaries and apologies subsequently were written to celebrate the aptness of the ceremonial worship which had been so prescribed; these commentaries customarily cited scripture or patristic writings identifying those events which occasioned worship in each hour, and quoted biblical authority for the practice of such periodic worship on a daily basis. While a great many such commentaries and apologies were written in the church in and beyond the patristic age, perhaps the most popular, and of most influence in the Christian community at large, was the Golden Legend of Jacobus de Voragine, which presented the events of Christ’s passion and resurrection as the focus for meditation in the hours. Except in certain monastic communities, the observance of these seven hours of devotion gradually fell off, and by the sixteenth century the “hours” had for the most part been reduced again to morning and evening prayers, whose content changed daily according to the prescribed ceremonies of the liturgical calendar of saints’ days and festivals. Consequently, there has been no healthy and continuing tradition of literary meditation on the Canonical Hours as such since the Middle Ages, excepting the official re­ visions of the Psalter, Prayer Book, and Breviary, which generally have drawn from the recorded meditations of the early church fathers. English Studies in Canada, ix, 4, December 1983 From the time of the Renaissance in England, works like Donne’s Corona and Devotions, Herbert’s Temple, and Vaughan’s Silex Scintillans have established a tradition in English religious literature of very personal devo­ tional poetry, which for the most part has not looked to traditional church ceremony for a formal model. These poets and their followers have been more inclined to base their meditations upon private perceptions of the ordering of the Christian life, or upon the pattern of the earthly career of Christ and the lives of the apostles. For his devotional series, the Horae Canonicae, W. H. Auden returned to the ceremony of the Hours as de Voragine had known them: seven devo­ tions corresponding to seven principal events in the Passion of Christ, in which the most important consideration is the response of the hearers to the events being recalled in the meditations, and ultimately the response of the sinful to the Sinless. Auden’s choice was a deliberate turning away from the nearer tradition in English poetry of highly personal meditations on spiritual themes; he turned instead toward the older tradition of the “hours” of com­ mon worship, those times ceremonially set apart from the day for the purpose of corporate reflecdon upon the immolation of the Son of God for the sons of men. The seven poems which make up the Horae Canonicae describe one man’s progress through the day of the Crucifixion. The speaker is a poet, who by his witness brings to the remembrance of his readers the events of Christ’s death, the world’s attitude toward the figure of Christ and its general cul­ pability in His sacrifice, and that particular responsibility in the matter which is shared by poet and reader alike. The first three poems describe the individual as he functions in the secular world, and there is a recurring allusion to the biblical accounts of the founding of civilization by Adam and his line. Auden...