The Journal Wk. 28
The Mirror and the Light: The Image of the King
March 1537: day by day, at the Tower and at the Rolls House, the Lord Privy Seal unpicks the events of the year past. With witnesses, with interrogatories before him, with clerks and Mr. Wriothesley, he is laying bare, day by day and name by name, the machinery of revolt.
The Mirror and the Light, 450
The crows who sit upon the prison wall
Rise and take flight as you pass:
They cling to you and half-believe you
When you say, I never did, I swore –
They recall you to the separate selves you wrought
For holidays and daily use;
Having crowned yourself
Interpreter of souls, you dare not sleep
While they watch, bright-eyed, the ragged birds,
Desiring the meat from off your bones,
The hint of flesh beneath the mask.
Through the rain you see the crows
Standing crying on a tower –
Omens are well for those about to die;
There are none for you today.
Hans whistles up a boy, who scuffles through the sheets bearing the king’s head, till he finds a version the master is content to show. He, Cromwell, puts his thumb on the king’s forehead, as though smudging him with chrism. ‘Turn the head. Turn it full on. Make him look at us.’
‘God in heaven,’ Hans says, ‘that will be frightening. Turn body and all?’
Frowning face and massive shoulders. Bloated waist, padded cod. Legs like the pillars that hold the globe in place. Legs that could never stagger, feet never lose the path.
The Mirror and the Light, 477
The image of a king
Far from a changeful fleeting thing
Must shine out through all of time,
Reigning unmoved and sublime:
You looking on his face, adore it;
Half-forget the man who wore it –
And after death it shines the clearer,
Having shatteréd the mirror.
The Journal is a section where I post weekly poems responding to Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall trilogy. Here’s last week’s edition:
