A Poem

Foreword by Dr Margaret Masson, Principal

of

St Chad’s College

Anne Stevenson was a distinguished American British poet who lived almost half her life in Durham. She was an honorary fellow of St Chad’s College.

This poem was written in response to her honorary Doctor of Letters, conferred by Bill Bryson in 2005. It begins at the Angel of the North, takes us back to imagine the builders of Durham Cathedral, and then further back still to its pillars of marble studded with snowflake fossils formed millennia before humans emerged. What is this human impulse to shape our world, to leave our mark?

An Even Shorter History of Nearly Everything (for Bill Bryson)

by Anne Stevenson (Honorary Doctor of Letters, Durham University, 2005)

Should you find yourself today on the road to Newcastle, You couldn’t miss, nailed to the horizon, The armed wings of the north’s super-angel Smelted from the embers of its past. Part phoenix, part satellite, part Lucifer, Faceless and sexless, it embodies vast Crowds of miniature working people Welded into an elevated whole, As if to cancel evolutionary nature And replace it with a single global soul.

The Angel electronically stores the dead, Communicates by radar, commands Through a computer in its head. You’ll notice that it has dispensed with hands, So never could have built this stone cathedral Whose shoulders, a short nine hundred years ago, Shoved aside the coals seams and still stands, A Rock of Ages in the evening glow, Shrugging off raids by pylon, and power cableour world the hands that raised it couldn’t know

Any more than they could know the local stones They shaped with mathematical exactness

For luminous Cuthbert and Bede’s stolen bones Were seas squeezed solid long before man’s genesis, Were relics, world upon world, beneath a crust They reckoned sixty centuries in the makingThin as a tissue dropped on Everest, But packed like New York with nearly everything That translates time into language for us. We need to name the images we trust.

How is it that, alone among breeding creatures, We feel compelled to create for ourselves, Again and again in the image of ourselves, A sacred exoskeleton, claiming for ourselves Powers to preserve our uniqueness? Not as we are, But as shells leave signs in the sand: Relics of Christian worship, Christian war, Reminders that ‘on our beginning is our end’, Heaps of DNA in cryptic rooms, The Nevilles hacked to pieces on their tombs,

News that this palace, theatre, fortress, prison Was achieved by some genius of the pointed arch Who read his Bible but couldn’t read the rocks Dragged from the Carboniferous to frill a church With storms of fossils, individual as snowflakes Three hundred million years adrift with the continents, Locked in the ooze of an equatorial ocean. What faith, what story, what fact is more remarkable Than this resurrection of the dead that represents The life in us, the strangeness of it all?

Anne Stevenson, Collected Poems Published by Bloodaxe Books, 2023

www.bloodaxebooks.com/ecs/product/collected-poems-1312

The Music The Ceremony

The choir comprises members from the University College Chapel Choir, St John’s Chapel Choir and the University Choral Society.

Accompanied on the organ by Daniel Cook, Cathedral Organist and Master of Choristers.

‘Antiphon’ from Five Mystical Songs, ‘Let All the World in Every Corner Sing’, composed by Vaughan Williams.

Text by George Herbert.

Conducted by John Forsythe MBE, Music Director of University Choral Society.

‘A New Song’ by alumnus Sir James Macmillan (Music, Graduate Society, 1981-87 and Honorary Doctor of Music 2007). Text from Psalm 96.

Conducted by Louise Reed, Conductor of St John’s Chapel Choir.

‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen (How Lovely are Thy Dwellings)’ by Johannes Brahms from ‘A German Requiem’. Text from Psalm 84

Conducted by Louise Reed, Conductor of St John’s Chapel Choir.

‘Gloria’ composed by Kenneth Downie.

Performed by The Reg Vardy Band, County Durham.

Conducted by Lewis Wilkinson (Music, Collingwood College, 2013-16), Manager of Performing Arts (interim).

This ceremony celebrates the installation of Dr Fiona Hill as the 13th Chancellor of Durham University.

Staff Procession enters, accompanied on the organ by Daniel Cook, Cathedral Organist and Master of Choristers.

Please stand for the entrance of the procession which comprises members of Senate and Council.

Ceremony opening; Professor Karen O’Brien, Vice-Chancellor and Warden.

Please sit

Welcome to the Cathedral; The Reverend Canon Michael Hampel, Acting Dean of Durham Cathedral.

Appointing the Chancellor; Joe Docherty, Chair of University Council.

Musical Interlude

• ‘Antiphon’ composed by Vaughan Williams

Oration of Dr Fiona Hill; Professor Karen O’Brien, Vice-Chancellor and Warden.

Installation; Dr Fiona Hill will be invited to take up her robes of office to affirm her oath as Chancellor.

Assisted by Sir Thomas Allen, former Chancellor, and Joe McGarry, President of Durham Students’ Union.

Musical interlude

• ‘A New Song’ by Sir James Macmillan

• ‘Wie lieblich sind deine Wohnungen (How Lovely are Thy Dwellings)’ by Johannes Brahms

Dr Fiona Hill is welcomed to the University by some of our students.

Address; Dr Fiona Hill, Chancellor

Musical interlude

• ‘Gloria’ composed by Kenneth Downie

Closing the Ceremony; Dr Fiona Hill, Chancellor Staff Procession exits, accompanied on the organ by Daniel Cook, Cathedral Organist and Master of Choristers.

Please stand