The Cathedral Builders - Poem by John Ormond

They climbed on sketchy ladders towards God,
with winch and pulley hoisted hewn rock into heaven,
inhabited the sky with hammers,
defied gravity,
deified stone,
took up God's house to meet him,
[D1] and came down to their suppers
and small beer,
every night slept, lay with their smelly wives,
quarrelled and cuffed the children,
lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy,
[D2] and every day took to the ladders again,
impeded the rights of way of another summer's swallows,[D3] 
grew greyer, shakier,
became less inclined to fix a neighbour's roof of a fine evening[D4] ,
saw naves sprout arches, clerestories soar,
cursed the loud fancy glaziers for their luck,
somehow[D5]  escaped the plague,
got rheumatism,
decided it was time to give it up,
to leave the spire to others,
stood in the crowd, well back from the vestments [D6] at the consecration,
[D7] envied the fat bishop his warm boots[D8] ,
cocked a squint eye aloft,
and said, 'I bloody did that.' [D9] 

Biography

John Ormond Thomas was born on 3 April 1923 in Britain. His early verse appeared under the name Ormond Thomas in Indications (1943). The advice of poet Vernon Watkins that he should not publish until he was 30 made him hyper-critical of his own work. Ormond 'returned' to poetry in the mid-1960s, having destroyed much of his early poetry. He started publishing poems in the periodical, Poetry Wales. His first major volume, Requiem and Celebration, was published in 1969. His reputation was enhanced in 1973 by the appearance of Definition of a Waterfall and his inclusion in Penguin Modern Poets. A volume of selected poems was published in 1987. He died in 1990.

Analysis 

“Cathedral Builders ” by John Ormond is a free verse of 26 lines. The entire poem is a single sentence broken up into lines – enjambment. The structure of the poem - being a single line – alludes to the subject of the poem – the continued construction of an enormous structure step by step. In the poem, the poetic persona observes a group of builders building a cathedral. The voice has access to all aspects of the builders’ lives, both public and private. In the first six lines the poet describes how the builders went on with their project during the daytime. In the process, Ormond makes them appear superhuman. They are described as invincible celestial beings. A close reading of this section should encourage the reader to see references to the Bible. The first line itself refers to account of the Tower of Babble in the Old Testament. The first men had built an enormous structure in order to get to heaven and God had struck it down and made men speak different languages in order to prevent them from being able to communicate so that they would not be able to make such an attempt again. The story of the Revolt of the Giants that appear in Greek mythology tells a similar story. The common denominator of all such stories is that God had crushed all attempts made by humans to get back to heaven. In the poem Ormond sees the builders’ attempt in a positive light as something that has the blessings of the Roman Catholic Church. However, based on our previous experiences the idea that it might not be looked upon favourably by God himself is hard to ignore. At the same time, the futility of building a house for God, the Creator, spending so much time and effort on the face of acute poverty among the builders themselves is hard to contest – in the end the old builder is without a pair of warm boots. Then a question worth finding an answer to would be whose interests are being served by building the massive structure. At this point it is hard to ignore the phallic nature of the building. In that sense some might call the enterprise an ego trip of the church and the state at the expense of the poor.

The third line makes a reference to the Biblical verse that the kingdom of Heaven belonging to the poor, a saying, according to many Marxist thinkers, used by the church to make the poor accept the unfair division of social resources. The same sentiment is criticized in Blake’s “Chimney Sweeper” where Tom Darcre is promised a better life after death if he were to accept his terrible lot as a sweeper without complaining. In the sixth line the builders are given superhuman   qualities – they “took up God’s house to meet him” – and at the same time presents God as a remote deist figure (a creator who had lost interest in us after creation) who is not interested in coming down to the level of man. In that sense man acts as a child who is desperately seeking the approval of a negligent parent.

Lines 7 to 11 are a bathetic[M1]  anticlimax compared to the previous lines. The superhuman builders of the daytime of the previous section are shown to be leading subhuman lives at night. Sex and alcohol being their only diversions, even those are unsatisfactory as they do not have enough money for a regular mug of beer and their wives are smelly. The family lives of the builders too are miserable. They fight with their wives and their children are unruly. On the ground, the builders lead unheroic lives: “lied, spat, sang, were happy, or unhappy.” With the passage of time even building the cathedral becomes routine without the magic associated with it at the beginning. The building itself had become something that obstructed nature: “impeded the rights of way of another summer's swallows”. An impediment is something that prevents the union of two people in Christian marriage.  The swallows which were going away to build their nests and start their families are therefore impeded by builders. In that sense they are obstructing God’s design. While the building continued to grow, the builders themselves “grew greyer, shakier.” It is as if the building is in a parasitic relation with the builders. The cathedral drains the youth and strength of the builders and leaves them mere shadows of their former daring selves so the only thing they could is curse liberally. Moreover, though they were constructing a house for God they become less helpful towards each other. It is interesting that the poet should say that the builders of God’s cathedral should “somehow” escape the plague.

Once they become too old to continue with the construction of the top most part of the cathedral they are forced to let others take over their life’s work. On the day of the consecration of the building the former builders who are now old and infirm are made to stand with the rest of the crowd, their work unacknowledged, out in the cold. Old and out of work, they are cold and hungry so that they envy “the fat bishop his warm boots.” The cathedral is a structure that is as close to perfection as it can be built by weak and flawed human beings who take pride in that divine touch in them that allows them to create things of beauty and grandeur. There is immense pride as well as a lot of anger in what the worker says to himself in the last line, especially through the use of the term “bloody”. His contribution might not be acknowledged in historical records; however, he himself stands tall in front of this monument to human creativity which makes him Godly in his eyes – Man is the measure of everything (Gorgias, a 5^th C Sophist). The poem is a celebration of the humanistic values promoted by the Renaissance thinkers and continued up to today. It celebrates man as something awe-inspiring in itself. The underlying question is who built/created whom?     

Themes

1. 1.       Human creativity
2. 2.       Exploitation of human labour

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 [M1]The profound and the sordid are side by side  

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 [D1]Imply a lofty struggle. There is something wrong with the entire project as implied by the amount of backbreaking labour required and the danger involved in building a house for God – sketchy, hoisted, hewn. The elephant in the room is whether God needed a house.

 [D2]An anticlimax after the heroic struggle implied by the first 6 lines – but this is the reality of life. 

 [D3]Many human activities are at variance with nature. Look at the problem human settlements encroaching on the elephant passes in SL

 [D4]Instead of becoming better, the endevour is making the situation of the workers worse both physically and socially/morally

 [D5]It was not God for whom they are building the house who kept them safe, but mere chance

 [D6]Once the work is complete the workers are no longer important and pushed out of the way. But then a worker who builds an operating theatre would not be asked to attend the first operation either.

 [D7]Read “Worker Reads History” by Berthold Brecht

 [D8]Clergy given to an epicurean lifestyle

 [D9]Ends in an upbeat note – no one can take away the pride of work well done. Human beings may be tiny and weak but have built marvelous things. There is a touch of hubris/ egoism here. It is “I” who did it, not “I did with the help of God” … Read Ozymandias by P B Shelley for a different perspective on egoism