Derek Turner is the editor of the Brazen Head, and the author of the cultural history/memoir Edge of England: Landfall in Lincolnshire (2022). He has written for journals including the Spectator, Country Life and the Guardian, and his poetry has appeared in Quadrant.

Robert Grosseteste, Bishop of Lincoln between 1235 and 1253, was one of the great intellectuals of thirteenth century Europe, and is seen as one of the founders of modern science. He was a poet, preacher, translator of Aristotle, writer of instructional and theological works, and the first English intellectual to think seriously about the nature and physical properties of light. His writings on light were a major influence on Isaac Newton, and are still read today by physicists as well as scientific historians

The Bishop in winter

Back to the city with last of the light

With blackbirds in blackthorns heralding night –

Death under branches, dun season of dearth,

As cold beyond cold beads the East Country earth.     

---

The Bishop’s steed stumbles, his secret’ry starts,

As their party picks home from farthest-flung parts,

Hoping for hearth as sky’s black flag unfurls,

To swallow all sinners in unfeeling world.

---

Dark thickens, air thins, numbs fingers and feet,

As steely shoes clink along once-Roman street –

Miles yet to go under stars sharp as swords –

Moon chills still waters at bitter-bleak fords.

---

But the Bishop sees brilliants – bright spangling gems –

As Greeks once glowed great through his wide-angled lens.

(Ancients who asked of the nature of things

Set fire in the mind of the man with the ring.)

---

Stars prick the plain and shoot among planets,

Strewn shining diamonds on blanket of jet;

Broderies worked in black covering cloths,

Showing the road for benighted and lost.

---

Chains of bright Being, strung tapers of Truth,

Worked by great Hand in Universe youth;

Divine by design, O celestial flame,

O Artisan fine, all praise to Your name!

---

All rays can illumine if seen the right way –

Rushlights for reading, brave bright of broad day,

Flames on friends’ faces, oriflamme of bird’s bill,

Glass that spills sun in his church on the hill.

---

Tomorrow will stride across seas, swamps and fields,

Gilding all lands as the beaten black yields –

Sun of The Son, most golden of forms,

The world by the Word made suddenly warm.

---

But now the old Bishop, out here in the dark

Must ride through the small hours bearing his spark –

He shivers, considers new treatises great

And longs for Cathedral, his lamp in the waste.