The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo
Still from Margaret Tait’s film, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland
St.Winifrede’s Well, in Flintshire, Wales, which may be the oldest continually visited pilgrimage site in Britain, is said to be where a spring arose when the young Winifrede, a chieftain’s daughter, was martyred and restored to life in the 7th century. A chapel was later built over the pool, which is believed to effect miraculous cures. The poet Gerard Manley Hopkins, who studied a few miles away in the 1870s, declared that the place ‘filled him with devotion’ and planned to write a ‘tragedy’ about it; although the work was never completed, he did compose several fragments, including a ‘maiden’s song’, the strange Leaden Echo, Golden Echo. The poem, typically sonorous and emotive, has two sections - a lament about how all material things, however lovely, are doomed to decay and death, and a more optimistic riposte, proclaiming that if beauty is given back to God, as was the case with Winifrede, it will become everlasting. The poem’s core theme, the resurrection of the body, is devoutly Christian, and in that light, it is a surprising subject for the complex and evocative short film of the same name by the Scottish film-maker and poet Margaret Tait, who gathered footage for it over a period of seven years, from 1948 to 1955.
Tait was not known for her religious sensibility. Gerda Stevenson, who worked with her on the feature film, Blue Black Permanent, described her vividly in an obituary in The Scotsman:
‘As I got to know Margaret I discovered her great warmth, and her many contradictions. She was passionate and cool, mistrusting and giving, explicit in her judgment, yet loved ambiguity. Her humour was wicked - she loathed sentimentality and pretension, both of which abound in the film industry. Her horizons were broad, but she was rooted in her native Orkney. She drove me one day, in the back of her rattling small van, down a winding Orkney seaside road, to the old kirk which was her work-base, the hub of Ancona Films (named after the street where she lodged while training as a film-maker at the Centro Sperimentale di Photografia in Rome). Every inch of floor was covered in leaning towers of dusty film-reel cans - her life's work. She spoke hardly a word, but generously gifted me with signed copies of her own fascinating books of prose and poetry which she published herself during the ‘fifties when she lived and worked in Edinburgh. After a few minutes, she ushered me out of the building, discomfited by this invasion, albeit at her own invitation, of her deeply personal space’.
Tait’s best-known works are her poetic documentaries, usually shot with a handheld 16mm Bolex, which have frequently been described as ‘film poems’. As one writer has put it, she seemed to be ‘breathing with the camera’, gazing at and considering the smaller everyday aspects of life, magnifying sensation and human feeling, juxtaposing the meditative with the momentary. Tait was aware of the ambivalence of time, always rooted in the past and disappearing into the future, and it may have been the poem’s sense of the evanescence of all things, thoughts and feelings, as well as the hope that their beauty will somehow survive, that drew her so strongly to Hopkins’ composition.
The film is an odd collage of clips of women’s faces, children, gravestones, worms, stained glass and choristers, dripping taps, gates being closed, flowers, and birds in the sky, all tied together and accompanied by Tait’s gentle recital of the poem. An abundant and unpolished collection of intimate moments, The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo is beautiful and touching; very much at odds with today’s taste, it is unexpectedly numinous.
For further exploration:
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo by Gerard Manley Hopkins: https://hopkinspoetry.com/poem/the-leaden-echo-and-the-golden-echo/
The Leaden Echo and the Golden Echo by Margaret Tait: https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/6217?search_term=leaden%20echo%20golden%20echo&search_join_type=AND&search_fuzzy=yes
Land Makar (another fine film by Margaret Tait): https://movingimage.nls.uk/film/3700
An interesting short documentary on Margaret Tait: https://vimeo.com/240306939
Still from Margaret Tait’s film, courtesy of the National Library of Scotland