Descent

    for William Walker, the Winchester Diver,
    who shored up the Cathedral from 1905-1912

They watch his peculiar dressing:
vestments of descent, thick armour
against the deep, two hundred pounds
in weight. At last only his white hands
are showing. He’s winched into the trench. 

The cathedral’s foundation is a raft
of rotting beech logs, soft as a sponge.
God’s tower cracks, threatens to up-end
and slide into the Itchen. So they dig down
through marl and peat, beside the retrochoir 

until filthy water fills the workings.
And William Walker goes down, easing
timbers out beneath the buttresses:
stuffing, stacking, slashing cement bags;
working by touch in the slurry darkness, 

six hours a day, six years until it’s done.
His air-tube reaches to the world of light
where quiristers keep their endangered
offices in sweet harmony. And one who kneels
or lifts his eyes to the vulnerable roof 

may whisper a momentary prayer
for the diver and his daily incarnation
into the hostile hole of worms and leeches:
that all this shall not fall. Amen, amen;
sing the precarious galleries of the air.

Video (from Poets and Players, Whitworth Art Gallery, Manchester):
'Descent' - the Winchester Diver

More poems by Andrew Rudd