In early March 2013 we received a poem called “The Sound Of Silence” by Nigel Stuart*. Stuart is an academic historian who is now retired from his teaching and departmental administration at St Mark & St John, Plymouth and Dartmouth College, New Hampshire and is also an occasional poet. Nigel Stuart* was inspired by Coventry’s moving history.
He describes his connection to Coventry in the following poem:
I fell in love with Epstein as a sculptor at the Edinburgh Festival in the 1950s, including his “Ecce Homo”, and with the new Cathedral at Coventry as it was being built. Given my many years working on and teaching about the Second World War and its representations in public culture, the theme of Coventry, its images and the whole issue of bombing has never been far from my mind. I was one of the many millions appalled by the Iraq War and by Britain’s shameful role in those sad events and all these terrible actions, from WWII to our present time and all that has happened, from the destruction of the twin towers to the erection of the Bomber Command memorial, have been bubbling away - and have produced the following. The poem plays with the ‘being sent to Coventry’ expression and with numbers of features of the cathedral and the city […]
There’s more to Coventry than silence,
more to these mid-lands than the sea’s distance,
for sunk within these precincts’ presence
are stones which mock our absent glance.
More in these Triassic ruddy veins,
whose hard rock heart disdains receded shores,
whose fired sands’ light, bathes, in glowing panes,
a boulder that new life adores.
More yet than infamy’s tear-stained stones,
for pallid ’gainst these ruins crouches one,
who holds the averted gaze and owns
the conscience of a world undone.
Far more, this middle-earth’s twin towers
scrape sullied heavens, lest we still ignore,
or heedless pass, our greedy powers
who’d silence what we did before.
Nigel Stuart
You can find a PDF –version of the poem here.
*Pen name
Gail WhiteAugust 21, 2025 at 12:56 am
Thank you for this — it’s lovely.