This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
When thou from hence away art past,
To Whinny-muir thou com'st at last;
If ever thou gavest hosen and shoon,
Sit thee down and put them on;
If hosen and shoon thou ne'er gav'st nane
The whinnes sall prick thee to the bare bane;
From Whinny-muir when thou may'st pass,
To Brig o' Dread thou com'st at last;
If e’er thou gavest silver and gawd,
At Brig o' Dread thou find’st foothold,
If silver and gawd thou ne’er gav’st nane,
Thou tumbl’st doon to Hell’s flame
From Brig o' Dread when thou may'st pass,
To Purgatory fire thou com'st at last;
If e’er thou gavest meat or drink,
The fire sall never make thee shrink;
If meat or drink thou ne'er gav'st nane,
The fire will burn thee to the bare bane;
This ae nighte, this ae nighte,
Every nighte and alle,
Fire and fleet and candle-lighte,
And Christe receive thy saule.
Adapted from the Oxford Book of English Verse (1900)
The neighbours still have their Halloween decorations up; the gardens and fences of the suburbs are still festooned with bird-killing polyester cobwebs made in Chinese slave factories. Plastic ghoulies and ghosties vie with ubiquitous unnatural-orange pumpkin imagery sent from Halloween-obsessed America via the same Chinese sweatshops to the minds and hearts of Australian families who have forgotten, if they ever knew, what the last day of October signifies in centuries of tradition. Not just minds and hearts, but souls and stomachs. All Souls’ Day deals with dreams and death and food. For we all dream and die, and even what we eat has had to die first.
Bound by time, we select times, marking days or nights to celebrate things that are always with us. This ae night, ‘The Lyke-Wake Dirge’ tells us: this one single night. But then it adds ominously ‘every night and all’. One night to sing a soul over the obstacle course of all his life’s choices to end in heaven or hell. Catholics, confronted with theology that demanded good works as well as faith, have given us pragmatic old Purgatory – hey no-one’s perfect, we all need an escape clause. You could even get away with murder – if you were sorry. I remember a brilliant scene from Bedazzled – the original 1967 one of course. Its theology, straight from the Book of Job, has Peter Cook as world-weary Satan in competition with a distant God to gain souls, complaining bitterly