‘On the Same Oure Ladies Chyrche’

STAY, curyous traveller, and pass not bye,
Until this fetive pile astounde thine eye.
Whole rocks on rocks with yron joynd surveie,
And okes with okes entremed disponed lie.
This mightie pile, that keeps the wyndes at baie,
Fyre-levyn and the mokie storme defie,
That shootes aloofe into the reaulmes of daie,
Shall be the record of the Buylders fame for aie.

Thou seest this maystrie of a human hand,
The pride of Brystowe and the Westerne lande, 
Yet is the Buylders vertues much moe greete,
Greeter than can bie Rowlies pen be scande.
Thou seest the saynctes and kynges in stonen state,
That seemd with breath and human soule dispande,
As payrde to us enseem these men of slate,
Such is greete Canynge's mynde when payrd to God elate.

Well maiest thou be astound, but view it well;
Go not from hence before thou see thy fill,
And learn the Builder's vertues and his name;
Of this tall spyre in every countye telle, 
And with thy tale the lazing rych men shame;
Showe howe the glorious Canynge did excelle;
How hee good man a friend for kynges became,
And gloryous paved at once the way to heaven and fame.

 

The poem builds from the sight of Redcliff Church and has a similar moral to ‘On Our Lady’s Church’, but here the dialogue is transferred from an externalised inner debate in Rowley to an address to an imaginary traveller happening through Bristol and pausing to view the church, which was particularly admired when seen from the docks -- as here from Welsh Back.

Though the traveller does not speak, he is positioned by Rowley’s perspective. Rowley urges that he shame ‘the lazing Rychme’ of England by spreading the tale of Canynge’s pious munificence.

However, the magnificence of the church is, as elsewhere, asserted rather than evoked, save in Rowley's description of the statuary. The last stanza, which takes the traveller’s assent for granted, is anticlimactic. He is instructed to "learn the Builder's Virtues and his name”, but Canynge has already been mentioned in the second stanza.

Perhaps this clumsiness in the poem, along with the overall awkwardness, is due to the strictness of form and tightness of rhyme. Each eight-line stanza (verse) uses only two rhymes and the second half of the rhyme scheme of each is the mirror image of the first—abab baba.

The 'tall spyre' did not exist when Chatterton was writing; the original spire collapsed in 1446 and was not replaced until the later nineteenth century. Through the intervening centuries, the tower ended in a truncated spire.