Ever since discovering Dorothy Sayers’ delightful gentleman detective, Lord Peter Wimsey, on BBC Radio years ago, she has captured my imagination. Eventually, I found that she was a Christian author contemporary with C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien. And then when I went to read Dante’s Divine Comedy I was surprised to find that her translation is one of the most famous and well-regarded translations. Not only was she a master of the mystery genre, she was also a remarkable scholar, particularly in a time when it was still difficult for women to achieve the academic success of their male counterparts. It seems that just when I think I’ve grasped the extent of her work, something else surprises me. This happened recently when I was doing research on poetry about the King Arthur legend. I am teaching a few classes at a homeschool co-op this fall on Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. I wanted the students to realize how the King Arthur legend has inspired authors for centuries and so was looking for some modern poetry written about the world of King Arthur. And much to my surprise, and delight, I stumbled across a poem entitled, “The Elder Knight,” by Dorothy Sayers. I knew immediately this would have to be incorporated into my lesson plans and so this past week we used The Elder Knight as the text for our first Socratic discussion together.
I read the poem on my own before class to prepare and I thought I had a decent understanding of it. But then as we discussed it in class together, we unpacked so many more layers of richness and meaning. It is one of the poems to slowly savor and enjoy over and over. My intent here is not to do a close analysis; it is well worth taking the time to enjoy and study for yourself. But there were just two lines near the beginning that I can’t get out of my head.
Herein is all the peace of heaven:
To know we have failed and are forgiven.
These lines are the very essence of the poem. If you don’t understand the whole narrative, these lines are enough to take away. And despite being set in the medieval world of King Arthur, Dorothy Sayers is exploring one of the deepest problems of humanity: failure. We all know how it feels to fail. We sometimes are paralyzed by a fear of failure. Failure can devastate and destroy us. Our stories from the beginning of time center around this problem of failure. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, the hero realizes he is mortal and will eventually die. He sets off on a great journey to find immortality. Only to fail when he has nearly made it home again. Adam and Eve failed to maintain their place in the Garden, finding themselves cast out of the presence of God. This poem makes an excellent introduction to Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, for Sir Gawain’s story is all about wrestling with failure and its consequences.
But Dorothy Sayers does not just contemplate the destructive power of failure in our lives. For her, failure becomes redemptive. Failure is not the end of the story. It does not need to set off a chain reaction of self-loathing, self-sabotage, and all other miseries we inflict on ourselves. Without being moralistic or preachy, this poem is infused with grace. Sayers doesn’t go into great detail about who forgives, her focus stays on the person receiving forgiveness. There is no shame in failure, for it is met with grace. And this forgiveness brings us peace. We can rest easy knowing that even when we do fail, it does not need to destroy us. Failure is not something to dread or fear. There is peace, and courage, to be found in forgiveness.
I would argue that there are two ways of interpreting this forgiveness. I think Dorothy Sayers is implying that God is the one who forgives us for our failures, with her reference to the “peace of heaven.” There are other sections of the poem that hint at her Christian perspective as well and so I think this is a safe assumption to make. However, there is also a sense in which forgiveness comes from ourselves. Failure is so difficult to handle because we are so hard on ourselves. We hold ourselves to these standards of perfection and castigate ourselves when we invariably fail. The shame of failure can be released by forgiving ourselves. If we can learn to offer grace to ourselves, we will no longer need to fear failure. I think it is often easier to forgive others than to forgive ourselves. To cultivate this deep level of grace is to become free from our past and free from our fears.
Herein is all the peace of heaven:
To know we have failed and are forgiven.
