Quern Stone

I have a memory that is well-fitted for table quizzes; a bizarre association of trivialities, dates, names, places that I can rummage through to find the answer or offer someone else enough information that they can fill in the blanks. I’m not good at remembering important details like real people’s names, birthdays etc out of the immediate context, and have never been one to quote at will pieces of text, be that Bible verses, poems learnt at school or even dialogue from parts that I played on stage in the past; once the curtain came down my brain seems to delete such information, or rather put it in an archive not easily accessible except on the rare occasion that I have returned to the part again. I can’t even easily retain pieces of poetry, or prose that I have written myself beyond the context for which I wrote it.

So this week I found myself in a group where we were alluding to the image of “the mills of God grinding slowly but exceeding fine” in the hope of ultimate divine retribution.

But none of us could remember the source. Was it from the Bible – Proverbs or some prophet? Most of us in the room were clerics so you might have expected us to know.

I didn’t think it was... “Maybe Shakespeare,” I suggested. But so as not to break the flow we didn’t turn to Professor Google (other online repositories of knowledge are available) at the time.

But on doing so later I discovered that the image it was first alluded to as a current adage by Plutarch and others in the 1st and 2nd century CE, and later referred to by writers at the time of the reformation, including Erasmus of Rotterdam. It first appears in English in George Herbert’s collection of proverbs “Jacula Prudentum” (1652), but the most quoted one seems to be Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s version

“Though the mills of God grind slowly; Yet they grind exceeding small...”

Which was actually in a translation of epigrams by Friedrich von Logau.

Arthur Conan Doyle alluded to it in his very first Sherlock Holmes story “A Study in Scarlet” and it apparently was also used a couple of times by Agatha Christie.

And during WW2 both Winston Churchill and Franklin Roosevelt quoted Longfellow when promising retribution for the evils committed by the Nazi regime.

All of this is just a long introduction to the fact that this proverb was still in my head yesterday when I attended a funeral where an old family photograph on the order of service, reminiscent of similar photos in our family archive, showed a pair of millstones abandoned by a farmhouse door.

And this poem emerged from the grinding going on in my head....

A quern stone by the threshold, 

discarded in favour of 

off the shelf convenience, 

now an antiquarian artefact, 

but embodying a hidden history;

years of the daily domestic grind - 

the relentless cycle milling

slowly but exceeding small, 

producing a fine flour,

without which there can be no 

sustaining bread of life.

Selah