“They’ve closed the chapel at Brideshead, Bridey and the Bishop; Mummy’s requiem was the last mass said there. After she was buried the priest came in — I was there alone. I don’t think he saw me — and took out the altar stone and put it in his bag; then he burned the wads of wool with the holy oil on them and threw the ash outside; he emptied the holy water stoup and blew out the lamp in the sanctuary and left the tabernacle open and empty, as though from now on it was always to be Good Friday. I suppose none of this makes any sense to you, Charles, poor agnostic. I stayed there till he was gone, and then, suddenly, there wasn’t any chapel there any more, just an oddly decorated room. I can’t tell you what it felt like. You’ve never been to Tenebrae, I suppose?”
“Never.”
“Well, if you had you’d know what the Jews felt about their temple. Quomodo sedet sola civitas…it’s a beautiful chant. You ought to go once, just to hear it.”
[Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited (1945)]
Referring to Shippey's comments on the poem, I thought he actually hit closer perhaps even than he knew. There are of course in the last line Tolkienian "echoes" of both the Prophecy of Zacharias (2:10) and Psalm 22:6 (and perhaps an example of what I think of as "Tolkienian inversion", in this case of Genesis 3:14 and 3:17). But in the Catholic Psalter, what Shippey calls Psalm 24 is of course Psalm 23. It's the fourth psalm of Tenebrae on Holy Saturday. The antiphon is 'Elevamini portae aeternales, et introibit Rex gloriae.'
In fact Tenebrae - or, more specifically, the First Lesson of Matins of Maundy Thursday - was almost certainly Tolkien's inspiration for Galadriel's 'Song of the Elves beyond the Sea' (better known since the publication of The Road Goes Ever On as 'Namárië').
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