by Ann Wroe
Chalk thrown up from the earth is scoured so clean that it seems to have had nothing to do with soil or the spoil-heaps of working the land. Instead it dots the hills as the uncut ore of light. To him that overcometh, says the Spirit in Revelation, will I give to eat of the hidden manna, and will give him a white stone, and in the stone a new name written, which no man knoweth saving he that receiveth it.7 On the clifftops above Beachy Head hand-sized white stones, perfect for new names, lie everywhere. Passing ramblers string them out on the turf to make the names they already know, with declarations of heart-love that can be read from any small, buzzing aeroplane. Walking there one summer I found, lying among the pearl-pebbles on the short dry turf, a ‘real’ pearl ear stud with a thin gold shaft. Its faint opalescence was mirrored in the sea. If one lay there, how many others did? Or under what trick of the sky or the light would all turn into jewels?
This fascination was encouraged young, when my great-aunt would lead me on walks with the spaniels just below the chalk North Downs at Bearsted, in Kent. Our longest ramble would take us to a muddy track called Button Lane, once the site – she told me – of a button factory, before the war. Not a trace of it remained, except for the small, flat pearl buttons scattered along the path and in the pasture round it. Most were four-holed, some two-holed, and all slightly mottled on the back with black, green and brown, like a bird’s egg. Thirty years after those walks it was still common to find them, trodden only a little deeper, muddied but rainbowed repositories of light. In my dreams they became silver threepences and sixpences, endlessly turning up out of the grass.
Thomas Traherne, ministering to his flock at Credenhill near Hereford in the mid-seventeenth century, would have said that all grains of dirt were destined for transformation.8 Indeed, he believed stones were jewels already; as was every tiny ‘sand’. (‘O what a Treasure is evry Sand when truly understood!’) As a child he had seen the streets of Hereford strewn with powder-gold, which his shouting playmates took for common dust. He knew better, he told a friend, for from infancy he could see ‘on both sides the Vail or Skreen’: what seemed earthly, even dirty, was painted, for him, in heaven-colours.
And Nothing’s truly seen that’s Mean;
Be it a Sand, an Acorn, or a Bean,
It must be clothd with Endless Glory,
Before its perfect Story
(Be the Spirit ne’er so Clear)
Can in its Causes and its Ends appear.
Jefferies, too, pondered the ‘perfect Story’ of these inconsequential things.9 Lying on the clifftop above Beachy Head, stretching his limbs beside the new-found chalk ways that captivated him in the early 1880s, he would sometimes carelessly rub out little pebbles from the dry, crumbling earth. (Casual observers thought he did nothing but wander and dream, though he also wrote just enough books and articles to live on.) He considered the pebbles with his large, blue-bright eyes, marvelling at the sand that glistened on them. ‘Particles adhered to my skin – thousands of years between finger and thumb, these atoms of quartz, and sunlight, shining all that time.’ He found, too, those natural concomitants of chalk, legions of tiny, grey, empty shells that crunched under his boots like hoar frost or fragile beads. These were ‘receptacles of ancient sunlight’. A glow could still be seen in them, like that in curved amphorae stacked against a wall slowly moving with gleams of the blue, trireme-rearing sea.
Thousands of similar shells lie in the grass of the surrounding hills. Some curl on themselves like ammonites, some are pointed spirals; none is bigger than a centimetre. All are grey-white; some are edged in black. Whether they are new or ancient is often hard to tell. Perhaps they live and move, earth creatures perilously fastened with a dot of slime to the tall, bending grass stems; perhaps they have worn free long ago from the deep seabed. On a bank they make a show of dozens of points of light, lifted to lie among scabious and pink restharrow and the tiny mauve-flowered thyme – Ravilious’s ‘wonderful smell of the hill country’ – in which Jefferies ecstatically buried his face and his hands. ‘There may be an outcome for us that we know nothing of,’ he wrote afterwards.10 ‘An outcome for all that has lived: the Eastbourne hill shells for example – the (blue) swallow …’ His own outcome, so devoutly wished for among the natural litter of the chalk hills, was that his soul might come to expand with the whole life and power of the sun: that he might know ‘unutterable existence infinitely higher than deity’. The Downs encourage that sort of thing.
The poet John Clare was a shell-man, but of narrower horizons. He especially sought the cases of Northamptonshire field and garden snails. As a ploughboy and ditch-filler in his young years, he turned them up; and well into adulthood he would go ‘pooty-hunting’, following the ‘silver slimy trails’ on his hands and knees. He treasured especially ‘a scarce sort of which I only saw 2 in my life picked up under a hedge at Peakirk town-end & another in Bainton meadow its colour is a fine sunny yellow larger than the common sort & round the rim of the base is a black edging’. It was not, he added – surprisingly, since he was so seldom in London – ‘in the collection at the British Museum’. Evidently he had visited, and checked. As he held the rare specimen in his big coarse hands it had the light of summer in it, again perhaps an ancient summer, for he had found other shells, ‘most of them of the large garden kind’, on the Roman bank beside the Roman road, small curved horns that had long outlasted the tramp of the centurions. His shells were often buried in banks, in places screened by bramble-bines and hazel leaves, tremblingly parted as if he spied on the mossy, deep, untidy nest of the dull brown nightingale, from which it sometimes sang. He would edge with a finger the same rounded interior smoothness, the same intricacy of weave and line, but the snail’s small house he could carry away.
On a page of his journal around 1825 he drew ten such ‘pootys’ with his pen. To the untrained eye they all seem rather similar, though not to him. He intended to paint them with some ‘cakes of colors’ he had just bought. They had the look of Neolithic spirals. And indeed the most striking aspect of the larger, wind-lifted snail shells that also litter the Downs is how they radiate outwards from that raised apex, passing through a gamut of colours – patterned bands of white, blue and purple, tabby-cat markings, skylark featherings that Clare called ‘mozzld’ – and also spiral inwards, in a line that seems to imitate the curl of the wave, the dip of the hill and the flow of the stars.11 Each seems profound and beautiful in a different way, as they swirl from light to dark and dark to light: air, earth and sky all enclosed in a coil of calcium carbonate that lodges in a pocket, buffered with leaves and grass.
One morning in spring, ‘poking about the hedges’ as usual, Clare found objects startlingly different. The dewdrops, he wrote,
on every blade of grass are so much like silver drops that I am obliged to stoop down as I walk to see if they are pearls and those sprinkled on the ivy-woven beds of primroses … are so like gold beads that I stooped down to feel if they were hard but they melted from my finger. And where the dew lies on the primrose the violet & whitethorn leaves they are emerald and beryl yet nothing more than the dews of the morning on the budding leaves
Clare was by then mad, or taken to be. When his notes on the morning dew were transcribed, by another hand that added proper punctuation, he had been committed to a private asylum at High Beeches in Essex. From there in 1841 he escaped, wandering home to his village of Helpston by going from heartless public house to public house, sleeping in sheds on trusses of clover. Gravel hobbled his feet in his shoes, and his food over several days was nothing but quids of chewed tobacco and half a pint of beer, bought with a penny thrown to him by someone who took him for a broken-down haymaker. It was perhaps with an eye already skewed by madness that he saw the grass full of pearls and gold beads that fell to water in his hands.
Yet he saw too as a peasant-poet, much as he disliked the phrase: one who would ‘drop down behind a hedge bush or dyke’, like a bird, to write down his ‘things’ on paper scraps pressed on
the hard crown of his hat, and who learned to observe the fields at a sauntering pace as he weeded or ploughed, or minded cows. His publisher hoped, in vain as it happened, that he might write a natural history of Helpston, like White’s of Selborne. Clare’s own word for his way of walking was ‘saunered’, suggesting even more a lackadaisical, whimsical wandering in Nature.12 He needed to walk slowly to appreciate the golden furze, the thyme-scented hummocks in the sheepfields, the ‘sun-tannd green’ of the ripening hay, the dragonflies ‘in spangled coats’ and, in the May woods, lilies of the valley under hooded leaves ‘like maids with their umbrellas’.
A slow pace, too, like his, reveals the beauty of stones – the purple and blue interiors of white-robed flints, Ravilious’s favourites, the fools’-gold flecks of pyrites, or the strange round flattened stone, marked with a perfect six-pointed star, that lay beside a puddle on a walk of mine. The immense shingle beach at Brighton reveals almost no stone that is not interesting for a hole in it, flecks on it, or some oddity of shape, marbling or coloration. There are said to be semi-precious stones on some southern shores, cornelian and jasper, lying within reach of the red-skinned visitors who quickly hobble over them, or lounge on their beach mats playing ducks and drakes with the waves. Yet the commonest pebble too, Jefferies insisted, ‘dusty and marked with the stain of the ground, seems to me so wonderful; my mind works round it till it becomes the sun and centre of a system of thought and feeling’.13 It would be just such a common stone, wrote Jakob Böhme in the 1620s, unprofitable and trodden underfoot, that would prove to be the pearl of divine understanding.
The humblest part of Nature, in the eyes of writers like these, might hide unexpected reserves of light. This was true even of the grass, silently robing the earth from generation to generation. Evidently it fed on sunlight and grew towards the source, in the way of all green things. But poets, who tended to fling themselves down unhappily in grass, found closer parallels with themselves. They imagined they heard it growing, singing; they compared it to men, and its brief season to their own lives. As for man, his days are as grass, ran the words of Psalm 103: For the wind passeth over it, and it is gone; and the place thereof shall know it no more. Jefferies liked to sit on it, buzzed by scarlet-dotted flies, as if he too were a blade of grass, unselfconsciously living and filled with the sun. This seemed the most perfect existence possible for ‘an indolent, dreamy particle like myself’. One blade pressed to his cheek, he claimed, could tell him what all Nature was saying.
Close up, grass is also lovely; and as much so when dead, feathery and dry as when alive. (Ravilious disliked the ‘continually vivid green’ of Essex fields when he lived there, and longed for the subtler colours farther south.14) Grass dances and ripples under wind-light on the hills; it may be gilded with low sun, silvered with ice, quaking with the glitter of its own seed. The short bristle-leaved bent grass of the Downs makes a surface sprung like a dance floor, lifting the walker’s heart as well as his feet, so that even a shepherd boy like Dudeney feels the wide sky is his province, as much as the curving earth.
The name of downland grass was unknown to me until I found, in a London charity shop, a green Observer’s Pocket Book of Grasses, Sedges and Rushes. It was as humble as its subject, damp-stained and battered, costing fifty pence and without its jacket. Yet half its illustrations, surprisingly, were in colour, showing clusters and panicles touched with pink and purple, blue and grey; and the grasses were praised for their beauty, elegance and decorative effect as if they were garden flowers. Relatively few, in the author’s quaint phrase, were ‘of use to the agriculturalist’. Their use was to the artist and the dreamer.
Grasses have a hundred names, as my little book informed me – even without Clare’s ‘feather-headed’, ‘tottering’ and ‘spindling’, which were unofficial. Sweet vernal grass, whose oil perfumes hayfields; green panick grass, neatly spiked and with no sign, despite its name, of agitation; meadow soft grass, its faint pink flowers spreading mist across the fields; slender fox-tail grass, silky bent grass, false oat whose spikelets glitter like metal; and unlovely couch grass, sprawling and tenacious, whose country names, ‘Quickens’, ‘Quitch’ and ‘Squitch’, all mean ‘living’, and green life. Both Clare and Traherne referred to ‘spires’ of grass: the old word, but one that also suggested blades and panicles reaching to heaven, each one ‘wholly illuminated’ by the sun, wrote Traherne, ‘as if it did entirely shine upon that alone’. Jefferies saw grass, untouched by anything but daylight, lit like a torch; William Blake in his Songs of Innocence painted its leaping spirals intertwined with flames.15
A child brought him grass, Walt Whitman wrote (loafing at his ease, world-including, accepting the gift with his enormous, sky-parting hands). The small voice asked what it was. Whitman had one confident answer, in the roaring compendium of poetry he called ‘Leaves of Grass’:
I believe a leaf of grass is no less than the journeywork of the stars,
And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand, and the egg of the wren…
His poem had begun with summer grass, its blades blazing at sunset with ‘individual splendour’; and out of those leaves his ‘Song of Myself’ was woven, making him, too, ‘the journeywork of the stars’. Yet his subsequent thoughts were sadder and more tentative. The grass that composed him sprang also from the graves of Civil War casualties he had nursed and mourned in the army hospitals of Washington, those brave, wrecked bodies going open-eyed into the ground with ‘the beautiful uncut hair’ of those struck down too soon. Blood and bandages, heartbeats and putrefaction, stars and sweat, were all mysteriously meshed in the grass-universe of himself.
How could I answer the child? I do not know what [grass] is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner’s name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Jefferies adored Leaves of Grass. Others were decidedly cautious. One was Gerard Manley Hopkins, who found his own early poems lumped in with Whitman’s by the critics, though in his opinion Whitman’s did not ‘rhyme or scan or construe’ and their author was, besides, immoral.16 Hopkins was thirty or so when he first read him, a committed Jesuit, witty but dogged by exhaustion and bowel trouble, studying theology at St Beuno’s in wild Wales; he could hardly have been more different from the brawling, louche newspaperman of Brooklyn and New Jersey. His song was of the glory of God in Christ; Whitman’s was the song of Whitman, ‘an American, one of the roughs, a kosmos,/Disorderly, fleshly and sensual’. For all that, they strayed close to each other, as Hopkins was painfully aware. Both of them were dazzled by the whole span of creation. In 1882 Hopkins admitted to his friend Robert Bridges that he had always known ‘in my heart Walt Whitman’s mind to be more like my own than any other man’s living’. He added:
As he is a very great scoundrel this is not a pleasant confession. And this also makes me the more desirous to read him and the more determined that I will not.
Nonetheless, he had noted Whitman’s lines about the grass. He remembered God’s handkerchief ‘designedly dropt’. The American had messed about with the dactylic rhythm, he complained, just the sort of ‘savage’ thing Whitman would do – but for all that the talk of messages, hints and remembrancers was after his own heart. For God left such suggestions in anything which, like the grass, played between light and shade; light being, for Hopkins, the Word.17
… rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;…
All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.
Jefferies w
as less convinced that God was involved. But he too was fascinated by the messages he found, for example, in the depths of a pinewood: the ‘spots, dots and dustings’ in a foxglove and on a butterfly’s wing, on meadow orchids and the rind of oaks. There was nothing, he wrote, that was not ‘stamped … [with] the sacred handwriting, not one word of which shall fall to the ground’. Some ‘inner meaning’ informed the sun, the wood-wasps, the trees, the grass: all that ‘shining, quivering, gleaming … changing, fluttering, shifting … mixing, weaving’. Light-script flashed even in wisps of straw, caught up by oak boughs from high-piled wagons that swayed along the country lanes. It shone too in the clover-and-timothy hay tumbled after a journey in Whitman’s hair and clothes, prompting his cry: ‘I must get what the writing means.’18
Eager eyes found potential messages everywhere in Nature, for to observe something at all might imply a private summons to read and understand. Everything demanded notice, as clearly as if it rayed out light; everything spoke, if you could only hear it, and the act of seeing could become a sort of transcendental conversation. It might be natural then, as Clare bashfully recorded of a rural poet rather like himself, to talk back:
And as he rambled in each peaceful round
Hed fancy friends in every thing he found
Muttering to cattle – aye and even flowers
As one in visions claimd his talk for hours
And hed oft wonder were we nought could see
On blades of grass and leaves upon the tree
And pointed often in a wild surpprise
To trifling hues of gadding butterflys …
As a child I believed fervently in these hidden codes; so much so that at the age of ten I devised with my friends a coded mystery involving a Chinaman. I knew no Chinamen, but had heard they had pigtails and never cut their nails, which they used as pens. The shadow of such a man – no more than that – had been seen on the wall of the infants’ cloakroom at school, just at the bottom of the stairs. Then he began to leave messages. The first were odd words and numbers written on scraps of exercise-book paper, folded very small and pressed into window frames. I found several, once under the aged watery eye of Mother Winifred, who paid no attention and was therefore involved. Then the Chinaman dropped on the playing field three coloured cords knotted round a drumstick – a form of communication used, I claimed, by the Aztecs or the Incas. Yet he was a subtler worker, too, and soon his signs were everywhere. I saw his Morse code, or perhaps Braille, on the grey silky bark of every beech tree that lined the playground. It was too high to read, but meant for us, nonetheless. Directions were scratched on stones, and important numbers reckoned by nodes on twigs. Any exquisitely finished thing in Nature – acorn cups, triangular beechmast, streaked tulip petals, the polished-smooth oak apple I kept in my blazer pocket – seemed to have his hand in it. When his calculating shadow started crawling in the spotted laurel leaves and the dandelion clocks, we all decided in terror that the mystery should end. I no longer believe that there are code words written through the landscape by a yellow, long-nailed finger. I still feel, however, that my eye is drawn to things for a reason.