by Ann Wroe
So did Henry David Thoreau, one of Whitman’s first admirers, who after decades of official surveying of the fields, hills and bogs about Concord, Massachusetts in the mid-nineteenth century could still be shocked by some discovery in Nature, and always read it as a message for himself.19 Often an acquaintance would bring it casually to his fierce blue eye, like the rare purple Azalea nudiflora which his neighbour Melvin had sprigs of in a pail behind his house, pulled from some secret swamp. (‘Well, I told him he had better tell me where it was; I was a botanist and ought to know … for I should surely find it if he didn’t.’) Sometimes he found the thing himself, like the tiny barred bream, Pomotis obesus, trapped one November under the ice of Walden Pond, which he had never spotted in all his months of solitary living in his hand-built cabin there. In August 1858, with equal suddenness, he became aware of the tufts of purple wood-grass in Concord Great Meadows. He had never noticed those either. But at that moment, he felt, the grass rose up and blessed him: ‘Wherever I walk this afternoon [it] stands like a guideboard and points my thoughts to more poetic paths.’ The same thing occurred two years later, outside Lowell, when for the first time he observed (from a railway carriage!) the Sporobolus serotinus, or dew-grass, holding beads of dew so thickly along its stems that they looked like the work of frost. The humble plant ‘had its day’, and shone out to him. If he could have things all his own way, he often thought, he would do no surveying at all, but would just pick evergreens and herbs to sell to the Concord townsfolk, trading thus in ‘messages from heaven’. Even wisps of straw that caught the sun meant to him, as to Whitman, ‘some small word dropped’.
Indeed all plants, Böhme wrote, were expressions of the earth’s hidden brightness breaking through: of that perpetual leaping up from lower realms to higher he called, alchemically, ‘the growing of the Lily’. Thus rushes and reeds, those lowliest grass relations, could also harbour light – and even more effectively when dead than when alive. In answer to shepherds’ reed pipes in Milton’s Lycidas the evening stars appeared, gradually steadying into brilliance. Blake, too, began his heaven-sent Songs of Innocence by piping songs among his sheep; then, taking another hollow reed, he dipped it in ‘stain’d’ water to write them down. That simple pen wrote clearly all through his book, in translucent brown ink with the tinge and waver of rivers in it. Blake drew himself in the frontispiece with his tapering pipe in his hands, pausing in mid-breath as a child in a cloud gave him instructions; his flock, like Dudeney’s, grazed gently behind him. Yet he was also a singing reed himself, slim and hard-jointed, with his shock of red-tasselled hair tied in a loose, wild pigtail. He could trill words, as Milton’s shepherds drew out stars.
Reeds, as much as grass, were a type of the poet, making music plaintively and continually in the water and the wild. Clare’s ‘oaten reed’– a straw, in fact – was sometimes so rawly warbling that he would throw it in a corner in disgust; yet, also like him, it could produce a ‘sweet, wild-winding rhapsody’, filled with light, on other days.21 George Herbert in his rectory around 1630, thin and straight as a stem, hoped that he might make a ‘poor reed’ in the consort of heaven, being musical. His consumptive lungs would not disqualify him: God had promised in the Book of Isaiah, after all, that he would not crush the broken reed. In December, reedbeds in the southern marshes capsize into glittering wickerwork along the ditches; and reeds also made the ‘roof of rusted gold’ on Blake’s cottage at Felpham in West Sussex, where the angels’ ladder ended and they lay, wings folded, along the thatch.
Rushes and bedstraws showed their virtue in a different way, by softening stone floors and hard beds for the Holy Family as well as common folk. The bedstraws, with their tall menorahs of tiny white or yellow flowers, were thought to have acquired them as sparks of passing grace: a sleepy shift of the Virgin’s hip, a drop of her milk, the Holy Child’s tears. The flowering rushes, their small wire parasols tipped with white, had possibly guided holy feet over wet, treacherous places. But rushes also burned, their whole body fuel to a flame. Stripped of their rind, bleached, dried and steeped in tallow, they made a light for the poor – and for poets. They burned in Dove Cottage in Grasmere, in that low dark kitchen half-buried in the bank, guiding Dorothy Wordsworth to a drawer or the servant girl to a shelf of bowls into which, winter and summer, she would spoon their morning porridge. They flickered, too, in Clare’s dim cottage, shrill with tumbling children, where their father bent over the table to clip ‘Odditys’ from the newspaper, or to read the literary magazines.22
Rushes were dearer to Clare even than grass, for they made up most of the ‘moorey ground’ in his corner of Northamptonshire that still lay open for saunering and stock-grazing, and had not yet fallen victim to the Enclosure Acts. He walked out there with no set purpose, just seeing how the elms and the brook and the old ivy-hung stile were getting on, hoping to find and greet them before the ‘No Trespass’ boards appeared. In answer to ‘each little tyrant with his little sign’, nailed on the very trees as if the birds should obey, Clare cried out in pain for ‘the eternal green’:
Unbounded freedom ruled the wandering scene
Nor fence of ownership crept in between
To hide the prospect of the following eye
Its only bondage was the circling sky …
Thus infinity was found among the rushes in Northamptonshire, in Clare’s Elysian Fields.
For Traherne, too, Paradise was green; this time with young wheat, filling the valleys beyond Hereford’s gates in its ‘first springing verdure’, ‘great and verdant’, ‘fair and delightful’.23 He prayed for faith as vibrant and enduring, for he felt those fields would never change: ‘The Corn was Orient and Immortal Wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from Everlasting to Everlasting.’ Past the bordering woods a ‘glitt’ring Way’ ran on towards hills which must, he thought, be those of the eternal country. Each year, for the rest of his life, the sight of green wheat springing gave him that same shock of delight.
To many eyes barley is lovelier, undulating in a soft sea, its brassy tints brushed with red and rose-madder as it carelessly flows across the dip and rise of the fields. By contrast wheat is regimental, orderly; it stands stock-straight, letting the sunlight flash through its blue-green spears (translucent as chrysoprase, Hopkins wrote, ‘Nearest to emerald of any green I know’). By June those blades have a casing of gold and a gold, sharpened tip; by August the heads are dry, glittering and ready. No wonder Milton described his angels forming a phalanx with their spears in heaven,
as thick as when a field
Of Ceres ripe for harvest, waving bends
Her bearded Grove of ears, which way the wind
Swayes them …
Clare remarked on the brittle ‘sun-threads’ that pricked, intensely bright, in wheat stubble and when hay was cut. Hopkins saw ‘delicate and very true crisping’ (a word he used also for wave foam and lark song) along the tops of the crowded ears. This was the only plant sharp enough for stardom: Spica virginis, the wheat-ear in Virgo, keeping company with heroes and gods.
Like grass, wheat has a song: murmurous, quiet, intent, though under the wind – Jefferies said – it could produce ‘a sharp ringing resonance’, like a tuning fork.24 It could talk, too, when Jefferies in one short story sent a small boy to explore it, his nimbus of gold curls not yet overtopping the rustling, rippling ears. The wheat, calling him ‘darling’, and ‘my love’ with a Wiltshire burr, whispered of past colours and ancient sunshine, the growing of oaks and the nesting of swallows, and wondered aloud why men could not share the world’s wheat fairly. (‘Naughty Socialistic Wheat’, the poet Edward Thomas called it.) ‘Til you have a spirit like us, and feel like us,’ the wheat told the child, ‘you will never be happy.’
Enchanted, Jefferies’s little boy would gladly have lost himself among it. So would Jefferies himself, who longed to absorb beauty inwardly as wheat ears took in the sun. And so would Samuel Palmer; for to him wheat w
as holy. At nineteen, pale-faced, scruffy-haired and short-sighted, he too observed it from ground level. The year was 1824, and he had just met Blake; his head was filling with wonders. Earlier he had examined the play of light among the grass he lay in, peering through the blades at the sun, ‘inimitably green and yet inimitably warm so warm that we can only liken it to yellow’. On the other hand (shifting his position slightly), ‘light transmitted through objects is warmest & reflected from them coolest so among these splendid masses some dewy points of grass reflect very cool, white and grey …’ Now wheat pushed glossier spikes before his eyes, and these entranced him. He thought a picture would be ‘very pretty’ with nothing but a cottage and a clump of elms emerging from that great golden sea. A few years later he found himself in such a place, in the valley of the Darent at Shoreham in Kent, where he and a group who called themselves ‘the Ancients’ gathered in self-conscious penury, in a farmhouse soon known as ‘Rat Abbey’, to paint as Blake had done.
In Palmer’s steep, sacred Shoreham fields the wheat stood tall, like the thick rippling pelt of a creature sleeping under the woods.25 In an ink-and-sepia drawing of 1825 a man in Jacobean dress, perhaps Bunyan’s Christian, lay in such a field, cheek on hand, reading the Psalms; wheat clustered round him to give grave illumination, as if the stalks were heavy-headed acolytes with candles in their hands. In Palmer’s drawings and watercolours wheat waited in stalk or sheaf alongside human activity, each stalk the height of a man, a silent and burnished congregation of souls; in one watercolour a rustic church was walled with fiery wheat, with a wattle door standing open. At dawn wheat was erect, alert, cheering on a smocked and vigorous young man heaving harness on an ox; at dusk the sheaves, like men and women, leaned on one another for weariness. Wheatfields under sunlight or moonlight lay hallowed, with the Host-orb hovering over them; and their reapers or gleaners became angels, but that is another story.
Palmer drew wheat and barley in exquisite detail, in pencil and watercolour on tinted paper. Elaborate notes on how light transformed them were written down alongside. He drew out in the field, his battered sun-hat (big as a parasol) the colour of dried straw, the pockets of his spreading brown drawing-coat stuffed with chalks, palettes, sketchbooks, knives, his ‘little Milton’ brass-bound at the corners, torn envelopes, his snuffbox and, at one dangerous stage, bottles of egg yolk to make tempera. Through his round, scratched glasses – the sort, he lamented, that did not attract the ladies, disguising as they did ‘the darting artillery of my eyes’ – he once saw a thin golden halo round an ear of wheat, where the transparent husk stood against the sunset. He noted the reds and ambers in it, struck out of it with prismatic intensity by the sun. And this, too, he tried to paint. Individual ears of wheat, mere diamond-pricks of paint, were often the brightest element in his landscapes.
When Ravilious attended the first proper exhibition of Palmer’s Shoreham paintings, in 1926 just before he left the Royal College of Art, he was deeply impressed. Nothing like these visionary watercolours had been seen in England, except for Blake. Immediately afterwards he walked with his two best friends the twenty or so mostly suburban miles to Shoreham, all three dressed up as Ancients (the usual costume being broad hats and trailing coats). Other imitation was more serious. Ravilious came to see light, especially twilight, as Palmer did, wandering out of ‘the worst sort of American film’ in June 1935 to find, as he told his lover Helen Binyon,
such a marvellous quiet pink evening and a late cuckoo. There were a few stars out and half a moon and trees silhouetted in spots very dark and rich like Sam Palmer’s. I was glad to be missing the film really.
His flint-and-brick Sussex churches acquired Palmer settings, buried deep in fields and trees; and in those fields his wheat, like Palmer’s, became numinous and tall. Though Ravilious’s sacred talismans were usually a cup of tea and a packet of Player’s cigarettes (the Downs in winter, he mused once, were ‘a wonderful tea colour’), he painted the corner of a wheatfield below Wilmington Hill tufted with crimson fire, and engraved wheat stems erupting from a sheaf like fireworks exploding in the sky. He longed to go to Sussex, he told friends, when the corn was at its best – for then the light was.
The wheat in Palmer’s paintings glowed against ‘umbrageous’ trees (his own rather ponderous word), high-heaped and broad-leaved. Under them shadowy flocks lay down in the heat of day or the repose of dusk. The blotchy darkness of the trees, as Ravilious noticed, was often laid on thick. Yet they could also play a different role. Sometimes their canopies held light longer, catching the last of the declining sun when the sun itself had disappeared.26 In the course of a year I noted down many such Palmer effects: a line of oaks under Ditchling Beacon, for example, glowing gold and green beneath sunset clouds whipped up like candyfloss, while the nearer fields already lay in shadow; or the last flicker-and-flame of November plane trees in St James’s Park against grey-misted Westminster; or the birch at Pulborough just tipped – coiffed – with sparse yellow leaves, a torch above the hedge. Each of these seemed picked out as a light-bearer, like the single birch at Rydal Dorothy Wordsworth called ‘our favourite’: a ‘flying sunshiny shower’ in the wind’s glance, or a ‘Spirit of Water’ in a tree’s shape.
It was natural that Dante’s fourteenth-century Paradise should be structured like a tree, its leaves never falling, for these bore messages of light as clearly as the white leaves of books. Indeed, perhaps words could be exchanged that way. Thoreau thought of his journal as ‘a leaf which hangs over my head in the path – I bend the twig and write my prayers on it then letting it go the bough springs up and shows the scrawl to heaven …’ When in 1845 he took up his solitary life in the woods by Walden Pond, wishing to ‘learn what it had to teach’ and to ‘live deliberately’, passing friends who found him absent would pencil their names, for calling cards, on yellow walnut leaves; though some he could guess at by their peeled willow wands on his table, or the grass they had plucked and thrown away.27
Clare, who in his poverty often had nothing to write on, thought silver-birch rind would make a fine substitute for paper. (‘It is easily parted in thin lairs & one shred of bark round the tree would split into 10 or a dozen sheets & I have tryd it & find it recieves the ink very readily.’) This would make a safer repository for his poems, no doubt, than the scraps of coloured shop-paper he had resorted to as a boy, hiding them in the kitchen wall away from his mother, who otherwise used them as firelighters and kettle-holders. With his poems on birch bark, whole woods could blow with his gleaming words. And he could hide among them.
I felt it happiness to be
Unknown, obscure and like a tree
In woodland peace and privacy
Yet those unknown and unconsidered trees also glowed with industry and beauty. Traherne never forgot his childhood astonishment when he first saw trees ranged against the sky outside Hereford: ‘their Sweetnes and unusual Beauty made my Heart to leap, and almost mad with Extasie, they were such strange and Wonderfull Things’.
He wished green, living branches might spring from his own soul, with fruits following at any time of year. Herbert too longed for this.28 Sighing over his book of devotion, he longed to be a tree, his sinewy arms and fingers embracing the air,
for sure then I should grow
To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust
Her houshold to me, and I should be just.
Specifically he wished he was an orange tree – ‘That busie plant!’ – putting forth unwithering leaves and bright, heavy lamps of fruit which, when dried, would scent the many-drawered cupboards and dove-jointed boxes where he stowed his gloves, his neatly folded handkerchiefs and his prayers, whether grateful, joyous or despairing:
Then should I ever laden be,
And never want
Some fruit for him that dressed me.
Trees did not groan to God, did not prostrate themselves and beat their breasts on the cold tiles of Bemerton chancel as he did, when it seemed he was unworth
y to be called as a minister. Instead they laid down wood and held out beauty, silently. My root was spread out by the waters, ran the Book of Job, and the dew lay all night upon my branch. My glory was fresh in me, and my bow was renewed in my hand. Even wood that was sawn and dead, planks, rafters, beams – like Herbert’s deadened heart, as he saw it – could open out in light. At Godshill on the Isle of Wight, in the church that towers on its mound above the village, a fourteenth-century wall painting shows Christ on a cross that has flowered into lilies round him. (Hopkins knew this painting from family holidays in Shanklin, and recalled it when he found another living-tree cross at St Albans.29) The crucified figure hangs among green sprays, so weightless that it seems he has merely fainted, and in this bower must wake again. Incarnate light springs out of beams of wood as naturally and silently as the leafing of the April trees; and from the finials of the branches flowers like stars detach and drift away.