by Ann Wroe
An unkempt wild apple tree shouted to me once on the York-to-Selby footpath one afternoon in November when all else was grey, brown, flooded, dead; high umbelliferous stalks withered to black, and the only sound the shooters bringing down pheasants, or black crows, across the broad wet fields. I passed the tree first against the sun, and never noticed it; on my return, the sun behind me, it lit up with copper-red apples the inaccessible bank on which it grew. With a pipe-playing shepherd and his flock beneath it, and a sweep of thick wheat beyond, that tree would have belonged in Palmer’s Paradise.
A single gold apple sang, too, from a tree left behind when the end of our garden was severed by a high wire fence for the North London line – an apple or perhaps a quince, for we could never get near enough to tell, and the boughs were half wrecked round it. No birds tried to eat it, but we speculated that an angel might, if with a blaze of tangling wings one chanced to pass that way. The fruit hung there in case of need.
One variety in particular, the Golden Russet, seemed the very food of poets. (It is rarely seen or sold now, small and hard, its skin the dulled colour of unpolished brass.) This apple grew on Jefferies’s childhood farm at Coate in Wiltshire; one of his favourite spots for meditation was a plank seat set thickly in buttercups (his ‘flowers of the sun’) under the russet tree, through which light dappled and fragmented. From an upper window, closer to, he could discern ‘delicate streaks of scarlet’ on the fruit, ‘like those that lie parallel to the eastern horizon before sunrise’.40 Another Golden Russet grew beside Clare’s childhood cottage at Helpston, and helpfully contributed its crop to pay the rent of forty shillings a year. When the cottage was divided into tenements and the garden parcelled out, his father chose to keep the old tree, for it was his favourite, and ‘Tho the ground was good for nothing yet the tree still befriended us & made shift to make up the greater part of our rent …’
It was not so far away, in the garden of the family farmhouse at Woolsthorpe in Lincolnshire – a house built of the ‘white stone rock’ that lay beneath it – that Isaac Newton sat one night under an apple tree and thought about gravity, the earth and the moon. (The tree still stands, and gives fruit; its variety is Flower of Kent.) Like Clare, Newton was accustomed to thinking in the open air. In boyhood, set to mind the cattle, he would hide under a hedge with a book, or inspect in his sober, silent, short-sighted way snail-shells, stones, grasses, the purple pasque flower and the starry bog bean, asphodel and moonwort, and bring these simples home with him. Not long before his death in 1727 he remarked that to his mind he had always been such a boy, playing as it were on the seashore, and ‘now and then finding a smoother pebble or a prettier shell than ordinary, whilst the great ocean of truth lay all undiscovered before me’. Palmer often quoted those words, perhaps liking the idea that ‘Newton’s Particles of light’, as Blake called them, might first have been noticed, casually and serendipitously, among the sands of the sea.41
The story of the apple seemed to come from various conversations, including one with young William Stukeley as, sitting under other apple trees years later on a summer evening, he and Newton drank tea together. The tale grew in the telling. In Stukeley’s version of 1752, as Newton had sat musing, he simply saw an apple fall perpendicularly to the ground, and wondered why it did not go upwards or sideways. ‘Assuredly,’ he concluded, ‘the reason is, that the earth draws it.’ In another version, the apple did not fall. It merely hung there, silvered by moonlight on the tree into a sphere of purest metal, about twenty feet away from him. This was how medieval minds had imagined the luminous bodies to be, and almost as close. Newton, observing his apple-sphere, saw that it subtended in the sky the same half-degree of arc as the moon; and that the moon, like the apple, was not flung about wildly as it flew through space. The gravitational pull of the earth, therefore, extended much farther than men thought. In the words of another acquaintance who heard the tale, ‘Why not as high as the Moon, said he to himself.’
Man fell with apples, Byron commented in Don Juan, and with apples rose.
Eve, though, did not expect to fall. She did not understand the meaning of the word. Satan, erect before her, coiling and scintillating, had told her that if she ate the apple her eyes would be ‘perfectly Opend and clear’d’, and she would ‘be as Gods’. So she bit in, eagerly: afterwards bowing low to the tree, ‘as to the Power/That dwelt within’.
The taste may have gone from nectar to ashes in a moment. Random wild apples can be unreliable: misshapen and wasp-creeping things, the rind tough, the flesh chewy and unflavoursome, fuzzing the tongue and coating the teeth – and so the eating of them, straight from the white-dusted path, is seldom sensible. Yet it is also irresistible, because they are on offer, however small; and their burnish seems to rekindle the original temptation of Eve in the golden grove. I remember one, hanging beside the sunken lane that runs down to Ovingdean from Brighton, which still kept in late December the gold patina of September, though shrivelled to the size of a cherry and almost hollowed by two pecks near the stem. Such eaten-away apples, Jefferies wrote, were sometimes more ‘glowingly beautiful’ than the rest.43 And there is a tree I know of, more gilt-lace lichen than tree, above Sheepcote Valley at the edge of East Brighton golf course, where the apples’ flesh is the softly graded pink-to-red of an Albertine rose, and their taste is of perfume and dew. In ancient documents such lichen-painted trees are called ‘hoar’, as if transfigured into frost and light. A few bites of fruit from these might well open what Blake called ‘the doors of perception’, and the Gates of Paradise.
By these he meant, in the first instance, human eyes. But those doors, or gates, could sometimes be as literal as the apple was. They were so for Blake himself, whose visions at Felpham began one morning when he heard a ploughboy say, as he passed the cottage, ‘Father The Gate is Open.’ From then on, heaven-light flooded in on every side. It was through the city gates of Hereford that the child Traherne gazed at ‘the Valley of Vision’ leading to ‘the End of the World’; and through plain wickets, opening on to wheatfield or sheepfold, that Palmer traced the white paths that wound towards Elysian hills. In boyhood (an apple for sustenance) he would walk out with his father beyond Greenwich to a certain gate in Dulwich he later called ‘the gate into the world of vision’. A ‘better country’ lay beyond, which at nineteen he intended to show by painting, behind the hills, ‘a mystic glimmer like that which lights our dreams’. The seven years at Shoreham took him to his own Valley of Vision – his term, as well as Traherne’s, though very little of Traherne was published in his day. In old age his curtailed but favourite walk ended at a gatepost, the gate gone and the prospect free; the very ‘Prospect’ perhaps, of blue river, glowing hills, castle and massed white clouds that he was reimagining, painting slowly in his bed, in the months before he died.
Gates can be tricky, though. A stile is an invitation and continuation, quickly climbed or even jumped. (‘Always get over a stile,’ Jefferies advised.44) But a gate holds something back, dictating a pause and the question of whether it should be passed through at all. Ravilious, when painting houses, gardens or landscapes, routinely left the gates and doors ajar to field or path or street, or simply to the air. He sometimes took a paling or two from a fence, for a man with a boy’s whims to wriggle through. This also let in light. People might see anything if they stepped – or ran, as his were often running – to the other side. But first, the gate must be open.
He had evidently been trained on the gates of East Sussex and the scores of fastenings devised for them; fastenings so complex that it may be easier, after all, to leave them ajar. There are kissing gates in places, and at Friston, Jevington and East Dean rare five-bar tapsells that swing round at a touch; but those are too easy. So local gates are fortified with wooden latches, spring-loaded metal bolts, iron catches modelled on bicycle bells, stick-and-knob levers, chains, string, wire, baler twine; and weights made from oil cans, rusty pendulums, pierced bricks, salt-lick and large beach stones
already worn through by the sea. One baffling gate used to block the path leading out to the west side of Cuckmere Haven, to that shout of light and white cliffs, where two Z-shaped brackets had to be disengaged from a rusty metal plate. It has been improved now, with the brackets made redundant, but still demands thought. A small pond, its water dead, opaque and brown, lies to one side, a high hedge of elder to the other. The ground is swampy, like Bunyan’s Quaggs; the fields low and riverine, with cattle grazing. The gate guards the way south, as does the grey heron standing sentinel at middle distance, beside an overgrown ditch. In an almost identical landscape of ditches and cows, wondering how he might record the look of light on it, Ravilious mused that a heron might solve his problem, ‘if it were large enough’.45
Bunyan’s Christian, similarly baffled as he set out for the Celestial City, asked Evangelist the way to go.
Then said Evangelist, pointing with his Finger over a very wide Field, Do you see yonder Wicket-Gate? The Man said, No; then said the other, Do you see yonder shining Light? He said, I think I do. Then said Evangelist, Keep that Light in your Eye, and go up directly thereto, so shalt thou see the Gate; at which when thou knockest, it shall be told thee what thou shalt do.
He said, I think I do –
The GateChyngton Farm/June
At the wide field’s end stands the wicket gate:
and then? Ah, then, the deliberate pause,
arms on warm wood, and the silent wait
for the direction marked as yours.
Behind, the way trodden to the white bone,
the map followed, and the task complete;
vetch greeted, and speedwell, and the thin dust blown
in bluish glitter from the ramrod wheat –
Ahead, a vast country never seen before,
no matter how often you have passed this way:
flowers unpicked, fields rearranged, mysterious lore
chipped by the chaffinch from the elder spray –
Behind, the known world’s bustle and its glare
fade into nothingness. The rusty catch
holds back the breathing of enchanted air –
Step forward, then, and lift the latch –
And immediate at the sound the heron-guard, his wings crooked like a collapsed umbrella, leaps up and flaps away from this realm to that –
AMONG THE BIRDS
Our heron may not be visible for long. Birds, as they fly, carry brightness with them in the sheen of a breast or the turn of a wing. They reflect the unseen sun at dawn or evening or focus it like cloud, sometimes resolving completely into light. Blink at a squadron of starlings speeding over the sea, and it disappears. On Telscombe Tye – that great apron of downland that sweeps to the sea between the brown-roofed semis of Saltdean and Peacehaven – the grass and sky in summer are alive with larks, but invisibly. It is all song, or at most a glittering agitation of the intervening air. Ravilious loved this effect, and in his wood engravings often reversed his flying birds into silhouettes of light against the hills and in the trees. They were there, and not there, both at once.
Birds were always ‘borderers’ on the earth, Thoreau wrote.1 They were creatures of a subtler element, ‘which seem to flit between us and the unexplored’. Blake, more excitably, had had this thought before him:
‘How do you know but ev’ry Bird that cuts the airy way
Is an immense world of delight, clos’d by your senses five?’
Jefferies, too, observing birds – specifically the gull, the chaffinch and the eave-swallow – surmised that all things had ‘a Third Existence’ in the beyond.2 ‘They [come] to their object there, the end and purpose of their lives. Not immortality in the same shape; their object.’ The notebook thought petered out, as he fell to wondering what sort of birds those would be. They might be transmuted into light, like the yellow-hammer he saw on a branch of ash, so bright in the singing sunshine that its feathers seemed wet with it. Or perhaps they were light already, as he had conjectured before. ‘Everything matter … the prismatic feathers of the starlings … Blackbird entirely formed of matter – eye, mind, heart, love, song … Now analyse matter and it resolves to force … clearly it is like electricity …’
The word ‘prismatic’ was perhaps more exact than he knew, for Newton had observed that colours were struck and light reflected from ‘the thinness of the transparent Parts of the Feathers; that is, from the slenderness of the very fine Hairs, or Capillamenta, which grow out of the sides of the grosser lateral Branches or Fibres of those Feathers.’ The same was true of ‘the Webs of some Spiders, by being spun very fine’. Both could be analysed almost entirely in terms of light refracting and reflecting. Newton had looked at the sun through a feather; three rainbows grew round every filament, as they did round his prisms.
For Jefferies no bird was closer to light than the skylark. Whenever he heard ‘that sweet little loving kiss’, spring seemed to appear, and the sun shone. ‘The lark and the light are one,’ he wrote. The lark’s ascent was a universal wonder; Clare would pull his hat over his eyes to watch as it leapt from the stubble, ‘winnowing’ the air until it became a ‘dust-spot’ above him, its breast flashing with the first rays as the sun’s rim edged above the hills. This was not without effort: the vibration of the short wings can seem almost frantic, the chest bursting with song. But as the bird gains height and disappears it becomes all music – or all heavenly effect, like the wide wing-swoop of cirrus clouds, crowned with a lark’s crest, that was sketched one morning over Cattle Hill in Ovingdean as I made my way down the chalk lane where the wild apples grow. Pope Benedict XVI recalled that at his ordination as a priest a lark rose singing from the altar. He was not sure it was a lark – perhaps a swallow, since larks are not generally seen in churches or in towns. Yet that leap into grace could doubtless be done as well from an altar of marble as the altar of the grass.
And exuberance, or praise, was not all it meant. With its sharp, small, silver spurs, the lark pricked the sun and made him rise. In its etymology, ‘lark’ means the revealer – almost the betrayer – of the rising sun. (And it is curious that the other dawn singers, no matter how raucous, fall silent at that dayspring, that first scratch of light.) Even later in the day, in seasons of fog, a trill of larksong announces light. One afternoon on the north side of Mount Caburn, outside Lewes, the February scene gave me the sensation of being trapped inside a watercolour: everything blurring, blotting and misting, bare woods smudging into fields, fields into sky, the fog itself a vast soft brush drizzling and damping. The bank I was tentatively following suddenly blundered up as sheep, mud-matted, fleece-soaked, thumping away and vanishing … and when the lark as suddenly sang it was as if the saturated paper had been turned down at one corner, and fastened with a silver pin.
To the sound of larksong, too, on Wilmington Hill, an extraordinary cloud formation like a scallop shell appeared all across the summer sky, scattering baptismal grace in a few drops of unexpected rain. Rain and sun, glinting together, fell down with the song. In their constant travels between earth and heaven the numberless larks of the Downs seem responsible for muddling the two, so that fragments of sky – scabious, gentians, harebells, blue butterflies giddy above the grass – appear wherever they fly. But Hopkins, typically, recorded far more complex machinations:3
Left hand, off land, I hear the lark ascend,
His rash-fresh re-winded new-skeinèd score
In crisps of curl off wild winch whirl, and pour
And pelt music, till none’s to spill nor spend.
What this meant, he explained patiently to Bridges in 1882, was that the song fell to earth ‘not vertically but trickingly or wavingly, something as a skein of silk ribbed … or fishing tackle unwinding from a reel or winch * (*or as pearls are strung on a horsehair)’. This pealing lark-light resembled nothing so much as his April clouds, ‘stepping one behind the other, their edges tossed with bright ravelling, as if white napkins were thrown up in the sun but not quite at t
he same moment so that they were all in a scale down the air falling one after the other to the ground.’
Blake’s larks had a more determined career, entirely devoted to carrying light back and forth between earth and heaven. They were young angels to him, no more, no less:
A Skylark wounded in the wing,
A Cherubim does cease to sing.
He drew and painted them from life, for they had sprung singing round him on morning walks south through London’s fields, before the light of childhood was closed from him ‘as by a door and by window-shutters’. His larks were part-boy, part-bird, with a pointed topknot crest and with wings extending from their arms. Throats trembling with ‘the effluence Divine’, they led the Choir of Day,
Mounting upon the wings of light into the great Expanse,
Reecchoing against the lovely blue & shining heavenly Shell …
Their hidden nests, most often made where the wild thyme crept, marked the Crystal Gate of the First Heaven of Los, the spiritual sun. Larks were his messengers. When they soared from the grass in Felpham’s Vale it marked a moment of supernatural visitation and inspiration, knocking Blake prostrate on the path to his cottage door, his broad-brimmed black hat rolling away. He rose up, though, in power.
Palmer was more sceptical. Though in almost all things he revered Blake, he could never quite grasp those spirit-larks. (‘I say … none of that!’ he thought the bird might have replied, with his own Victorian properness.) Yet he painted and etched with love the rising of the lark at dawn, keeping in mind one of his treasured images from Milton’s ‘L’Allegro’:4