by Ann Wroe
Many others had noticed that halo of light – bounding both in the sense of defining, and in the sense of being active and alive. Hopkins glimpsed it round the ‘sillions’ of a field and the blade of a plough ‘with-a-fountain’s shining-shot furls’; Dorothy Wordsworth observed it on thick-curled backs of sheep and lattices of ash; Jefferies noted its ‘edge and outline’ round boats, shop signs, pebbles and everything else he saw in Brighton. ‘The more distinct, sharp and wirey the bounding line, the more perfect the work of art,’ Blake wrote; for every line was the Line of Beauty.11 ‘Leave out this line and you leave out life itself; all is chaos again, and the line of the almighty must be drawn out upon it before man or beast can exist.’ Grosseteste elaborated: ‘For every shape is a kind of light, and a manifestation of the matter that it forms.’
That line shows above Firle round grass blades, sessile-oak leaves, a terrier racing past, the lovers lying close (he smoking, she with a book, bare arms crooked, hip bone tight beneath her summer dress), the wings of a chalk blue half-closed on a clover flower, and the long shoulder of the Beacon against the summer sky. Ravilious said it was the design of the Downs, ‘so beautifully obvious’, he painted them for. His thought seems to match the quotation from Psalm 65, Palmer’s favourite, on the wall beside Firle church, ‘The hills are girded with joy’.
Yet there was almost no weight in Ravilious’s hills, nor in anything he painted, no matter how substantial they seemed in life. A battleship moored by hawsers to a quay was as delicate as a dinghy, and a ship’s mine buoyant as a balloon; trees fluttered like flags, and planets spun as if they were tennis balls. Almost defiantly, he called every aircraft an ‘airoplane’. His machines, too, were weightless on the earth, as if all was form and function without mass; as if, instead of matter, there was merely light and line. Everything, like one of his beloved Tiger Moths, might take off, somersaulting through the clouds until all that was left was the original thought, a vapour trail snaking and shining in space. For every shape is a kind of light.
Or a brushstroke, perhaps. Traherne thought God’s word, or light, was His ‘Pencill’, and His own beauty and power the colours with which He painted the ‘table’ of the world, bringing it to be. The principle could be seen on a single beech leaf, the clear ‘raiment’ fading away from the sharp green edge. (Every leaf in the spring woods displays this, outlined by the sun and then filled in by it; Dante used the colour of young beech leaves for angels’ wings in heaven.) Blake drew the simple conclusion: ‘Form is the Divine Vision, And the Light is his Garment.’12 Goethe put it sharpest, a shock to those hoping to be invisible in the jungle of the summer grass: ‘If light did not see you, you would not exist.’
All this happened instantly, or so it seemed. Light was announced, and was, with creation tumbling after. But some thought there was a slower, more tentative unfolding. In Genesis light was kept back from earth until the fourth day, held in abeyance while dry land was heaved out of water and covered with grass and trees. Provisional daylight was made for these green things, and a dim, pale day at that, said St Bede and St Jerome: more or less what appeared before sunrise, barely contesting the night. Later sun, moon and stars were fashioned like lamps to hold a working measure of light, while light itself (Milton thought), having travelled almost languorously from the east, ‘sojourn’d the while’ in a tabernacle of the first clouds.
Already, then, two guises of light appeared: lower and higher, functional and holy. Latin expressed this discrepancy in two words, lumen and lux. They passed into Tuscan, to Dante’s pen: lume, luce. Both could mean the light of day or the eye, the aura of fame or glory, and life. In many ways their virtues were overlapping. But lumen essentially touched on the motive power and usefulness of light: a torch, a lamp, a ray, sun or moon; something shaken through the dark, or a window, crack or chink, letting light in. Dante in Paradise saw ‘all substances, accidents and relations’ neatly bound together in un semplice lume, gathered up in light, like loose leaves in a book.13 It could as easily break out in accidents again.
Lux, by contrast, was tabernacle light, unchanging as the gold relief behind retablos of saints. Fra Angelico portrayed it with gold leaf, his figures almost one with the gilded air around them; Palmer used shell gold and gold paper, luxurious extras in the vagrant Shoreham days, to impart divinity to portraits of his friends. This light did not fizz, inveigle, flash, sidle in; it existed in pure stillness, a state of spiritual illumination. Fiat lux, said God in His first great declaration, establishing the principle and, wrote Grosseteste, the inward essence of His creation. Lux illuminated Eden and the angel-eyes of Eve and Adam, as they innocently wandered and embraced there. It also filled heaven. Luce etterna bathed Dante in Paradise as an infant’s mouth was bathed sweetly, wonderfully with milk. Lux perpetua gently clothed the blessed souls.
On earth this light was understood – in so far as it was understood – as intellectual, not physical. Aquinas taught that it made up lucidity or claritas, ‘the intelligible radiance of form that pervades a being’. It was also, as Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus explained with Jesuit-trained verve, ‘the scholastic quidditas, the whatness of a thing’. Both Aquinas and Duns Scotus built up the idea, absorbed by Hopkins as well as Dedalus, that the essence of a thing, its self, was fundamentally linked to light. Each particle of created matter partook of lux, though it was also thoroughly shaped and shaken by restless lumen as it passed.
The fourteenth-century author of Pearl saw no need for that lower, subsidiary light, at least in the beginning; no need for the ‘spotty’ ‘grym’ moon and the ‘dym’ sun, if newborn light was still dazzling down from heaven. It surely flowed out as generously as divine love itself. Both pagan and Christian writers believed that light never rested, never shrank to one shrouded, sacred flame; but came down unceasingly, so that sun, moon and stars had only to be held as glass jars under a waterfall, brimming and flooding over. ‘The sun,’ wrote Galileo, ‘is just a repository of what he receives from elsewhere … and the Scriptures make that obvious.’14 Yet simply by virtue of descending and taking on materiality, the ‘fertilising spirit’ that was light was bound to change. Its original divinity had to give way, at least for a while, to temporal illumination of the world of ordinary things.
Once again Hermes Trismegistus brought forward his strangely melancholy, brooding characterisation of light. In the Hermetic tradition he founded, passing into the medieval, light gradually grew heavy with desire for its reflection seen in the waters of chaos, with desire to become material itself, and sank down into it. As its heaviness increased, it sacrificed brightness: so that Herbert saw Christ, light incarnate, as he descended, extravagantly hanging his shining robe and rings on the stars:15
The God of power, as he did ride
In his majestick robes of glorie,
Resolv’d to light; and so one day
He did descend, undressing all the way.
The starres his tire of light and rings obtain’d,
The cloud his bow, the fire his spear,
The sky his azure mantle gain’d.
And when they ask’d, what he would wear;
He smil’d and said as he did go,
He had new clothes a making here below.
There was no way but through that water-dark, as Bunyan’s Christian found, sinking deeper in the River of Death with each step, crying Selah in hope of light, as the billows swelled above his head and all God’s waves went over him. But on the other side he found buoyancy, speed, agility; and so too did light, recovering itself, as it fell out of heaven into the world of becoming. Lumen de lumine is the incarnation phrase from the Nicene Creed; the words dance. Heavy as light now was compared with what it had been, it was still swifter, fierier, subtler and more beautiful than anything else around it. And its name, among the Saxon and Anglian tribes, still connoted weightlessness as well as brightness.
Thus Langland described light, which was love, which was Christ incarnate, as it entered with blazing delic
acy his fourteenth-century atmosphere of wool and soot, tallow and sin:
For hevene holde it ne myght . so hevy it semede,
Til hit hadde on erth . yoten hym-selve.
Was nevere lef up on lynde . lyghter ther-after …
Tho was it portatif and pershaunt . as the poynt of a nedle,
May non armure hit lette . nother hye walles …
Yoten meant poured out: that sense of endless flooding abundance. Portatif and pershaunt meant swift and piercing, needle-sharp. Strange words, combined with that linden-leaf lightness, for love or for Christ; but not for light. ‘It was light and sharp and drastic also,’ wrote Hermes Trismegistus of the first ray and the first word: as efficient as the engraver’s burin, or the hawk’s claw.16
Yet there was tenderness, too, in this. Christ, or light, in a carol as old as Langland, dropped down like dew, which scattered the meadows with those silent jewels that men woke up to, out of ignorance or sleep; so quiet on spray and flower that he simply ‘came’ to his mother, where she was. So swift that he was instantaneously there, and here.
As dew in Aprille,
That falleth on the grass.
The Christ-light was also imagined drifting down more slowly, like snow, at the darkest point of the year. The feel of light was possibly similar, if out of a yellow-grey and lowering sky, suddenly, softly, with touch and spring, it were to fall. Ravilious adored snow, abandoning shaving so as not to miss it, showering it in huge flakes across his winter landscapes, snowballing until ‘I was wetter than anyone about the neck and had to change my clothes’ and bombing the street below, wild as a boy, when he cleared the drifts from a neighbour’s roof. Like light, and as dazzling, snow defined, shaped and covered, all at once. Rather than obscuring objects, it showed what they were. Thoreau said it was ‘like the beginning of the world’. He noted, too, that it fell on no two bare trees alike, but ‘the forms it assumes … are as it were predetermined by the genius of the tree’. Hopkins observed how after a heavy fall in March snow restored to his local elms, even as it shrouded them, the inscape underneath. From below he could see ‘every wave in every twig … beautifully brought out against the sky’.17
If light fell like dew, or rain, or snow, perhaps it shared in some way the nature of liquid things. That would account for the way it could shimmer in heat like a screen of falling water, stream visibly before a sleet-bearing wind, or make reflections on roads; and it explained why Hopkins saw the sun above the Roehampton cedar as ‘a shaking white fire or waterball’. Just tremors in the air, Newton said, accounting also for the way stars seemed to twinkle in the night sky. Others continued to disagree. ‘You that wrap me and all things in delicate equable showers!’ cried Whitman to light. The ‘golden ambient vapour’ which Turner admired in Cuyp’s pictures, and which glowed in many of his own, also sounded very like light. He wished he might be wrapped in his own Sun Rising through Vapour when he died, particularly since no one would buy it from him.
Near Erwood, in mid-Wales, I once befriended a small stream in the depths of the woods. It was the only source of light in a cleft close-shaded by aspen and alder, sycamore and birch. Beside the plank bridge it tumbled constantly over rocks with almost the same ripple here and cascade there, the same lick of foam at the rock base and brown-gold webbing over stones. This was chaos, ordered. Horizontally the water flowed as smoothly as silk on a shoulder, but in falling it would thin and crystallise into long twists of cut glass. Everything it did seemed a model of how light might behave. Even on a level surface, Thoreau noted, water naturally braided into spirals: strands of rope, Hopkins thought, holding him steady in a deep sun-dappled well. Perhaps light, as it grew heavier, would tend to do the same.18
Strange crossovers certainly occur between water and light. Walks round about my Welsh stream were set sparkling by the tinkle, trickle and drip of tiny rivulets and run-offs of rain: a glint across a bramble leaf, a glitter in the lace of herb-robert in the hedge, a green dash of slime on a stone. Where rocks are dark and mountains overhanging, the fields deep and the clouds low, water in its ubiquity substitutes for light. Conversely, in the dry chalk south where surface water is rare – a puddle here, a dewpond there, empty ditches choked with bullrushes and wild roses – light often substitutes for water. Mudflats shine deceptively, when they will cake your boots with dust; egrets stalk, ankle-deep, in shimmering tufted grass; a small valley holds at its heart not a stream but a path, littered with white stones worn to smoothness only by feet and time. And everywhere, in lieu of moisture on leaf, grass or spray, lies a powdering of light.
Such parallels fascinated Coleridge, and had done ever since his childhood dabbling on the River Otter in Devon: a plump boy, with large grey eyes and ever-open mouth, watching from the bank that ‘bright transparence’ flowing over sand. Later, he laboured to describe the ‘water-threads’ of the falling Greta at Keswick, especially ‘the white Eddy-rose that blossom’d up against the stream in the scallop, by fits and starts, obstinate in resurrection – like life’ – or like light. In the falls of Lodore he saw the bad angels falling from heaven, ‘Flight & Confusion,& Distraction, but all harmonized into one majesticThing’– a metaphor for the endless creative struggle of light against the dark.
Long before scientists racked their brains over whether light was waves or particles, matter or motion, medieval minds wondered whether its texture might reveal what it was. For it certainly seemed to have texture, of a sort. Light was in fact the first form of corporeity, Grosseteste wrote in De Luce, from which all matter condensed and coalesced.19
Many after him thought they saw it in this tiny, atomic form. ‘Swarming in the brightness & the Breeze,’ wrote Coleridge in Grasmere, cleverly making light both verb and noun. Thoreau described it as dashes and flakes, and could tell by sunbeam shiftings when a breeze rose. Gilbert White’s gleams (‘Grey, gleams, snow gone’) seemed similar. Palmer in Italy, stepping from cool ecclesiastical dark into the ‘dazzling weather’, found all the air trembling with little motes: ‘Newton’s particles’, as Blake would have said, adding sadly that Newton, with his musings on the corpuscular form of light, had made the world ‘heavier to me’. Yet Palmer thought those tiny grains allowed him to see ‘real’ sunsets, and real twilights. Jefferies called them ‘the dust of the sunshine’, blown from hawthorn leaves, ash sprays, brambles, wheat and grass – as on a high summer day white cotton floats from the poplars, and pollen from the flowering limes. Threshers and winnowers worked in a chaff-dance of light, scratches, streaks and strokes of it, explosive as the fire-flash of furnace or forge. Hopkins filled the bowl of heaven with grain-dust; Clare, who had scrawled his first childhood words in golden dust in barns, remarked more than once on the mealiness of everyday light.
I wandered once into the Flint Owl Bakery in Glynde, a mile from Firle, in the middle of the day. The bakery, a cluster of low white buildings, stood opposite a Georgian church whose pale stone was mottled with grey lichen and gold moss. I went there first. A wire-mesh door kept out the birds: the sort of mazing grid through which Palmer, at nineteen, adored the ‘brilliant varied tints of the sky’ in the tracery of a far plain-glass window.20 A wooden rack was provided for coats, a scraper for boots. Inside the church – one large room, rather than nave and chancel – a powder-blue ceiling, picked out in carved white wood and faintly stained with damp, glowed like a spring sky, or like the paper-thin eggs of the blackbirds or thrushes that had been saved by the mesh screen from blundering inside.
A similar light filled the bakery, where the tall grey windows had not been opened in a while. Visibly and edibly, to my famished eye, it poured through the glass. It rimed the cobwebs on their upper panes and outlined, with white rust, each hinge and catch. It settled in the trays, along the shelves and on the painted planking of the floor. The rough dark loaves were dusted with it, the sacks full. I began to understand the delight of Ravilious when, in 1935, he visited a Hovis mill, ‘[as] pretty as possible white and almost new looking�
�; and the joy of Thoreau at the ‘cobweb drapery’ of the Concord mill, where meal-dust revealed the thisness of the wooden workings just as snow, in winter, revealed the trees.
No one was about; the bakers had gone to lunch, perhaps. But they had left the door ajar on thick triangular slices of light, the tables smudged and fingered with it, lumps of it ready to be kneaded and, here and there, leftover chunks of it for wayfarers, surely, to take and eat (as I did).
light descends edibly,
forming into bread
morsel by crumb, and my noiseless tread
steals under window-white
ladders of dust
from table or altar, one radiant crust –
White loaves were left for St Cuthbert on the storeroom table at Lindisfarne by a young angel rescued from the snow: white bread being the food of aristocrats, melting and soft, rather than the chewy oaten bran of the poor. Their aroma was of lilies and roses, but whiter and sweeter than those: bread of heaven indeed. They were still warm, fresh-cooked, despite the long miles they had presumably fallen and the bitter cold outside.