Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

  Now have I therto this condicion,

  That of al the floures in the mede

  Than love I most thise floures white and rede

  Swich as men callen dayesies in our town …

  No devotion in him was more intense, for so tiny a thing.

  That blissful sight softneth all my sorwe …

  And y loue it, and euer ylike newe,

  And evere shall tyl that my herte dye …

  In dreams the daisy appeared to him as a princess crowned with pearls, for in French – an apt and lovely pairing – the word marguerite means both the flower and the precious stone. Around his time, the jeweller-author of Pearl remarked that he had lost his little dead daughter as a pearl ‘trendles’ (slips) into grass, and he glimpsed her in Paradise, also in a dream, with double rows of them sewn on her sleeves.

  In order to see the daisy’s ‘resurrection’, that first unfolding with the first light of the first morning in May, Chaucer’s poet would forgo sleep. Propped on an elbow, he would lie in the grass to see the daisy open, ray by ray, as the sun rose above the hill. Its petals were edged below with crimson, like the scattered clouds of dawn. These sleepings and wakings seemed synchronised, the flower’s, the sun’s and his own: for he felt his ‘hertes line’ sent out from him, as light from his eye, in response to what he saw. He also sensed a mounting dread, powerful as his love, that the daisy might not open and the sun, therefore, might not rise. In his dreams daisy and sun processed together as lovers, she in her green robes and petal-crown of ‘perle fine oriental’, he with angel’s wings and darts of fire; for though the sun was all light and majesty, she was his equal.

  The humble spreading of light by smaller flowers was something Coleridge, too, treasured.6 He recalled with real feeling the lowly white fumitory on the roofs of hovels in Scotland and the star-white potato flowers in the fields there, pretty as ‘the loveliest and richest flower Gardens’, and urged himself not to forget them. In Malta he was entranced by orange blossom that, like daisies, ‘oversnowed’ the ground. In his notebook he copied out all Chaucer’s lines about his best of flowers, together with the daisy-praises from William Browne’s Britannia’s Pastorals, ‘Fair fall that dainty Flower!’ He also jotted a memo to himself – having plucked a daisy he found blooming in the northern cold in March – never to pick a flower again, but to let it live and shine.

  Another small white flower, the edelweiss of the highest mountain peaks, became for Emerson the symbol of Thoreau’s rare purity of life. He did not truly understand why his friend spent so much time ‘with muskrat and fishes’ in the Concord swamps; he often condemned it as a waste of a fine intellect; yet seeing Thoreau botanising in his own woods, one day in 1858, Emerson understood him to be engrossed in something more than plants. In his eulogy for him in 1862 he remarked that hunters in Switzerland would scale the most dangerous cliffs to bring down edelweiss, and were sometimes found dead at the foot of them with their prize clutched in their hands. Its German name meant ‘noble purity’, and it shared a genus, Emerson said, ‘with our summer plant called “Life Everlasting”’. It seemed to him now that Thoreau was living in the hope of gathering flowers equally sacred and equally rare.7 The edelweiss perhaps most closely resembles the long-and-short sparkle of stars; that, and the white-flowered wild garlic, which sweeps for miles through the woods above Jevington in April in swirls of trailing, pungent leaves. As Jefferies said, ‘Straight go the white petals to the heart.’

  The Celtic Church celebrated such things. On the vigil of St Bridget’s Day, February 1st, an old sheaf of wheat roughly modelled as a woman was carried round the villages of Ireland and the Western Isles. Each young girl would fasten to it a crystal, a shell, a daisy or snowdrop; even – if the weather was brutal – a spar of ice. For Bridget, or Bride, was the Christian incarnation of an ancient goddess of light, and she was decked with all the signs of heaven-sent brightness associated with spring.

  Her special sign was the dandelion, ‘the little flame of God’ that both stared at, and tracked, the sun; she would appear at dawn with its yellow-rayed disc newly alight in her hand. This flower symbolised, in the old accounts, the gladness of children after winter playing at last outside (as the children of London a century ago would travel out to Kentish Town, then in the fields, to pick sheaves of drooping dandelions and buttercups, and ride back on the clanging tramcar with the sun wilting in their laps). Dandelions were Palmer’s special flower; he mourned when they were uprooted as weeds from his garden in Redhill. Even when their rays fade their thistledown heads make points of light across the fields, together with glittering dung beetles, dew on grass blades, darting tansy-flies: all the world ‘sprinkled and showered with a thousand pretty eyes’, as Palmer put it, and strove to paint it.8 As ghosts – tethered to a seed, dispersed at a breath – the flowers still shine.

  Telscombe churchyardApril

  Dandelion, dinted dazzle in the grass,

  sun-yellow yet, brave in your full brass

  flourish and flare of flowers;

  see here your fate, inwardly netting

  ghost-globes of gossamer, each fine cross-fretting

  pearling to pinpoints the escaping hours –

  I thought them unkempt among the graves at first: weeds which the sexton, like Palmer’s gardener, should have taken out. Later I found them most suitable for graveyards, perhaps nothing more so. Ravilious once buried the family cat in a wreath of dandelions, the sun underground, as in those Neolithic mounds near the Wilmington Giant; yet even picked and discarded and left in the dark, they form their perfect globes. Dandelions, as much as dwarf thistles, seemed to make up the clouds of thistledown Hudson saw in late summer on the Downs, so thick in the air, turning their glittering spokes towards the sun, that they appeared to be falling from heaven as much as rising from the ground. He had last seen the same thing in Patagonia, on the other side of the world. Thistledown as it drifts – bruising itself on clods and stones, somehow never quite landing – makes slow continuous revolutions, like a Ferris wheel or Fortune’s wheel, fickle as the stars. Coleridge, watching it in Cumbria in 1800, thought it flew among the mountains ‘like life’.9

  St Bridget was also the patron of cows and milking: of the dairy, with whitewashed walls and sanded floor; of the gleaming tin bucket with its foaming, slopping load, and the quiet gold crust of cream. Heavenly light was at home there, and made useful. On her grass farm in Connaught she had twelve cows to be cared for; as she milked, pressing her fair head to the broad, warm flanks, she would pray for butter in her kitchen, ‘the kitchen of the white lord’ or Christ, and for milk that was pure enough for him:

  Thou wilt give me milk from the top of the club-moss,

  And not the grey water of the sand-drift …

  Thou wilt give me milk from the heather tops,

  Not grey milk of the taste of rowan berries,

  But honey milk and white as the sea-gull …

  The cows gave abundantly, sweetly. Bridget’s ‘level lawn of kine’ became an Irish idyll, her ‘chalk-white starry sunny glen’ a poet’s dream. (Hopkins, confined to smoky Dublin in 1888, longed for a farm like hers in the western counties, with glow-worms and new milk.) In one corner Bridget kept her white wand, stripped from birch or willow, which conjured milk from the udders, white clover from the grass, cotton tufts from the bilberry-black moor and white-breasted oystercatchers from the shore, all her ‘signals’; in another stood her loom, with its white warp-threads. And with her white hands later she would churn the milk, stirring and chanting, setting the gold flakes dancing, until at last she could lift from the thin grey whey the dripping butter-globe of the sun.

  Light in its various heavenly-lamp guises could often be brought down to earth: sometimes by mere homely comparisons but sometimes, too, with a bump and a blaze. Young, eager poets often claimed to possess these lamps anyway. (‘The Skies were mine,’ cried Traherne, ‘and so were the Sun and Moon and Stars’; Hopkins told his mother there was no
one, no matter how poor, who was not already ‘owner of the skies and stars’.10) They could thus be packed up or pocketed or, in Jefferies’s words, treated like parlour furniture. St Bridget, not content with picking or churning the first sun of spring, hung her rain-soaked cloak on a sunbeam that spanned the room – what else was it for, indeed? – until, long after dusk, she allowed it to go. The beam bent, bowed, gathered itself from bowl and board, and vanished. She had mistaken it, she said, for a beam of wood, like one of those wheel-spokes of sunlight and shadow that sometimes roll slowly across fields or sky and pause, as though planted there. Hopkins, again, noticed ‘splays of shadow-spokes struck out from any knot of leaves where the sun was/ like timbers across the thick air’.

  It was the Greeks who first domesticated stars, tracing high above them not only heroes with their clutter of horses, belts and swords, but milk spilled in pale profusion across the sky (the thin, watery, bluish milk, flecked with froth, of goats pastured on dry grass and sharp herbs, bitter as the rowan berries of Bridget’s northern moors). Milton and Whitman saw the stars as wheat thick in the ear, of God’s sowing; a companion of Thoreau’s thought a poor man could find them ‘a kind of bread and cheese that never failed’. To Hopkins they were sheaves spilling out sparkling grain, as well as jewelled versions of his ‘May-mess’ apple blossom and the ‘mealed-with-yellow sallows’ of March. Having seen trees as stars, he naturally compared the heavenly lights to ‘wind-beat whitebeam’ and ‘airy abeles [white poplars] set on a flare’ – besides the goldsmith’s-haberdasher’s list he jotted in an early notebook:

  The sky minted into golden sequins.

  Stars like gold tufts.

  – – – golden bees.

  – – – golden rowels …

  Stars like tiny-spoked wheels of fire.

  Lantern of night pierced in eyelets …

  They ‘peaked’ in the sky, he thought suddenly. Peak with a sense of ‘peek’ in it.

  Altogether peak is a good word. For sunlight through shutter, locks of hair, rays in brass knobs etc. Meadows peaked with flowers.

  Stars might also be hanging lamps, low enough to be trimmed or winged by birds; they might be Blake’s silver and gold moths fluttering on nights of misty weather, or Herbert’s beams-turned-to-bees, among which he longed to ‘Glitter, and curle, and winde as they’. (‘Twiring’ was Hopkins’ word for star-dances, an old word for ‘winking’, in which twirls and gold wire combined.11) Vaughan, though dazzled by their ‘Emanations/ Quick Vibrations/And bright Stirs’, also saw them chalked on the sky like tailor’s marks. More often they were embroideries stitched into the black backcloth of the world, like the ‘tinsel’ of metallic and silk thread that Traherne had so admired when he was a foolish boy. It was thus possible to imagine walking, brushing away fireflies and sparking at heel and toe, among what Galileo called ‘the old and familiar stars’.12

  They could be plucked down, too. Surely winter elms, their bare branches scraping the January sky, dragged down stars with them – those pallid five o’clock stars that appeared half asleep through the teatime window – and wore them as a dowager pokes pins in her grey hair, not too many, not too bright, here and there. On Hampstead Heath my favourite copper beech, tossing at night in a winter gale, seemed held together only by a few stray, wavering light-grips, the flotsam of the constellations.

  Now when the bare night branches heave

  With January wind, and intricately weave

  Around me watching shadows of the far

  West-wheeling constellations, each pale star

  Stipples the tree, and me, in place of leaves

  If winter stars clung to twigs, in summer leaves replaced and hid them. Jefferies was surprised once, when a leaf moved on the pear tree that overhung his window, to find a star behind it, ostensibly as pickable and close. (‘I feel that there are infinities to be known,’ he wrote, ‘but they are hidden by a leaf.’) Venus shone ‘like an apple of light’ above Hopkins in Birmingham, while Antares in the Alps was ‘a bright crab-apple tingling in the wind’. Each was potentially tangible, as well as unimaginably removed. Whitman, meanwhile, let his gaze roam among ‘quintillions ripen’d … and quintillions green’ in the tangled orchards of the night sky.13

  Stars might also be jewels for the taking, only slightly out of reach. Coleridge’s son Hartley, aged five (his stretching for the stars as an infant already tenderly noted by his father), planned to reach the ‘pretty Creatures’ on a ladder, once he was a man. There he would ‘pick ’em out with a knife’, as he might pick the raisins from a pudding, and ‘give them to Anny Sealy’. Perry Como, a 1950s crooner, put a falling star in his pocket and kept it there; when he felt for it later it seemed to have decayed to mere romantic glitter, as one might find a pocketful of crumbs.

  Or coins, perhaps. A character from Spanish fiction, the miser Torquemada, reimagined the stars as pesetas, duros and half-duros scattered on the dark baize of a money-counter’s desk. He could put them in piles, tip them tinkling into his scales, bite them to test if they were true (their taste, tingling on the tongue, part metallic, part stone). And he could wonder what they might have earned, at five per cent interest every century, over all the years they had shone there since the very beginning of time: since God had stamped His seal on them and shaken them out, too many to count.

  But it was Traherne who, in the most uninhibited way, found his treasure there.14 His aim was to be ‘Clothed with the Heavens, and Crownd with the Stars’. This majestic feeling, he wrote, was the natural state of anyone who understood that God’s creation had been made expressly for him. As St Bridget might have said, what else was it for? He could pull on the sunshine like a cloak over his cheap leather clothes (with which he was perfectly content, as with his ‘10 pounds a yeer’ to serve his little parish). Casually, he could fetch down a star as a buckle for his ‘old’ high-crowned hat, the only possession he bequeathed in his will, save for his beloved books. He lived frugally, mostly on bread and cheese and apples, for he had been taught that ‘He lives most like an Angel that lives upon least Himself.’ But he could sometimes dine, also like an angel, on butter and cream, and presume that he owned – locked in a cupboard, pressed in a case – his own heavenly diadem, shut up safe.

  Out of their sphere, stars were sometimes huge. In Revelation the star called Wormwood, the only one named, fell ‘burning as it were a lamp’ on the third part of the rivers of the world, turning them so bitter that men died from drinking them. (As a child I loved the idea of this star, wiry as a grey thorn, dangerous too, yet necessarily – because a star – winged and beautiful.) In the Ethiopian Book of Enoch seven transgressing stars ‘like great mountains’ were left trussed together in a terrible desert place because ‘they did not come out at their proper times’. More often, though, they came down as unfearsome things that fitted in a hand.

  One fell earthwards on my uncle’s farm on Romney Marsh when I was seven or so. No one saw it drop; but Uncle picked it up from a furrow in the field below Teddy Lord’s house, brushing off the dirt with his big, black-nailed thumb, and knew what it was. It looked a little like a fresh-dug potato, but smoother and much heavier. He broke it in half with a hammer; the inside was silvery and striated, raying out from a central core like a strange filamented fruit. It was placed in the glass-fronted cabinet called ‘the Museum’ in the sitting room, together with a Samian-ware dish and blue-green glass beaker from a Roman burial found in a ditch; a dozen stems and bowls of delicate clay pipes; a golden guinea from the reign of Queen Anne, picked up as if also fresh-fallen from the grass beside a gate; and the egg box in which my cousins had arranged, in cotton wool, the mottled, mostly-blue birds’ eggs we had carefully stolen over the years, blown end downwards. I was not surprised our meteor-stone had fallen near Teddy Lord’s, for though the old man had died long ago his collapsing house, a corrugated-iron shack, might well magnetise a star. Besides, on a nervous trespass I had found among the rubble, in a wooden box, inside a small
blue tin originally for Carter’s Liver Pills, a dulled silver coin with strange swirling marks. I did not recognise these as Arabic then, and long preserved the coin as a token from another world.

  In November 1872 Hopkins recorded a shooting star ‘[radiating] from Perseus or Andromeda’ that fell one night on Stonyhurst College in Lancashire, where he was teaching: ‘sending the kitchen boy with a great todo to say something redhot had struck the meat-safe over the scullery door with a great noise’.15 But Hopkins could find no fragments in the yard, and only ‘the slightest of dints as if made by a soft body’ in the meat safe, ‘so that if anything fell it was probably a body of gas’. Smaller still, microscopically, stars grew in their quains across his bedroom window, north to south, when frost formed in winter: stars that were also veined leaves, flowers and trees. More scrunched on hoar frost mornings under Thoreau’s boots, ‘the wreck of jewels and the crash of gems’. Jefferies compared these brittle frost-stars to the tiny shells of the chalk, but this time fallen, as it seemed, from unimaginable heights. Clare watched them shoot lines of ice from weed to weed on the banks of the little brook where he walked, lines from the Book of Job repeating in his head:16

  Hast thou entered into the treasures of the snow? or hast thou seen the treasures of the hail,

  Which I have reserved against the time of trouble? …

  Hath the rain a father? or who hath begotten the drops of dew?

  Out of whose womb came the ice? and the hoary frost of heaven, who hath gendered it?

  A star fell into Herbert’s lap once; he jumped up, brushing it off in fright like a spark from the fire, only to find that it began to speak in a small, disturbing voice. Another, he supposed, must have fallen into the communion wine, sweetly dissolving there like a piece of sugar. More stars lodged in Thoreau’s coat at the outset of the New England winter, ‘not cottony and chubby spokes … but thin and partly transparent crystals’:17