Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

  about a tenth of an inch in diameter, perfect little wheels with six spokes … or rather six perfect little leaflets, fern-like… raying from the centre…

  A divinity must have stirred within them before the crystals did thus shoot and set. Wheels of the storm chariots. The same law that shapes the earth-star shapes the snow-star. As surely as the petals of a flower are fixed, each of these countless snow-stars comes whirling to earth, pronouncing thus, with emphasis, the number six. Order, … six, six, six.

  On second thoughts, they did not ‘pronounce’. As they melted on his rough woollen sleeve he thought they sang, as the farther stars seemed to do.

  Smaller yet, minutely small, they also came down in legions through the air. In December 1784 Gilbert White found ‘icy spiculae [little wheat-ears] floating in all directions, like atoms in a sun-beam let into a dark room’. He supposed at first that these were ‘particles of rime falling from my tall hedges’, but realised they could not be. What were they, then? Ravilious, commissioned to engrave the scene, made the starry visitants more or less interchangeable with leaves, webs and snow, creation dissolving round the forms of still and mystified birds.

  So stars could be snow, coins, gas, or humbler still: embers, cinders, sparks on a hearth to be swept up and thrown away. They could be ashes and dust, as men were. Just stones, thought Traherne in extra-buoyant moods, as small and close as the apple of his eye. The answer to Captain Boyle’s plaintive question in Sean O’Casey’s Juno and the Paycock, ‘what is the stars, what is the stars?’, was ‘Any blocks, coal-blocks; blocks, coal-blocks!’ shouted by a vendor in the street outside. In a Dublin tenement, it seemed, a star strayed to earth would be hustled from the rug with brisk brush and dustpan, or stamped on with a boot.

  They might fall no more safely over water. On Coleridge’s various voyages to the Continent whole galaxies danced, sparkled and perished in the foam by the ship’s side.18 (‘What these stars are, I cannot say – the sailors say, that they are Fish Spawn which is phosphorescent.’ Or fish scales, he mused elsewhere; or ‘bodiless Forms, colour but not substance … moonlight Elfins?’) From the heath-slopes of the Quantocks, skylarks trilling overhead, he also counted ‘diamonds’ through half-closed eyes on the distant sea, each one immediately fading too. (This glare of light off water, so much brighter than from metal, puzzled Newton, who observed it in a fragment of ‘Island crystal’; it was not understood until, very much later, scientists deduced that when light fell perpendicularly to a surface, its own reflection bounced back as dazzling interference.) Similar star-falls in water fascinated Thoreau, flashing off Walden Pond as ‘an infinite number of eyes, to see for you and report the aspect of things each from its own point of view’. ‘A hundred separate mirrors vibrating’ was how Jefferies described them, each inclined at a different angle and ‘casting a tremulous flash into the face’: mirror to mirror, as when creation began.

  Even ice could not trap stars, if they fell. The boy Wordsworth, in his clumsy wooden skates by night on Windermere, ‘cut across the reflex of a star’

  That fled, and, flying still before me, gleamed

  Upon the glassy plain …

  On the Ganges at Benares by night tiny lights on leaves float out from the hands of worshippers, rocking among the wreaths of half-drowned marigolds, to make a constellation all across the sleeping breast of the Mother River. The same effect was observed by Whitman on the Delaware at night as the shad fishermen paid out their nets, marking the line with ‘little buoy lights’, or candles on floats, ‘undulating delicate and lonesome on the surface of the shadowy waters’.19

  He could follow both false stars and true from the Camden night ferry, where the amiable Mr Whitall, an amateur astronomer, pointed things out to him and answered his questions. But any more facts than that – ‘the proofs, the figures, the charts and diagrams, to add, divide and measure them’ – made him ‘tired and sick’:

  Till rising and gliding out I wander’d off by myself

  In the mystical moist night-air, and from time to time

  Look’d up in perfect silence at the stars.

  He did not care to ‘dismount’ them, or the planets he hailed as stars, but nonetheless they were acquaintances, each one displaying a different character of light. Red Mars walking the heavens as Lord Paramount; Sirius, ‘calmly arrogant’; Lord Jupiter, ‘dominating, majestic’; Saturn, distant and pale; Venus, ‘languid and shorn of her beams, as if from some divine excess’; and ‘vast-spread, roomy Orion, chief histrion of the stage, with his shiny yellow rosette on his shoulder’. Through that ‘loose-clear-crowdedness’ he seemed to stride, as if through the streets of Manhattan.

  It may well have been under his influence that van Gogh began to paint his own star-filled skies, as lit up and bustling as the promenades of London or Paris.20 It was after reading Whitman that he began to feel the close companionship of the stars, ‘greenish, yellow, white, rose … flashing like jewels’, hanging low over the sea or calling to him down the chimney; and began to wonder why he should not travel to them as easily as the train could take him to the ‘black dots’ on metropolitan maps.

  They remained, however, street lamps to him, or at best a curious, jostling crowd; he did not grant them the familiarity of names. Whitman always did, and one in particular. With Venus he had a special understanding, or she with him, ‘as if [she] held rapport indulgent with humanity, with us Americans’:

  O western orb sailing the heaven,

  Now I know what you must have meant as a month since I walk’d,

  As I walk’d in silence the transparent shadowy night,

  As I saw you had something to tell as you bent to me night after night,

  As you droop’d from the sky low down as if to my side, (while the other stars all look’d on,)

  As we wander’d together the solemn night …

  Venus was forewarning him of the assassination of Lincoln, though he did not know it then, nor how to interpret both her closeness and her distance: ‘you, off then, aloof, moody as myself …’

  Other poets, though, claimed the same special tie to her. Clare, on his ‘love rambles’ after Patty in the Helpston fields, declared that he kept company with Venus at evening and morning alike, greeting her as ‘the Shepherd’s Lamp’ that he took along with him. More innocently Coleridge, when a schoolboy at Christ’s Hospital in the East End of London, came back from swimming in the New River to find Venus, too, fresh-bathed and watching him, and fell in love with her. Up on the leads of the school roof, high above the City, he kept solitary vigil at night with all the stars, the only beauty he knew.

  The Plough, or Charles’s Wain, or the ‘seven stars’, was also widely hailed as a friend. It was known to all observers in the northern hemisphere, parked in its homely ground near the North Star with the blade lifted from the furrow, and the work done. (In Africa, Asia and America it was a gourd, ladle or dipper, and hung in Whitman’s sky ready to be plunged in meal tub or water barrel.) Other constellations tended to be ignored by artists. The Plough, though, sparkled delicately on Blake’s fairies as they danced in enchanted woods, and hung low and brilliant as the moon over Palmer’s fields; he depicted it so often that he thought he might make instant money, in a bad patch, by painting it with sun and moon on tavern signboards.21 It lingered, too, in Turner’s dusks, bravely pricking those immense yellow skies. Hopkins saluted it, ‘all golden falling’, just before sunrise. Ravilious, who counted it among his ‘objects of delight’, engraved it hovering over rooftops in London suburbs, or peeping in at attic windows where careless girls lay asleep. Once he submerged it in an inky dewpond at the foot of Wilmington Hill, below the Giant, as the astrological bull-sign of Taurus gambolled heavily nearby. The Plough was abandoned there as in his other paintings rollers, harrows and ancient tractors were left to rust in the rain.

  As easily as birds became stars, those seven stars could become birds. W.H. Auden turned them into squawking geese; Cecil Collins set them floatin
g on a pond, seven swans, towards which he and his wife Elizabeth floated in a rowing boat. Stars could be rounded up, like hens, with a flap of an apron, or gathered in with bread like the doves of the Pleiades. ‘Flake-doves sent floating forth at a farmyard scare!’ Hopkins wrote of them.22 They were tame. The medieval Irish author of The Ivy Bower had ‘stars to my wish’ around his little hut, as Thoreau did around his tiny cabin at Walden.

  Nor did they necessarily shine in silence. To me, as to Thoreau, there often seems to be a faint, far song in them, closest to the needle-notes of linnet or goldcrest or the first crow of the cock, and continuously sounding. Yet it is also a near song, cold at the base of the skull; a song silver-sharp, curtain-quivering, blown past the window at which the thin rays scratch –

  And where one quill, drifting from unknown height,

  Writes on the dark in quaver-strokes of light –

  Occasionally there is a vast chorus of such voices, as I heard one night when I was about fourteen. We were staying in the camper van on a seaside site, possibly in Ireland; I had crept out, avoiding the washing of plastic plates and the chaos of putting up the roof bunks, climbed a little hill, and found a deserted playground with a single swing. It was too high, but I half jumped, half pulled myself on to the wooden seat. I was quite alone. I swung slowly, the chains creaking, while above me and around me – as it seemed – the huge vertiginous sky of stars wheeled and sang with a single, steady, collective note. Though incalculably far away, the sound, and the presence of the sound, also seemed to creep under my skin. Without perfect pitch, I could not tell in what key the stars sang (unlike the evening in Brighton when I ran home to prove, with a tuning fork, that the sea sang in F). But it was hard to leave, in case as I climbed off – the old seat banging in the small of my back – I should somehow disturb it or, worse, end it.

  ‘In the holy eloquent Solitude,’ wrote Coleridge in his notebook, the rest of the household asleep, ‘… the very stars that twinkle seem to be a voice that suits the Dream, a voice of a Dream, a voice soundless and yet for the Ear not the Eye of the soul …’ And, specifically, for his own soul.23

  The moon, whether new or old, never sang. It moved across the sky in chill silence, an object rather than a character of light, at least on first appearance. In its first quarter it might be a feather adrift from bird, or hat, or pillow. As it waxed it might be a hair-slide, badge or brooch, or a lamp beside the door. This, too, could be reached with a ladder by an enterprising child; Blake engraved such a one, pointing to the lovely crescent and shouting ‘I want! I want!’ Failing a ladder, parental arms could lift a child closer, as when Coleridge ran out into the orchard plot with the weeping Hartley to show him the moon: ‘he ceased crying immediately – & his eyes & the tears in them, how they glittered in the Moonlight!’ The babe was as enchanted as when he had seen long icicles hanging from the eaves with their drops shining in the thaw, each drop with a tiny lunar crescent at its tip.

  Light’s moon-guise was often heavily domestic. It might, according to the quarter, be cheese rind, a knife blade, a leather needle, a melon slice (‘paring of paradisaical fruit’, wrote Hopkins), or a hook to fish him up and part him delicately, ‘leaf and leaf’, like transparent mica stone. Coleridge wrote a soliloquy for the moon as a demented housewife, complaining that poets had turned her into a sickle, a barley mow, an ostrich egg, a bowling ball and ‘the half of a small Cheshire Cheese’. One night she was ‘a round of silver completely lost in egg-tarnish’ which then, with cloud-scouring, came good again; Dorothy Wordsworth watched her rise ‘large and dull, / Like an ill-cleaned brass plate’. A slattern, then, in cahoots with idle maids, who might turn a coin in their pocket at the new moon to make their small wealth increase.

  The moon’s true size was for centuries a riddle. If near and lamp-like (or perhaps, as Heraclitus declared of the sun, ‘the breadth of a man’s foot’), rings might be run round it or hoops thrown over it, as with jars of sweets at a fair. It might float down far enough to tumble into ponds from which hungry village idiots, or jolly Welsh huntsmen, would try to fish it out again. (‘Three Welshmen – moon in the water’ Coleridge added to a list of jokes.24) At Piddinghoe outside Newhaven, where the muddy Ouse winds round the base of a wooded hill and a neglected, round-towered church, moon-fishing was once a local habit, with ‘fools’ guarding barrels of smuggled brandy in the creeks by pretending to fish there and save the moon from drowning. The moon in water could be laughingly jumped over, as it was by Traherne’s small brother Philip, who delighted to have leapt it in ‘a little pearly River’ on the king’s highway – despite the danger of a fathomless fall into the upside-down sky. It could also be pissed on from sea cliffs by stout drunken men in frock coats, as Pieter Bruegel the Younger painted it, the crescent moon still lovely under the silvery impertinent stream.

  At least one medieval poet saw the moon as a tramp: a wanderer of the hedgerows with lantern, dog and knotted handkerchief of crusts, the man in the moon brought low. Often the branches caught it fast, and thorns tore it, while the ragged clouds snagged its long, rough hair. Even beauteous Diana, shooting her silver arrows, thrashed her way through bushes and thickets. For unlike the other lights of heaven the moon was entangled deep in earth’s affairs, and with the intimacy and emotion of a woman. She controlled the running of tides, the sprouting of seeds and the menses of girls; the souring of milk, the catching of herring and the dulling of copper bowls. A stone called selenites (Thoreau noted) grew whiter or darker with the phases of the moon, and men reported that their beards grew fastest, in rhythm with her influence, every fourteen days.25

  But the moon was far less often vigorous than pale, sick and swathed in shawls. Her pockmarks, which the ancients too had noticed, were proof of unwise liaisons and amours. Blake called her ‘leprous’ once, and Hopkins at fifteen described her as ‘pale with piteous dismay’, seeking only a place to die. In crescent form, waning, she can seem to clutch with a fingernail the giddy slope of the sky; Coleridge detected ‘a melancholy something’ in her then, and a curse in her last crooked look at the earth. At harvest time, reddish and barred with low cloud, she can look like a rouged courtesan behind the slats of a Venetian blind. Whitman, seeing her in that season, thought her blotched face was swollen with tears.

  Galileo had first played ungallant with the moon, intruding with his telescope to point out the spots and craters on her.26 Yet he did so in a series of six beautiful small watercolours, swift and borderless on a single sheet, using the newish technique of chiaroscuro to show her as both light and dark, half hiding. Pliny the Elder said long looking at the moon had induced the shepherd boy Endymion to love her, as she him; and Galileo may have been drawn into the same intrigue. His last studies of her in his near-blindness involved lunar libration, or the ‘most marvellous appearance’ of the way she moved, swaying and tilting in the sky, flirting still.

  This was the last thing he observed of her:

  That when she turned her face to him, she moved

  To left and right, up, down, and to the side,

  As if she understood him and approved.

  Coquettish then, she leaned a little way

  To glance at him across her shining shoulder,

  Daring a smile; he could have stroked her cheek

  If he had been both livelier and bolder.

  He saw this too: that when she climbed the sky,

  Sculpted, some said, of phosphorescent stone,

  She shone with borrowed and reflected light

  That was some part the Sun’s, but more his own.

  The last treatise of his old age was on the secondary light of the moon. No, he declared, she was not made of Bologna stone, nor lit by Venus, but was given that ghostly glow by the light of the earth – which was thus a heavenly body itself, and a member of the company of the stars.

  On a stormy December night in Brighton, walking home to my flat, I had a typically strange encounter in which the moon was involved. I consigned it to
the notebook as soon as I had struggled indoors.

  Tonight a woman I didn’t know approached me in the street. She was perhaps forty, blonde, with a strained and windswept look, wandering alone. ‘I know this is really random,’ she burst out as I passed, ‘but have you noticed how beautiful the moon looks tonight?’

  It was indeed very beautiful: haloed in a clear sky, with Coleridge’s star or two beside. The new moon with a bright star, Ravilious wrote, was ‘really rather lovely and surprising’ every time.

  We stood and gazed, and talked more about it; how especially striking it seemed in its stillness, when the wind was fierce and the sea roaring.

  When we had parted I looked at it again, and all had changed. Tattered clouds were surging across, the aureole had gone, and now the moon struggled upwards like a refugee, her waif-child lost, dishevelled in the noisy darkness, wandering alone …

  For with the moon serenity is fleeting and the outcome is always in the balance, as it is with us.

  Thoreau was deeply impressed with that struggle between the moon and the clouds.27 It seemed to him that the war was conducted especially for night owls like himself. The moon rebuffed the dark like a lamp set in an apartment or carried in by a woman, shining specifically ‘for us’. But there was much more, he told readers of the Atlantic Monthly in November 1863, to be learned from her:

  Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanscrit? What if one moon has come and gone, with its world of poetry, its weird teachings, its oracular suggestions, – so divine a creature freighted with hints for me, and I have not used her, – one moon gone by unnoticed?

  To avoid that mistake he walked often by moonlight, and let her bright tide enter his thoughts. For there was such a tide, he said, that poets could feel. After his own immersion he sometimes slept a deep, sweet, besotted sleep, like Endymion. On his rambles with the moon the fields and trees seemed flooded, as though by a general inundation. He could not see the path, but somehow felt it; could not see the bottom of the grass but sloughed through it like water, fumbling still, out of habit, for huckleberries in the bushes. Though her light was often diffuse and pale, he noticed it reflected more sharply from particular stumps in the forest, as though moon-seed were being sown in chosen places. Whitman in Washington, more surprisingly, watched her move through the White House, hanging the columns and porticos with ‘hazy, thin, blue moon-lace’ and carpeting the marble in white. But neither man learned a word of the moon’s ‘Sanscrit’. No more did Coleridge, though when the moon came ‘dim-glimmering thro’ the dewy window-pane’ in 1805, he found himself reaching for ‘a symbolical language for something within me that already and forever exists’. Goethe, in his own poem to the moon, described her wandering not in the sky but through ‘the labyrinth of the breast’.