by Ann Wroe
Times change, and we change with them –
Faith, like the breath of life, once departed never returns –
By chance, not intent –
Oh life of mine so full of toil, how brief your happiness, how fleeting your tranquillity in the chill of winter –
My careless care hath brought me to that pass/ What is, shall be, and wishe yt never was
Penses de Moy, wrote one ‘TG’ (Sir Thomas Gerard) beside a careful engraving of a pansy, for thoughts. His sunlit quip was thrown away on readers who might have no notion who he was. A man as a thought; thought as a flower; the flower delicate and bending, already fading out of the light within a window past which new hotel guests wheel their luggage, shouting at one another about car keys and theatre tickets, and never think to look his way.
Glass, too, would not last. There was no perfection or long life in it. Newton’s prisms, as he complained, were never quite pure and whole – as men were not. At Haddon Hall, not far from Buxton, a local glazier scratched his message on a diamond-shaped pane with fine, northern emphasis:
That man nare Lived
nor never Shall
that did all well
& had no fault att all
Yet since glass both transmitted and reflected light, the comparison suggested a body that was translucent as well as frail. ‘A Mortal Worm … translucent all within’, was Blake’s formulation. ‘What Heavenly Light inspires my Skin’ wrote Traherne on St Bartholomew’s Day, the feast of a saint who was flayed alive, as he observed his own flesh glowing with inner fire.2 It seemed to him ‘a temple of ETERNITIE!’ in which an angel lived and moved. Herbert described God striking rainbows from the stone of his heart, his body being glass; Vaughan’s flint-heart, under God’s steel, sparked off poem after poem of transparent, breathless devotion. Donne, having also incised his name on a windowpane with his diamond ring, hoping to draw in thereby the power of the reigning stars, marvelled that glass should be ‘As all-confessing, and through-shine as I’.
The fascination persisted. Newton recorded that William Halley, he of the comet, many fathoms deep in a diving bell ‘on a clear Sunshine Day’, saw the upper part of his hand illuminated by the sun through water and glass to the colour of a damask rose, while the under part took on the green reflections of the water. He seemed, in short, to assume a strange transparency. Light played such tricks at the surface, too. In August 1867 Hopkins, on holiday in Devon and lying in the grass, noticed a curious exchange, a sort of melting, between his body and the light. As he held up his hand (fingers splayed a little) against the pure Mary-blue sky, brightness invaded the ‘four fingergaps’,
swarming and blushing round the edge of the hand and in the pieces clipped in by the fingers, the flesh being sometimes sunlit, sometimes glassy with reflected light, sometimes lightly shadowed in the violet one makes with cobalt and Indian red.
He had tried the same with a petal – he did not say of which flower – to find it ‘diapered out by the worm or veining of deeper blue’, just as ‘white-rose clouds’ became mistier against the invading sky. Now, with his own flesh, the operative word was ‘glassy’. (Jefferies too, a few years later, watched the sunbeams gleam on his fingernail ‘like a prism’ and fall on his hand until he could feel the sun-life entering him.) Hopkins, lying there, found himself wondering at his own translucence.3 Some time later, shielding a candle, the effect was even more startling: the middles of his fingers and the knuckles dark as ash in the bright vermilion of his hand, while his veins swarmed like ‘juices of the sunrise’.
The image was bizarre, but in his world all things inevitably dissolved into elements, essences and light-and-shade: the ‘dappled-with-damson west’, the ‘drop-of-blood-and-foam dapple’ on blossoming apple trees, ‘pied-and-peeled May’. Men too (usually men, seldom women) broke into surf and flowers and light. The sailor, for example, pitched from the sinking Deutschland ‘through the cobbled foam-fleece’, soldiers ‘fretted in a bloomfall’, Harry Ploughman’s ‘wind-lilylocks laced’; and, in an unfinished fragment, a young man refined entirely into sunlight and the gleanings of a walk along the hedge:
Then over his turnèd temples – here –
Was a rose, or, failing that,
Rough-Robin or five-lipped campion clear
For a beauty-bow to his hat,
And the sunlight-sidled, like dewdrops, like dandled diamonds
Through the sieve of the straw of the plait.
At twenty-three, hiking in the Alps, Hopkins decked his own sun hat with harebells and gentians ‘in two rows above like double panpipes’.4 The flowers made him, too, ‘sunlight-sidled’. Clare noticed this effect when, with other boys, he raided wheatfields for poppies or blue cornflowers to make cockades for their hats when they played soldiers; Ravilious experienced it when he and John Nash went out to lunch in London in May 1936 ‘wearing sprigs of “Jew’s mallow”, a lovely yellow flower and looked gay and like a flag day in Kensington’. The same elation transfigured a released prisoner who bounded past W.H. Hudson on the flinty, hilly road from Rodmell to Southease near Newhaven, a fistful of yellow flag iris stuffed in the breast of his ragged old coat, boot heels springing with the joy of being out; as well as the long-haired downland shepherd boy who, in the midst of his grassy kingdom, had ornamented his grey cap with a big, woolly, purple thistle flower, which ‘gave him a strange distinction’. From that thistle flower, before too long, stars would form and drift away.
Perhaps the oddest transfiguration was one I glimpsed on a November morning beside the main line from London to York, approximately in Clare’s country: a cheerful scarecrow leaning his long shadow across the bare, flat, cold fields, while gold-foil streamers flashed and flew from his jacket.
Seen from the trainNorthamptonshire (perhaps)
Base metal to gold
may occur unawares –
take this scarecrow, old,
tilted, grey, who scares
nothing; torn suiting
rags against the rain,
tired arms saluting
ploughland, sky, train;
yet gilded pennons flutter from his breast,
while, close at hand, five swans alight and rest …
The streamers of foil were presumably pinned on for the same reason that old CDs are strung on wires over currant bushes: to dazzle threateningly, and keep the birds off. They exalted him. Yet they did nothing to deflect the swans, who gathered in the next field as though he had called them with a sweep of his broken hat and wide arms of invitation. Perhaps they were his swans; for too many as they were, and waddling awkwardly among cabbages, they were certainly not mine.
Palmer, writing yet more admonitions to himself in his notebook, remarked that if he wished to put human figures in his landscapes it was best to dapple them with darkness and light, matching the chiaroscuro of his trees, rather than giving them a solid bodily shape (‘figures most beautiful under this effect’).5 Turner had already discovered this, and gone way beyond it; in the raging white and yellow of his world, all forms and figures had virtually become light. This seemed unnatural and impossible, when viewed coldly on the walls of the Royal Academy. Yet I saw the same effect on Parliament Hill on a day of high summer, when a sudden wind whirled the white undersides of birch and poplar into a storm of confetti across the path, and amid them a girl came down the hill reading a letter, her body shivered into fragments by flying green shadow and white glare. Wind is optional; the same dappling and dissolving can be seen, as Palmer painted it, on a woman in a garden in the heat of summer, standing perfectly still.6
In Palmer’s etching of The Lonely Tower from Milton’s ‘Il Penseroso’ (a favourite with both him and Hopkins), two more dreamers lay beside their flock under the scattered infinity of the stars. They were shepherds in work-worn clothes and shapeless, brimless straw hats. Their gaze was fixed on a dark tower where ‘the Platonist’, by lamplight, sat reading Hermes Trismegistus. The shepherds, in their thoughtful stil
lness, seemed to mirror his studies, but they needed no illumination. Their bodies were flecked, as the heavens and the fields were, with an infinitude of points of light. This, Palmer wrote, was the charm of linear etching: ‘the glimmering through of the white paper even in the shadows, so that almost everything either sparkles or suggests sparkle’. In Claude’s etchings, he thought, the effect was exquisite, like ‘moving sunshine upon dew, or dew upon violets in the shade’. It marked, too, for Palmer, the glimmering through of the angelic and the divine. The shepherds hinted at Milton’s cherubim, ‘all their shape/Spangl’d with eyes’, and it was richly suggestive that these seemed to move behind his Milton etchings, and tenderly gaze on him.
This was yet another lesson he had learned from Blake. On one of his early visits to him – after he had tremblingly kissed the bell-pull at 3 Fountain Court off the Strand, ‘the chariot of the sun’ as he thought of it – he found Blake printing off his woodcuts for Thornton’s edition of Virgil’s ‘First Eclogue’. These were the only woodcuts the Interpreter ever made. Lost for words, Palmer inspected them: these ‘visions of little dells, and nooks, and corners of Paradise’. A windswept tree reached for the waxing moon; a stream flowed, by night, past a deep-eaved cottage; the shepherd-heroes of the Eclogues, Colinet and Thenot, debated in the fields and by the fire. The small, dense, dark prints, deep-cut and flecked with the burin on boxwood, showed landscapes and figures outlined, touched and vivified by light, ‘such a mystic and dreamy glimmer as penetrates and kindles the inmost soul’. Those were the same ‘thousand pretty eyes’ Palmer had already worshipped everywhere in Nature, scattered in the fields and hung in the ancient elm that had swayed outside his window.7 Here, called into being on Blake’s press, they gleamed through the black ink, completely unlike ‘the gaudy daylight of this world’. The effect is as beautiful even on thin, foxed wartime paper, as in my treasured Everyman edition of Gilchrist’s Life of William Blake, picked up cheap in a Brighton junk shop: a book that also has a title-page design of Blakean arrows by Ravilious, and his endpapers of webbed and blazing suns.
Palmer was given a sheet of four Virgil proofs to take away, ‘impressions taken there … by [Blake’s] own hands, and signed by him under my eyes’. They were stored in the ‘Curiosity Portfolio’, his heart’s delight. Ever after he strove to get the same effect, especially in his etchings. He was not tempted to try wood-cutting for himself, finding the shadows too dark and without variety, though ‘the sparkle of its light is joyous’. He fretted sometimes that he cared so much for those little specks of Paradise that they stopped him considering the larger picture, ‘the full sweep of a great brush’. But no sooner had he thought that, than he was pondering the best way to achieve the same ‘glimmering’ and brilliancy in watercolour as Blake had done, as in the luminous figures he had painted to illustrate Dante.8
The immanence of light in scenes and bodies could also be suggested in other ways. Blake deeply admired Fra Angelico, calling him ‘a saint’, partly out of envy for the way he laid on gold; but Angelico’s murals for the monastery of San Marco in Florence, which Palmer visited on his honeymoon in 1837 and revered for their ‘humble, heavenly love’, no longer made use of gold to portray light. Gold, in fact, was almost absent from this place, where the Medicis among others laid their worldly wealth aside. Instead, light was inherent in the smoothness, silence and simplicity of things. It shone from the vellum page St Dominic sat reading, one finger pressed to his lips; from his pale forehead, full of thought; from a stone floor, columns, walls; and especially from the rapt and watchful faces of assembled saints and the plain, unshadowed colours of the robes they wore. This smoothed-out light, sometimes seen lingering in the deep sky at evening, was described once by Dante as ‘fire behind alabaster’. Blake recreated it in his later copper engravings by rubbing away, with a burnisher, the network of etched lines with which he had once caught outer, visible, play-around light.
Palmer too learned from this older, quieter style. His paintings often included small figures grouped in the middle distance. Typically, in the amber softness of his evenings, they were walking home along a path, or gathering in corn-thick fields to cut or glean the harvest. Their bending bodies were clothed in white, and shone. Kilvert reported similar scenes in his diary, and sensibly explained them as women stripped to their petticoats to work better in the heat. In Palmer’s paintings, though, the daytime heat had gone, and the harvesters did not seem earthly any more.9 They moved freely and without self-consciousness, hints of sunset or moonrise bronzing their naked arms and burnishing their hair, like creatures fallen from heaven. (‘The petty coat intense white,’ the teenage Palmer noted to his satisfaction.) The men worked in shirts or smocks, also gleaming, and in shapeless hats bleached white by sun and rain. Here and there a glinting sickle reflected the low sickle moon. Hopkins paused a long time in a gallery before a similar watercolour of a young man mowing in his shirt, blazing with sweat and effort: ‘a great stroke, a figure quite made up of dew and grace and strong fire’, as any angel would be.
The angels Blake famously saw, walking among the sheaves in the fields at Lambeth (singing ‘Mercy, Pity, Peace’ over the new-mown hay and the brown haycocks), may well have been such men and women. They went laughing, cussing, arms and legs scratched by the glassy stubble, throats dry and eyes reddened in the dust; but in regular order, bowing earthwards, and clad in white raiment, like the heavenly host. A jug of harvest beer (the worst drink in England, Jefferies said, reputed to be muddy water stirred with a besom) then became a vessel of ambrosia; a satchel of dry bread and onions, manna in the desert; a cotton bonnet the halo of a heavenly creature, ribboned and rayed around the sunburned, singing face. Children, in the cornfields or out of them, slumbering or tumbling, were framed with angelic curls. Van Gogh lamented to his brother Theo that nineteenth-century men and women could not be painted ‘with that something of the eternal which the halo used to symbolise’.10 Yet he found his own way to express their ‘divine beauty’ in colour by, for example, contriving the richest possible blue background behind a girl’s fair hair. ‘I get a mysterious effect,’ he reported, ‘like a star in the depths of an azure sky.’
More random transformations could also occur. On late-autumn nights John Clare, working as an apprentice in the kitchen garden at the great house at Burghley outside Stamford, sometimes lay down to sleep under a tree in the park.11 In winter, similarly, he might slide into repose in the fields closer to home, because ‘I had taken too much of Sir John Barleycorn & coud get no further’. If the night was cold, with a frost, he would wake to find his whole right side sheeted and diamonded with light.
It was a winter season just like this
at Stamford, in the park, that he lay down,
his pockets full of snail-shells, and next day
rose up half-rimed. His one side fustian brown,
beer-stained and worn, the other dazzling white
drapery of angels; one side his paper, pence,
used handkerchief, a crust, the other frost-bright
pearls, diamonds, opals. See, by the lordly fence,
close to the glistening ranks of armoured grass,
his shadow-body sprawling in the leaf-lace
left behind; hear now the early-morning bells
stroking and cloaking him with Sunday grace.
He ached, and that side was never right afterwards; but he glittered. He was a country ‘clown’, knowing no place but Helpston and the fields about it, reduced to dullness and red-faced silence in the presence of strangers, especially those whose marble floors echoed to the banging of his hobnailed boots. But now he was transmuted, a creature of sparkling ice – as the common trees turned beautiful when they were cloaked in ‘magic foliage’ by the frost, and the ‘spire points’ of grass, in a winter freeze, ‘Shine whitend on their northern side’. The lowly foddering boy, too, struggling to the cowsheds ‘with straw-band-belted legs’ and a brown beaver hat jammed on his head, beating his fi
ngers against the blast, was ‘all attired in the brilliancy of a snowstorm like some supernatural prospect just stept out of the Arabian Nights Entertainment’:
When in huge fork-fulls trailing at his back
He litters the sweet hay about the ground
And brawls to call the staring cattle round.
Traherne’s local ploughman at Christmas, in ‘gayer Weeds and finer Band,/ New Suit and Hat’ and ‘neatest shoos’, was transformed as he sang in Credenhill church, his breath like incense smoking round him.
Ravilious also drew and painted bodies made mostly of light. No spiritual conviction lay behind this; the constant service-going and sermon-battering of his boyhood had instilled in him mostly silent embarrassment, and a determination not to set foot in church again if he could help it. Just before Christmas in 1938 he hugely enjoyed a heaven charade, ‘capering with sheets and harps and halos of cardboard – I loved playing a string harp’. But that was just a bit of fun, like ‘progressive ping-pong’ round the kitchen table, or the village cricket-match tea with its ‘wicked-looking cheap cake’.
At its simplest he just liked bodies unburdened by clothes, and in Essex once in winter not only swam naked with friends in the River Pant but played catch-as-catch-can nude round the garden afterwards, ‘pale apparitions in the yellow fog’. The lightness and ghostliness extended to his work. In his murals his characters danced and flew, unconstrained by walls or roofs and no more tethered to the ground than seaside kites. On paper, too, they were weightless, and not quite connected to the earth. They might be in naval rig and waders, inspecting Kentish mudflats for mines; they might be riding half-vanished bicycles down the high street of Great Bardfield, his home for a while, or running out to watch fireworks. Their faces were featureless, and their bodies shone. Passengers cramming on a London bus, top and bottom deck, lost their lower halves to light. Other bodies he left as white space, as he often left his flocking birds. On the ground they imposed no weight, only stippled or cross-hatched shadows: shadows made of light, as the old engravers knew. From rooms and scenes they had often just gone – a sunbeam, a shade – leaving a coat on a hook, a table set with butter, bread and mismatched cups, a chair pushed away. Or they were caught in uncertain movement and ready to move on, like the small bright clouds that sailed above them, in regular order, across the sky.