by Ann Wroe
Ravilious gave his figures space to shine, but space was not necessary. The most densely crowded places could also produce this effect. Rabindranath Tagore’s childhood house stood (and stands) in the heart of Calcutta, in a warren of narrow streets not far from where the great Hooghly, or Ganges, swells slowly to the sea. Every way through is crammed with human and motorised rickshaws, coconut-milk sellers chopping mounds of green fruit, sculptors smoothing goddesses from the grey Hooghly mud, vendors of second-hand paperback crammer-books, glossy brown boys soaping themselves at hydrants, whining beggar girls with grubby hands and children on their hips, businessmen with briefcases cramming down kufti from a paper wrap, obese jewelled women on mobiles directing their drivers, chai-drinkers casting their clay cups to the ground, lean stray dogs padding with a purpose. Here, one day in 1910, Tagore stood at dawn on the veranda of the house in Sudder Street.12 Lawns and trees separated it from the jumble round about, the cries of mynahs and hooded crows mingling with the waking city. He had noticed, as Palmer did, that at dawn and dusk light became peculiarly beautiful and, as it were, inherent in trees and walls rather than the sky. That day, as the sun’s first rays stole through the branches of the garden, ‘the morning light in the face of the world revealed an inner radiance of joy’. Each human figure, too, sent out that radiance, so that two boys walking together, their arms nonchalantly round each other’s shoulders, suddenly revealed to him ‘the fathomless depths of the eternal spring of Joy’.
The monk Thomas Merton had much the same experience when he visited Louisville, Kentucky, one day in March 1958.13 He had left the rural simplicity of the Abbey of Gethsemani for this grimy industrial city on the Mississippi, bent on some errand that was, in retrospect, unimportant. Trappist vows bound him to silence. At the corner of Fourth Avenue and Walnut Street, in the heart of the shopping district (where a bronze plaque still marks the moment and the emotion) he was suddenly seized with overwhelming love and tenderness for the crowd around him. The girls especially, as they walked in the sunshine, were ‘as good as and even more beautiful than the light itself’. He had indulged ‘the illusion of a separate holy existence’ from such people, a ‘pseudo-angel’ life, when there was no distinction or separation; when God had become incarnate in each one. But in such a setting, a bald, sandalled monk on a city sidewalk, he foundered in blushing silence. ‘There is no way of telling people,’ he wrote later, ‘that they are all walking around shining like the sun.’
Blake thought there was. He had no hesitation in telling Mrs Blake that her moments of joy, as when he mentioned his Visions to her, made her ‘a flame of many colours of precious jewels’. ‘He whose face gives no light,’ he had added in his ‘Proverbs of Hell’, ‘shall never become a star.’ As usual though, Traherne was least inhibited about it. His childhood playmates had been ‘moving Jewels’ in the street; later his own congregation, those heavy, hearty, apple-cheeked folk, were ‘Glorious Hosts’ to him, ‘Spurs, Wings, Enflamers’. The sun beamed from their faces; he dreamed of robing them in red, crowning them with gold. In fact, there was no need after all to pluck down stars. ‘My Lims and Members,’ Traherne wrote,
when rightly Prized, are Comparable to the fine Gold, but they exceed it …What Diamonds are equal to my Eys; what Labyrinths to mine Ears; what Gates of Ivory, or Rubie Leaves to the Double Portal of my Lips and Teeth? Is not Sight a Jewel? Is not Hearing a Treasure?
In short, he was ‘an enlarged Seraphim’, or an inward Cherubim, ‘wholly celestial’: more excellent, and more pampered by God’s creation, than all of them.
Ravilious had read Traherne.14 His works were then, in a sense, new, rediscovered in a second-hand book barrow in the Farringdon Road in 1895 and republished in 1908. They struck a curious, other-worldly note in the nervy interwar years – a strange note too for Ravilious, whose more usual reading was Huxley, P.G. Wodehouse and H.G. Wells. But in the spring of 1935 he showed Traherne’s ‘Thanksgivings for the Body’ to Helen at Furlongs, and later enclosed part of it in a letter to her. A colleague had told him the poem was ‘something between Whitman and Blake’; Ravilious couldn’t see much Blake in it, but loved it anyway. He left it unclear whether the body he was thinking of was Helen’s – her lovely pink skin unsheathed from that ‘hairy’ coat, that spotted dress – or one of the luminous figures of his paintings, which barely touched the earth.
O Lord!
Thou hast given me a body,
Wherein the glory of thy power shineth,
Wonderfully composed above the beasts,
Within distinguished into useful parts,
Beautified without with many ornaments.
Limbs rarely poised
And made for Heaven:
Arteries filled
With celestial spirits …
He told her later, though, that he believed in the sort of ‘transfiguring’ relationship – described by Wells in Mr Britling Sees it Through – in which both he and she would become ‘perfectly beautiful’ to each other and to themselves, just as Traherne described. Helen told him she liked the poem ‘awfully’.
Those jewel-like human bodies might also have been clothed in light, in the beginning. Manichaeans believed that the first-created man had been armoured with it as helmet, breastplate and guard; in his struggle with the Prince of Darkness, mirroring light’s own eternal struggle, he had to leave this dazzling carapace behind. The Christian Adam was usually less well clad: in Vaughan’s words,
Like the Sun shine
All naked, innocent, and bright,
And intimate with Heav’n, as light;
He too, though, was not always naked in Eden, but was sometimes made to discard radiant robes as he left the garden. Hopkins, preaching to the poor of Manchester on a theme of St Paul, told them they had all been given ‘a white robe’ and ‘lightsome armour’ in the beginning. Bunyan’s Christian, struggling to regain that grace, acquired a ‘Broidered Coat’, given to him by ‘three Shining Ones’ on his way to the heavenly Jerusalem: resting in an arbour, he took a stunned ‘review’ of it, stroking the fabric that gleamed like them. It was perhaps not unlike Joseph’s coat of many colours, which caused the wheat-sheaves to bow down before this teenage shepherd with the sun, the moon and the eleven stars.
Glory of this sort was the natural vesture of those who wandered the heavens, like Milton’s Raphael, with six-tiered rainbows on their backs. But Newton had seen prismatic light round strands of his own hair, pulled from his head; and such light could float, too, about men and women, or more often round their shadows on the ground. Benvenuto Cellini in 1539 was the first to record it, immediately after his great vision of the sun.16 The splendour was visible round his head at sunrise and for two hours afterwards, then again at sunset. The effect seemed permanent, though he showed it only to certain persons, those fit to know. It was clearer round his shadow; clearer still when dew was on the grass; and clearest of all in Paris, where the French king had received him kindly, and where the air was less hazy than in Italy.
Bad boy though he was, Cellini took this as a sign that God had exalted him. So did Thoreau, who was in any case inclined to think that way: who wished to make no noise on the earth, no footfall on the gravel road, but rather a panther’s padding on grass. He often saw an aura playing round his shadow – thick trousers, straw hat, old music book for flower-pressing under his arm, jacket pocket bulging with journal, pencil, spyglass, compass, jack-knife, twine – as he strode along the railroad line near Concord, and each time ‘would fain fancy myself one of the elect’. A visitor confirmed that no halo appeared round the shadows of Irishmen, those poor beggars and railroad navvies whose improvement, Thoreau thought, required ‘a kind of moral bog-hoe’. They shone only round those of Americans. No wonder, then, that Whitman too reported so exultantly after a crossing in the Brooklyn ferry:
Saw the reflection of the summer sky in the water,
Had my eyes dazzled by the shimmering track of beams,
Look’d at
the fine centrifugal spokes of light round the shape of my head in the sunlit water…
Other rainbow lights moved faintly, a horseshoe shape on the dewy grass, in front of Jefferies as he stalked with his gun in the twilight-curtained woods. He was marked out (for what great purpose?) silently but with intent, as he marked out his game.
It could all be easily explained, Goethe wrote in his Theory of Colours.17 When the eye looked at shadow and then at brightness beside it, especially after sleep or rest, the boundary would break into rainbows, those ‘sufferings’ of light against the dark from which all colours came. This accounted for the outline iridescence of sunbeams as they pierced through leaves, and for the dazzling halo round a friend’s head as he talked to him against a grey sky. His own eyes made these effects.
They also, he declared, made the spectrum opposites that hovered beside colours: the blue-green flames near the ‘powerful red’ of oriental poppies at dusk in his garden in mid-June 1799, flaring out as he walked up and down conversing; and, alongside the tight scarlet bodice of the tavern maid who brought his beer, her lovely sea-green shadow floating on the limewashed wall. (He kept a tinted sketch of this among his private papers, enabling him with one sidelong glance to summon her true colours again.) Scientists called this effect diffraction: colours evoked their complements, accounting too for Hopkins’s hovering bluebells in the pale yellow sunshine of spring. Goethe explained it by saying that the eye sought completeness. So from sunshine it made a mess of blots, from buxom tavern beauty a creature drawn from mystery or from Elf-land, and from an ordinary man’s shadow an aura fit for angels, or so it seemed.
All this would have made sense to Coleridge, who ordered Zur Farbenlehre as soon as he could (‘I must buy the Book’), and may have read it in the German. All Goethe’s theories on light attracted him; he declared him the modern spokesman for ‘the most ancient Pythagorean theory of Color’, and heartily approved of the way he had offered ‘Counter-experiments’ to Newton’s. On the other hand, he knew that Goethe had not succeeded in converting ‘a single Mathematician’ to his point of view; and he felt that the prismatic spectrum had not been properly explained by either of them. Where he undoubtedly agreed with Goethe was on the desire for completeness of both eye and soul: that interdependence of light and dark that might connect his own brooding shadow, for example, with the radiance of Sara Hutchinson on one particular evening at Gallow Farm in Yorkshire as she sat with her head on her hand before the fire, her lovely shoulder, arm and white neck caressed by the brightness of the flames.
And he longed for ‘a glory’. A proper one, not just the half-hallucinatory luminosities and spectra brought on at bedtime by ‘2 pretty large Beakers of Punch’ or a red herring eaten for supper. A real wonder, like those ‘thousand silky Hairs of Amber & Green Light’ shimmering from the sun at Ullswater, or that halo round the full moon at Gibraltar, with a few stars sparkling in it like a garland or a crown. In Germany, in German, he wrote notes about the strange glow-and-shadow effects witnessed on the Brocken in the Harz mountains, where Goethe had set his witches’ revels in a maze of deceiving lights. Coleridge climbed it in May 1798 with a group of friends, never ceasing to declaim all the way on how to define the sublime.18 No Brocken-spectre showed up, however, only (on a second climb) a wild boar with a coronet of glow-worms round its rump.
Others elsewhere had more luck. From the Manchester Transactions Coleridge copied out the experience of John Haygarth, who saw in February 1780 his own glory cast on ‘a very white shining cloud’ trailing close to the ground in the Vale of Clwyd:19
I walked up to the cloud, and my shadow was projected into it; the head of my shadow was surrounded at some distance by a circle of various colours whose centre appeared to be … near the situation of the eye, and whose circumference extended to the Shoulders … It exhibited the most vivid colors red being outermost … all the colors that the rainbow presents to our view – The beautiful colors of the hoarfrost or snow in sun shine –
Coleridge also noticed at Keswick that the stone wall of one of the Wesleys’ Methodist chapels was inlaid with sun-reflecting ‘little blown water-filled, or solid Glass Balls or Bubbles’ in which each passer-by could see ‘his own shadow with a heavenly glory, & all the rest dark & rayless –’. The sight might almost have turned him to Methodism, if anything could.
The closest he came to such an apotheosis was on his voyage in 1804 from Gibraltar to Malta. It was April 27, a Friday. They were in a dead calm, ‘or nearly so’:
the Reflection of the Sun thro’ the Sails & Ropes like a Vase or a circular Plume of flames in tortuous flakes of bright sulphur-blue; cherubic swords of Fire – now blowing all one way, now dividing, now blossoming in a complete crater-vase (a lily flower!) – … My Shadow the Head in the center of the crater which now forms a Glory about my Head …
He tried to repress his excitement. ‘Hints taken from real Facts by exaggeration,’ he cautioned himself. Nonetheless, in the middle of the Mediterranean, S.T. Coleridge – seasick, constipated, tormented by rhubarb and bilge-water (‘I have found myself in a Bason always, sometimes on one side, sometimes in the Bottom’) – became, for a moment, glorious.20
Usually humbler things seemed to symbolise him. His candle, besides focusing light for his experiments and his passionate, disordered dreaming, made a good proxy for himself. The tallow of his body was consumed in living (up to a point, though never enough for vanity to be satisfied); the flame was his own breath, his life, with the colours of the spectrum sometimes luminous about it. ‘Halo round the Candle – Sigh visible,’ he wrote in 1796; and in 1810, again tormenting himself with memories of Sara by the fire and his failure, at that precise moment, to press his suit with her: ‘A Candle in its socket, with its alternate fits & dying flashes of lingering Light – O God! O God!’ In the immediate aftermath of Wordsworth’s humiliation of him over Lyrical Ballads, his imagination lay ‘like a Cold Snuff on the circular rim of a Brass Candle-Stick, without even a stink of Tallow to remind you that it was once cloathed and mitred with flame’. The words of Böhme might have suited the situation, vis-à-vis Wordsworth as well as God: ‘I am a very mean and little spark of His light; he may set me where he pleases, I cannot hinder him in that.’
Poet after poet made himself an everyday, usually struggling, version of light. Jefferies was almost alone in his proud, torch-like flame.21 Donne shone pathetically, a fading spill (‘We are Tapers too, and at our owne cost die’). Dorothy described Wordsworth ‘kindling’ after he had walked continually up and down the orchard with her, like a dull match eventually striking on a box. Clare was a flickering rushlight of the farthing kind, thrown on the pile in his cottage corner, ‘that have glimmered their day & are dead’; Hopkins was ‘sputtering but unextinguished’ as he signed off a letter to a friend. Whitman, himself more sun-like, also made ‘diffusing, dropping, sideways-darting’ sparks, like those that flew from a knife-grinder’s wheel, of a crowd of jostling, fascinated urchins in Lower Manhattan.
Sometimes, too painful to dwell on, light had bathed them and then gone. Even the heaven-dazzle of Traherne’s infancy had been blown out by ‘Contrary Winds’, leaving him in boyhood ‘Lost as a dying Flame’. Job recalled with sighs his youthful preservation, when God placed light like a candle on his head; it did not last to manhood, but the benediction was long remembered. A wick when ignited first staggers and resists, then steadies, with a holy calm. Thus Dante at the mid-point of Paradise was first blinded by light, then veiled tenderly in it, ‘to prepare the candle for the flame’, as Beatrice told him.
– as when, in the incense-cold dark of a church in winter, the six high candles on the altar are lit by the tallest altar-boy, the match flaring in its sconce at the end of a thin pole; under that rippling, attacking flame the wick of one candle briefly catching, the next fading, while in cassock and ghostly surplice he flits to and fro, stretching up half-unseen to the limit of the pole and of his arms; the first one out, the next strug
gling, until the waxing spark of one or two encourages the rest, and as he swirls down the altar steps he turns to see the still, triumphant settling of every point of light –
Six above him, the seventh his own.
Coleridge always found it more heartening to consider the flame alone.22 The longer he looked, the more it came to symbolise something deeper than bodily life and breath. Hence the notes he made on ‘Monday Night, 11 o’clock, 17 Dec [1804]’:
… the exquisite oneness of the flame makes even its angles so different from the angles of tangible substances. Its exceeding oneness + its very subsistence in motion is the very soul of the loveliest curve/ it does not need its body, as it were.
That ‘exceeding oneness’ had to hint at soul as far as he was concerned; for only there, or in God, or in perfect whiteness (to go by Newton) were the many made One. On November 15 1806, at half-past eleven at night, he called the regular, inner, yellow-white flame of his candle its ‘inner Soul’, and noted that it forced the unsteady outer one to combine with it for a moment: ‘& the whole flame became, for a second of a second, one/ and of the form of the inner flame’. The experiment was confirmed when a little later the inner flame, ‘beautifully amber-edged at times’, drew the outer one too ‘into conformity with its beauty’.
The child newly baptised, or his godparents, was given a flaring candle as a symbol of becoming light, holding it steady; and the symbolism also occurred from day to day, as far as Hopkins was concerned.23 At Stonyhurst on a winter morning in 1872 he could not help noticing as young Tommy, screening the taper with his hand across the table in the dark refectory at breakfast, became a sculpted mask of leaves of gold, from the fine cleft of his nostrils to the down on his cheeks: an image Fra Angelico might have painted. The boy became light. And lovers – for Hopkins, necessarily, married lovers – also transmitted it. As he walked the lanes at night alone, each candlelit window seemed the token of ‘Jessy or Jack’ sewing or reading there, the two together, or one awaiting the other. He thought of ‘to-fro tender trambeams’ piercing the dark, beams fine as filaments of twisted silk, each representing twining fingers and eyes’ eagerness, for he felt ‘a kind of spooniness and delight’, he confessed, about married love. When he sat inside, too, at evening, in his room at some college or another – a book on his knee, but his attention culpably distracted – an occasional lantern would move ‘along the night’,