by Ann Wroe
That interests our eyes. And who goes there?
I think; where from and bound, I wonder, where,
With, all down darkness wide, his wading light?
Men go by me whom either beauty bright
In mould or mind or what not else makes rare:
They rain against our much-thick and marsh air
Rich beams, till death or distance buys them quite.
In the Walden woods that light was Thoreau, tramping his way home or sitting, solitary and philosophical, in his tiny cabin where the japanned lamp shone on three chairs, two forks, but only one spoon. He felt as far from the life he had left as if he had voyaged to the Pleiades, the Hyades, Aldebaran or ‘Miss Cassiopeia’s Chair’; and his window twinkled in remote distance and silence among the pines, with just as fine a ray as theirs. The villagers of Concord often remarked that he must get lonesome down there, and want to be nearer to folks. To this he had two answers. First, ‘Why should I feel lonely? Is not our planet in the Milky Way?’ And second, even more carefree, ‘No more lonesome than the north star.’
Thoreau made a habit of pure living deliberately in order to shine. At the age of seven I was taught much the same: that after confession my soul would gleam like a polished mirror, bright enough for others to see.24 Confessions, as it happened, were held in the evenings, in a gloomy church called St Joseph’s in New Malden, in south-west London. It was approached first across greenbelt fields round the Hogsmill, where Jefferies had roamed years before; then through a small, scrappy avenue of trees, past the forced-apart railings that were my shortcut to the swings, though I did not confess that; then through roads of 1930s pebbledash houses and wide, silent verges.
My mother would take me. My tiny roster of sins confessed in the right nervous words, through the grille where the priest sat breathing as loudly as a steam train, I would emerge wildly shining, pure and good. I would skip home in the dark, though carefully, for new sins could waylay me craftily between the paving stones with small, snipping, muddy fingers, and one was Pride. On a night in December, in a thick pea-souper, we mis-felt our way out of the avenue of trees and ended up on the riverbank, slipping steeply on dark grass. I piped up: ‘Didn’t Jesus say I am the Way, the Truth and the Light?’ (No – not quite.) And it seemed at that very moment that a street lamp, though still shrouded in mucous fog, was switched on above us, powered by seven-year-old saintliness alone.
Men and women passing through the world might sometimes leave light behind them. An Irish priest, Brother Slattery, explained to Hopkins that the ‘candles’ or wicks of fire that hovered round graves were generally known in his country to be departed souls, unable to leave.25 Souls of the stillborn and unbaptised were especially prone to wander and deceive. These may have accounted for Clare’s ‘will o whisps’, unless the original Will or Jack was just an ordinary traveller benighted in the Fens, striving to beat back the blackness with his own beams. As it was, Clare always supposed the strange whisking flames, crackling like pea-straw, to be ‘a person with a lanthorn’ when he first saw them.
In ancient Greece Empedocles taught that the eye itself was made like a traveller’s lantern, fashioned by Aphrodite out of earth, water, air and fire and fastened with rivets of love. (Ideally fitted, then, to make the love-light world that Böhme’s God created.) It was then wrapped in soft protective coverings, ‘as when a man who intends to make a journey prepares a light for himself on a wintry night, and fits linen screens against all the winds, but light, being more diffuse, leaps through’ – as it would. Newton as a boy made a similar lantern of crumpled paper that folded flat in his pocket, to see with a soft-screened candle his winter way to school.
Empedocles meant, though, that in the case of human eyes the candle was already there. And others, too, believed it. In the seventh century the Welsh bard Taliesin, beautifully conflating Logos and Light, proclaimed that he had been ‘a word in a book … a light in a lantern … I have knowledge of stars/ That existed before the earth was made.’ Traherne’s body, too, was ‘a Lantern only’ to the Candle of Love set inside it. He had sensed it, so many times,26
Securd from rough and raging Storms by Night,
Break through the Lanthorns sides, and freely ray
Dispersing and Dilating ev’ry Way:
Whose Steddy Beams too Subtile for the Wind,
Are such, that we their Bounds can scarcely find.
On this theory inner and outer light worked together, and vision depended on the action between them. ‘The eye is formed by light and for light,’ wrote Goethe, ‘so that the inner light may emerge to meet the outer light.’ He went on (quoting an ancient writer, whose name he seemed to think unimportant): ‘If the eye were not sunlike, how could it see light at all?’ Or, in Blake’s couplet,
The Suns Light, when he unfolds it,
Depends on the Organ that beholds it.
Even in the womb, therefore, the forming eye prepared itself for radiant exchanges and combinations. Traherne described an infant’s eyebeams in the words he used for light itself: refined, subtle, piercing, quick and pure; faster than ‘the sprightly Winds’, far out-shooting ‘the Reach of Grosser Air’.27 Only through such ‘Spiritual Lamps’, he wrote, could angels see earthly things and could light itself have purpose. ‘The Sun in your Ey, is as much to you as the Sun in the Heavens,’ he told Susannah; ‘… It would shine on all Rivers, Trees and Beasts in vain to you, could you not think upon it’:
Had he not made an Ey to be the Sphere
Of all Things, none of these would e’re appear.
Besides, as he had assured her—perhaps encouraged by that ‘naked bodily’ experience that other hands primly expunged from his writings—‘You are as Prone to lov, as the Sun is to shine.’
In this buoyant frame of mind he would trot, ever sprightly, to his church at Credenhill. He would weave through his beloved orchards, his ‘silent Trees’ and ‘immortal wheat’, to find the sun already submissive on the lintel and humble on the worn flagstones. For, modest churchman as he was, he was more than the sun. That was ‘a poor little Dead Thing’ compared with both his all-seeing eyes and his soul – sweetly kept as any apple in an apple loft, well away from soft brown rottenness. (‘There’s no Contagion here.’) Within his breast he held, incandescent, his own portion of light: ‘a far more perfect Sun, nearer unto GOD in Excellence and Nature’.
Herbert agreed. As a lutenist, he was well aware of the strings in his heart and how they vibrated when he prayed. Though he might be only ‘a brittle crazie glasse’, like all men and women, were not those inward heartstrings as bright and fine as the beams of the sun? Might they not tangle together, then, as he formed his morning praises, ‘Till ev’n his beams sing, and my musick shine’?
There was no awe here, but a sense of confident equality with the sun. Blake felt it as keenly as anyone. ‘I can reach the sun with my hand,’ he would say, ‘if I stretch it out.’ In ‘The Marriage of Heaven and Hell’ of 1790 he flung himself into it, through the ‘fiery tracks’ woven round it by vast white and black spiders, to emerge robed in white with the works of Swedenborg in his hand. It was from Swedenborg (before he dismissed him as old-hat) that he learned the contrast between the dead Sun of Nature, forged by Los when he fell from heaven, and the living sun of the spirit. The showdown, as Blake told his friend Thomas Butts, came between Felpham and Lavant in November 1802, a mild enough day, as he walked to meet his sister.28 Los appeared then, from a grey thistle in the lane in front of him, ‘in all his power’, blazing and glowering in the sun he had made; but Blake, equipped with ‘the bows of my Mind & the Arrows of Thought … in their golden sheaves’, fearlessly defied him. He owed nothing, he told him, to his sun:
Thou measurest not the Time to me,
Nor yet the Space that I do see:
My Mind is not with thy light array’d,
Thy terrors shall not make me afraid.
Instead his life was fed by ‘Another Sun’, the spiritual Los
who had not fallen – though he had met him too, on Primrose Hill, when the blinding figure had snapped ‘Do you take me for Apollo?’ With him he had joined before, and meant to again, advancing in glory until ‘nothing can withstand the fury of my course among the stars of God’. Already his fingers were sparking, ray-like, with the thought of the work he could do.
Outer and inner sun could often seem mirror-close. The rising of one might herald, even spur, the dawn of the other. As Vaughan pointed out, this was the way things should be; and the right way round was that his readers should ‘Rise to prevent the Sun’:29
Walk with thy fellow-creatures. Note the hush
And whispers amongst them. There’s not a Spring,
Or Leafe but hath his Morning-hymn. Each Bush
And Oak doth know I AM. Canst thou not sing?
Palmer, though not naturally an early riser, knew that ‘most great men’ got up when the sun did; he regularly slept outside at Shoreham, or failed to sleep, to catch the gleams that were vital to his visions. Blake knew enough dawns to paint them continually, peopled by his angel-larks and by ‘an Innumerable company of the Heavenly host crying “Holy Holy Holy is the Lord God Almighty”’. Clare, reporting for volunteer duty, remarked that dawn was ‘a very late hour with ploughmen’. Blind Milton at dawn spoke his verses aloud, bringing them to birth as his night Muse left him. It was in those first rays that Chaucer and his daisy opened their eyes together. Turner would ask other artists if they ever saw the sunrise, implying that, by God, they should; in old age, wrapped in a blanket or a dressing gown, he would go up on his roof at Chelsea to watch the colours spread over sky and river. Faced with those dawn colours, Whitman felt his own vast soul breasting and embracing the world. Hence the ‘song of me rising from bed and meeting the sun’:
Dazzling and tremendous how quick the sun-rise would kill me,
If I could not now and always send sun-rise out of me.
Thoreau echoed him: ‘Of what significance the light of day,’ he asked, ‘if it is not the reflection of an inward dawn?’ At sunrise by Walden Pond, the fish stirring in the green lake, mist drifting from the firs, each morning a fresh spring for this ‘perfect forest mirror’, he felt himself able ‘to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look’.30
Perhaps writers are prone to think this way. I did so one grey afternoon, walking up Newmarket Hill. The track was that taken by young John Dudeney to care for his flock, his long shepherd’s coat loose around him, his nose in a Latin primer or a history book, though ever alert for small white-rumped wheatears breaking from the chalk. I was meant to be thinking too, but nothing was in my mind, except the steady thrum of boots on turf and the silly jingle of old tunes. The sky hung like a pall. I began to long for the sun to break through, just a little; and as I longed the sky opened, a crack among the clouds, and as I walked and willed it a slow sunset, rose-wreaths and embers, began to tinge, gather and spread. By the top of Brighton racecourse the sky was aflame from one side to the other, the sort of spectacle people run out of doors for; and as I reached the seafront I saw them, tiny gesturing figures with their cameras and phones, against the fire.
Preposterous though it seems, I was sure I had done this myself. As Thoreau said, there was something painterly in it: as if I was actually brushing colour into the sky, and with it (for it cannot be without it) light.
Of ashes once I wove a rose,
From cloud teased out a glowing flower,
And pinned them to the winter sky
Where, for one crimson-spreading hour
Their glory grew. My doing’s this;
Celestial painting is my trade;
There’s sometimes no effect of light
My busy thinking has not made.
And yet today that brush, the same
That flourished fire, disturbs in vain
The tall grey water, and a wraith
Curls down, like thought, to ash again
Coleridge felt this sun-power in his own fashion.31 ‘Deeply depressed almost to despondence’ by thoughts of Sara and home, pacing in his greatcoat on a flat Maltese rooftop in 1805, he watched the sun edge above the dusky horizon and felt ‘as I always feel, as if it stepped in quick upon the Scene/ occasioning a startlet … (a breath of air on the surface of Tranquillity)’. Frequent ‘startlets’ and ‘startlings’ were the natural result of the opium he took; but his heart and the sun, too, seemed strangely connected. He sensed, as Traherne had done, ‘the suddenness, the all-at-once of Love’ leaping up with the dawn and seeming to make up ‘fully half’ of the world’s visibility and beauty by its own power alone. In short, as he had asked himself before, ‘Why is Love like the Sun?’ And what was this ‘self-fed fire’ that sometimes seemed to burn up ‘the Earthly of my nature’ in boundless splendour? Another notebook held the clue. In the midst of his usual flood of reflections he had jotted down one clear phrase (though it was Sir Thomas Browne’s, and not his own): ‘Life is a pure flame and we live by an invisible Sun within us.’
He evidently liked that thought, corresponding as it did to his night-time musings on the candle on his table. The difficulty was that the candle flame, however pure, needed fuel and kindling to burn, and was in his own power, with his breath or the snuffer, to eliminate; whereas Browne’s ‘invisible Sun’ seemed to have a power independent of himself. He longed to account for, but could not account for, the nature of the light that seemed to live in him.
Many before him had been fascinated by the phenomenon of inner light, and what caused it. Presuming it physical, but not being sure, Newton saw ‘Fire … like the Eye of a Peacock’s Feather’ spring into his eyes when he pressed them at the corners.32 Getting bolder, he probed behind his eye with a bodkin; white and coloured circles shot up then, which he was unable to explain. Milton in his blindness (a fate he attributed partly to his brave evocation of light, for ‘May I express thee unblam’d?’) was tormented by disturbing, abundant radiance, mixed with dark colours, that burst forth ‘with violence and a sort of crash from within’ as he tried to settle to sleep. The colours then condensed to impenetrable blackness, mixed with ‘ashy light’, as though the two were bound up together. Coleridge supposed the inner light might live in his brain marrow, ‘as visible Light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel & other smashy matters’. And there was no doubt that opium enhanced it, as he recorded later, having taken ‘a considerable Quantity of ‘’: this time he saw ‘a spectrum, of a Pheasant’s Tail, that altered thro’ various degradations into round wrinkly shapes, as of Horse Excrement, or … still more like flat baked or dried Apples, such as they are brought in after Dinner’.
Contemporaries focused, more helpfully, on the light that played in imagination, memory or dreams. This appeared to be a species of daylight, sometimes dimmer, sometimes enhanced, which had certainly puzzled Newton, since it had no obvious physical source. Wordsworth’s daffodils beside Ullswater appeared to Dorothy like a ‘busy highway’; yet when William recalled them in the solitude of his study they were all the brighter for their inwardness, ‘[flashing] upon that inward eye’, becoming stars.33 More provocatively, in his thirties Blake claimed to have recovered the light of childhood he had lost for twenty years, an experience that made him ‘really drunk with joy … whenever I take a pencil or graver into my hand’. This ‘enthusiasm or rather madness’, as he called it, was what he saw his visions by. It was not linked to his ‘Corporeal or Vegetative Eye’, he insisted; that was something he just looked through, like window glass, or Empedocles’s lantern-screen. The medium he now saw by was surely close to the kinder, holier light Milton had prayed for against the ‘ever-during dark’ that surrounded him, that ‘Universal blanc’:
So much the rather thou Celestial Light
Shine inward, and the mind though all her powers
Irradiate, there plant eyes, all mist from these
Purge and disperse, that I may see and tell
Of things invisible to mortal
sight.
Coleridge was prepared, with Milton and Blake, to consider this light divine, but that was not quite the end of the matter.34 He was also preoccupied with an inner light that acted differently, unpredictably. Plotinus was his chief authority, in the fifth chapter of the Enneads, and he had copied the passage into his notebook. It was not lawful, Plotinus wrote, to ask where this light came from, ‘for it neither approached hither, nor again departs from hence to some other place, but it either appears to us, or does not appear’. And it was unwise to pursue it, though Hopkins, for one, tried:
Be shellèd, eyes, with double dark
And find the uncreated light.
Instead, it was necessary to abide in quiet until ‘it suddenly shines upon us, as we prepare ourselves for the blessed Spectacle, like the eye waiting patiently for the rising Sun’.
This light, Plotinus explained, was not ‘outside and alien’, but an ‘earlier’ light within the eye. Intellect had nothing to do with it, nor visions of any kind. In fact, nothing was revealed by it; the light itself was revelation, the shock of knowing, remote from the outer world. ‘Other objects are the lit, not the light,’ he insisted. This type was so pure, so unmingled, ‘that we are left wondering where it came from … and where it has gone. We say, “It was here. Yet no, it was beyond!”’ Like all light; and yet like none perceived in the normal way in the material realm.