Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

  There is a Grain of Sand in Lambeth that Satan cannot find

  Nor can his Watch Fiends find it;

  Tis translucent & has many Angles …

  Every angle is a lovely heaven …

  Thirty miles to the west of Felpham, the chalk cliffs at Eastbourne come down to the sea. This is the less elegant part of town. Beyond the Holywell tea chalet the beach gets scrappy, with metal lock-up beach huts and high groynes between mounds of shingle. But the cliffs cascade to the beach in a muddle of elder, privet, honeysuckle, guelder rose, silverweed, foaming pink and white valerian and tall, ornamental mats of grass. Among all this lie huge straight-edged boulders of newly fallen chalk, from which signs warn you away. The pebbles on the beach, almost all pure white, are beautifully rounded into eggs and ovals and blinding in the sun. And Holywell itself is something of a miracle, because out of the chalk abutting the beach, just above sea level, flows a small but constant freshwater spring. It is almost as surprising, in this perennially dry and porous stone, as a sudden flight and shriek of swallows.

  A faded wooden board inscribed in wobbly capitals advertises this as a holy well. Whether it is or not, no one knows for sure. The name is pronounced ‘holly’ round here, denoting simply the well by the holly tree. Locals take the water in bottles and say that, when it settles, it tastes good enough. That it is curative is unlikely; doctors say the chalybeate spring has no healing properties. But it still sings loudly and sweetly in its pebble bed. The peculiarly smooth moulding of the chalk around it would have fascinated Ravilious, supple as the plump arms of the nymphs and goddesses he painted in his murals, or as the dreaming clouds above his hills.

  For some the spring has become a place of pilgrimage and devotion. They leave bead necklaces and candles here, with random shells and heart-shaped pebbles arranged on shelves of rock. But most visitors pause only briefly, to fill their bottles and splash their faces. Wash me, and I shall be whiter than snow. They are more interested in the huge black granite rocks piled just beyond, towards the sea. On these you can scramble, perch, jump and lark around over pitched slopes and abysses, dangerously to and fro. These rocks, like those on the Brighton undercliff, are not from hereabouts. By a blue southern sea, under a southern light, their crystals of northern quartz and mica flash out like diamonds.

  Up on these rocks a toddler in a striped T-shirt totters on an incline, unsure whether to go forward or back; a long-legged girl in ballet shoes tries to catch up on Facebook, no hands holding on to the granite slabs, her blonde hair teasing across her face; lads in jeans holler, topple and photograph each other, spilling cans of Carling, while their plastic football bounds away for miles; and an old couple picnic prudently at the base, with a thermos and a bag-for-life from Asda, carefully handing each other sugar, teaspoons and milk in a screw-top jar.

  ‘Every angle is a lovely heaven,’ Blake wrote. Each one made a prism to take in or send out light; and as Newton found, any veining in the glass, or lack of polish, or ‘inequalities in the Substance’ made no difference to that principle. Light pierced through and flung out colour, diamond bright, from the least and transparent parts of everything created. And its wild, sharp, zigzag career, starting out from infinite space, was completed by the human eye and, some thought, the human heart.

  Beyond the figures on the rocks a myriad stars, fresh-falling, flash from the waves and die and form again –

  And a single yacht – there is always one – cleaves the sea like a blade.

  NOTES

  REFERENCES FOR QUOTATIONS

  Since most of these works are available in many different editions, references are mostly given by original sections or dates of journal entries rather than by page numbers. Particular thanks are due to Christopher Whittick for sending me copies of Ravilious’s letters, some of them unpublished, from the East Sussex Archive.

  ABBREVIATIONS

  AHP The Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, Painter & Etcher. Written and edited by A.H. Palmer, 1892

  CP The Prose of John Clare, ed. J.W. and Anne Tibble (Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1951)

  DC The Divine Comedy

  HH Notebooks & Papers of Gerard Manley Hopkins, ed. Humphrey House (OUP, 1937)

  LLD Eric Ravilious: Landscape, Letters and Design. In 2 vols; ed. Anne Ullmann, Christopher Whittick and Simon Lawrence (Fleece Press, 2008)

  N Notebooks of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ed. Kathleen Coburn (Pantheon Press): Vol. 1 (1794–1804); Vol. 2 (1804–1808); Vol. 3 (1808–1819)

  PL Paradise Lost

  SPVL Samuel Palmer, 1805–1881: Vision and Landscape, ed. William Vaughan, Elizabeth E. Barker and Colin Harrison (Exhibition catalogue, 2005)

  SS Silex Scintillans

  WBW William Blake’s Writings, ed. G.E. Bentley Jr. In 2 vols: Volume II, Writings in Conventional Typography and in Manuscript (OUP, 1978)

  THE WHITE STONE

  1 Jefferies: The Open Air (Chatto & Windus, 1913): ‘Sunny Brighton’

  2 Hudson: Nature in Downland (J.M. Dent, 1932), pp. 39–40; 15. Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress, Section 8

  3 Bunyan: A Book for Boys and Girls, or Country Rhimes for Children. Psalm 51: 7

  4 Ravilious: to Helen Binyon (hereafter HB), 9 Aug. 1935 (LLD 166)

  5 Ravilious: to HB, 23 July 1942. White: The Natural History of Selborne, Letters X, XVII and VII. Ravilious: to HB, 30 Jan. 1936 (LLD 197)

  6 Glimpses of Our Ancestors in Sussex (online book): ‘Communication of John Dudeney to Mr R.W. Blencowe’

  7 Revelation 2: 17

  8 Traherne: Centuries of Meditations, 2.67; 3.3; 4.60; ‘The Demonstration III’.

  9 Jefferies: ‘Hours of Spring’. Ravilious: to Diana Tuely (hereafter DT), 13 June 1938 (LLD 365)

  10 Jefferies: Cited in Samuel J. Looker and Crichton Porteous, Richard Jefferies, Man of the Fields (Baker. 1965), p. 211; Story of my Heart (Longman, Green & Co. 1883), Ch. 1. Clare: Journal, 15 Nov. 1824

  11 Clare: Journal, 7 Jan. 1825; Later fragment (CP, p. 252)

  12 Clare: ‘The Journey from Essex’ (CP, pp. 244–50); ‘The Autobiography’ (CP, p. 32)

  13 Jefferies: ‘Hours of Spring’; ‘The July Grass’. Böhme: Confessions, X. Jefferies: ‘The July Grass’

  14 Ravilious: Tirzah Ravilious, Autobiography (LLD 92)

  15 Traherne: Christian Ethicks, ‘Of Knowledge’; Whitman: ‘Song of Myself’, 453–54; 100–102; 90–94

  16 Whitman: ‘Song of Myself’, 490; Hopkins: letter to Bridges, 18 Oct. 1882

  17 Hopkins: ‘Pied Beauty’. Jefferies: The Open Air, ‘The Pine Wood’; ‘Nature and Eternity’.

  18 Whitman: ‘Song of Myself’, 165–66, 394. Clare: ‘The Fate of Genius’

  19 Thoreau: Journal, 30 May 1853; 10 Sept. 1860; Walden, or Life in the Woods, ‘Economy’

  20 Thoreau: Journal, 12 March 1842. Böhme, Christ’s Incarnation, XI

  21 Clare: ‘To my Oaten Reed’. Herbert: ‘Employment’. Blake: Letter to John Flaxman, 21 Sept. 1800; Letter (with Catherine Blake) to Nancy Flaxman, 14 Sept. 1800

  22 Clare: ‘The Mores’

  23 Traherne: Hexameron; Centuries, 3.3; ‘The World’. Hopkins: Early Diaries, 1864 (HH, p. 8). Milton: PL IV, 980–83. Clare: Shepherd’s Calendar, ‘March’. Hopkins: Journal, 23 July 1874

  24 Jefferies: ‘Wheatfields’; The Open Air, ‘Saint Guido’. Edward Thomas: Richard Jefferies, His Life and Work (1909), p. 215. Jefferies: The Old House at Coate. Palmer: The Sketchbook of 1824, ed. Martin Buttin (Thames & Hudson, 2005), pp. 175–76, 2, 52

  25 Palmer: SPVL, pp. 128, 142–43. Ravilious: to HB, 9 June 1935 (LLD 146)

  26 Ravilious to DT, 14 Jan. 1940; to Peggy Angus, 22 July 1939, 2 Aug. 1939. Dorothy Wordsworth: Journal, 24 Nov. 1801; Dante: DC, Paradiso, Cantos XXXIII 85–87 and XVIII 28–33

  27 Thoreau: Journal, 8 Feb. 1841; Walden, ‘Where I Lived, and What I Lived for’, and ‘Solitude’. Clare: Journal, 1 Feb. 1825; ‘The Progress of Ryhme’, 282–84. Traherne: Centuries, 3.3

  28 Herbert: �
�The Affliction (1)’; ‘Employment (2)’. Job 30: 19–20

  29 Hopkins: Journal, 24 Aug. 1868. Clare: ‘Fen Description: Autumn’ (CP, p. 242)

  30 Jefferies: ‘January in the Sussex Woods’

  31 Clare: ‘The Autobiography’ (CP, p.25). Hopkins: Journal, 1870 (HH, p. 133)

  32 Hopkins: ‘Binsey Poplars’; Journal, 17 Oct. 1873. Jefferies: ‘Wild Flowers. Whitman: ‘Song of the Open Road’, 7

  33 Whitman: Specimen Days, ‘Thoughts under an oak – A dream’ (1878). Thoreau: Walden, ‘Baker Farm’. Clare: Journal, Christmas Day 1824. Thoreau: Journal, 18 March 1858; 15 June 1840; 19 June 1843

  34 Rilke: ‘Advent

  35 Hopkins: ‘God’s Grandeur’; letter to Bridges, 4 Jan. 1883; Journal, 17 Sept. 1872

  36 Hopkins: Journal, 13 July 1863; ‘Barnfloor and Winepress’; Journal, 9 July 1868; 11 July 1866; 4 Sept. 1868; 19 July 1866; 9 July 1874

  37 Hopkins: Journal, 19 July 1872; Untitled, ‘As Kingfishers catch fire’; ‘Commentary on the Spiritual Exercises of S. Ignatius’; Journal, 12 Dec. 1972; 14 March 1871; 1 May 1871; 22 April 1871

  38 Hopkins: ‘Epithalamion’; Journal, 16 June 1873; ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’, st. 8. Milton: PL IX, 577–78

  39 Traherne: ‘The Enquiry’ V; ‘The Odour’. Palmer: AHP, pp. 180, 175; SPVL, p. 214

  40 Jefferies: ‘Nature and Books’; The Old House at Coate. Clare: Autobiography (CP, p. 12), 1

  41 Blake, Notebook, p. 7 (WBW, p. 927). William Stukeley: Memoirs of Sir Isaac Newton’s Life, f. 15r (The Newton Project, online)

  42 Milton: PL IX, 705–07, 835

  43 Jefferies: JE, ‘Nature and Books’. Blake: Letter to Butts, 23 Sept. 1800. (WBW, p. 1542). Traherne: Centuries, 3.3. Palmer: AHP, pp. 15–16; 1824 Sketchbook, pp. 2, 81–82

  44 Jefferies: ‘Nature near London’

  45 Ravilious to HB, 12 May 1938 (LLD 357). Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress, Section 1

  AMONG THE BIRDS

  1 Thoreau: Journal, 21 Sept. 1840. Blake: The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, ‘A Memorable Fancy’

  2 Jefferies: Cited in Looker & Porteous, op. cit., p. 210; ‘Wild Flowers’; The Nature Diaries and Note-Books of Richard Jefferies, ed. Samuel J. Looker (1948), p. 244. Newton: Opticks, Book 2, Part III Prop. v; Bk 3, Part I. Jefferies: ‘Hours of Spring’; ‘Out of Doors in February’. Clare: Later fragments (CP, p. 251)

  3 Hopkins: ‘The Sea and the Skylark’; Letter to Bridges, 26 Nov. 1882 (asterisk indicates a footnote in the original); Journal, 22 April 1871. Blake: ‘Auguries of Innocence’

  4 ‘Milton’, Book the Second, passim.Palmer: AHP, p. 280

  5 Dante: DC, Paradiso XX, 73–75. Palmer: AHP, p. 168

  6 Coleridge: N 3314; ‘Answer to a Child’s Question’; Letter to Godwin, 1802; Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Part 1, 75–78; N 2345, 2494. St Columba’s birds: see Brian Morton in The Tablet, 16 March 2013

  7 Coleridge: N 2054, 2556. Hopkins: Journal, 30 May 1873. Hudson: Nature in Downland, pp. 173–74. Clare: List of Birds: Swifts (CP, p. 278)

  8 Thoreau: Walden, ‘The Beanfield’. Hopkins: ‘The Windhover’

  9 Clare: Nature Notes, ‘Hawks’ (CP, pp. 196–97). Jefferies: ‘Forest’ Coleridge: N 3400. Messiaen: Preface to ‘Quartet for the End of Time’, and video interviews

  10 Hopkins: ‘Spring’. Thoreau: Journal, 22 June 1854. Whitman: ‘When Lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d’, 13. Hudson: Nature in Downland, pp. 240–41. Clare: ‘The Eternity of Nature’

  11 Emerson on Thoreau: The Atlantic, Aug. 1862. Edward Thomas: ‘The Unknown Bird’; ‘Aspens’; ‘Roads’

  12 Hopkins: ‘Peace’. Dante: DC, Paradiso XVIII, 73–111

  13 Coleridge: N 582

  14 Jefferies: The Open Air, ‘The Pine Wood’. Hopkins: ‘Spring’

  15 Clare: List of Northamptonshire Birds (CP, pp. 261–91). R.S. Thomas: ‘A Thicket in Lleyn’ (poem); ‘A Thicket in Lleyn’ (prose), in Britain: A World by Itself (various authors, 1984). Coleridge: N 1851

  16 Messaien: video interviews. Collins: William Anderson, Cecil Collins: The Quest for the Great Happiness (Barrie & Jenkins, 1988), p. 58. Clare: Journal, 2 March 1825

  17 Ravilious: to HB, 24 July 1935 (LLD 163n); 27 Jan. 1935 (LLD 105). Irish poet: ‘The Scribe in the Woods’ from The Finest Music: Early Irish Lyrics, ed. Maurice Riordan, p. 4

  18 R.S. Thomas: ‘A Thicket in Lleyn’. Blake (William and Catherine): Letter to Nancy Flaxman, 14 Sept. 1800 (WBW, p. 1538). Ravilious to DT, 18 Dec. 1938 (LLD 397). Clare: Journal, 9 Oct. and 16 Nov. 1824

  19 Traherne: Select Meditations, 3.65

  20 Vaughan: SS 1, ‘Christ’s Nativity’ Williamson: ‘Midsummer Night’; ‘Star-Flights of Swifts’ from The Labouring Life (1932); The Lone Swallows (1922), p. 120

  21 Coleridge: N 1635. Edward Thomas: ‘Cock–crow’

  22 Coleridge: N 2086. Thoreau: Journal, 7 Feb. 1841

  23 Dante: DC, Paradiso XXIX, 12; Vaughan, SS 2, ‘Cock-crowing’; Hopkins: Journal, 17 Nov. 1869. Einstein: Autobiographical Notes, ed. Paul Arthur Schlipp (Open Court, 1979)

  24 Clare: ‘The Journey from Essex’ (CP, pp. 247–48). Emerson: Anecdote from Charles Eliot Norton. Dante: DC, Paradiso CXII, 29–30

  IN THE BEGINNING

  1 Palmer: AHP, p. 386. Traherne: Centuries, 1. 1

  2 Ravilious to HB, 30 Dec. 1936 (LLD 277). Grosseteste: Hexameron (On the Six Days of Creation), trans. C.F.J. Martin (OUP, 1999), Part Two, I–III

  3 Hermes Trismegistus: The Divine Pymander, 1.4. Ravilious to DT, 1 March 1939 (LLD 405). Milton: PL III, 6

  4 Hopkins: Meditation of 7 Nov. 1881. Böhme: Three Principles, XVI. Ravilious to DT, 3 Sept. 1938 (LLD 377). Traherne: Centuries, 4.80

  5 Whitman: ‘Noiseless Patient Spider’. White: Selborne, Letter XXIII. Coleridge: N 2166

  6 Grosseteste: Hexameron, Part Two, X. Bacon: Perspectiva 1.7.1. Dante: DC, Paradiso XXIX, 13–18, 25–30. St Paul: Ephesians 5: 13

  7 Coleridge: N 1999, 2344

  8 Böhme, The Signature of all Things, XI. Traherne: Centuries, 2.78; 4.25; ‘The Vision’. Hopkins: Journal, 24 Feb. 1873

  9 Hopkins: Journal, 1 Aug. 1868; Feb. 1870; Early Diaries (HH, p. 49); 12 Dec. 1872; 17 Sept. 1872. Traherne: Centuries, 3.3, 2.67; ‘The Apostacy’

  10 Traherne: Centuries, 3.55. Clare: ‘Autumn’ (CP, p. 243). Jefferies: The Open Air, ‘Wild Flowers’. Rich: Alfred W. Rich, Water Colour Painting (1918), p. 35. Hopkins: ‘The Windhover’; ‘Harry Ploughman’. Jefferies: The Open Air, ‘Sunny Brighton’

  11 Blake: ‘Descriptive Catalogue’ (WBW, p. 861). Grosseteste: Hexameron, Part Two, X. 2,4. Traherne: Centuries, 3.35

  12 Blake: Jerusalem, 54. Goethe: Conversation with Eckermann, 1808. Bede and Jerome: Grosseteste, Hexameron, Part Two, IV. Milton: PL VII, 248–49

  13 Dante: DC, Paradiso XXXIII, 85–87. Grosseteste, Hexameron, Part Two, I. 1. Dante: DC, Paradiso XXX, 85–86; XXXIII, 108

  14 Pearl, sts 88–90. Galileo: A. Frove and M. Marenzana, Thus Spoke Galileo (OUP, 2006), p. 414. Hermes Trismegistus: The Divine Pymander 7

  15 Herbert: ‘The Bag’. Bunyan: Pilgrim’s Progress, Section 12. Langland: Piers Plowman, C Passus II, 149–155

  16 Hermes Trismegistus: The Divine Pymander 1.5. ‘As dew…’: ‘I sing of a maiden Ravilious: to HB, 16 Dec. 1935 (LLD 191); to DT, 2 Jan. 1939 (LLD 399). Thoreau: Journal, 20 Jan. 1855; 30 Jan. 1841

  17 Hopkins: Journal, 13 March 1870; 26 Sept. 1873. Whitman, ‘Song of the Open Road’, 3. Turner: A.J. Finberg, Life of J.M.W. Turner RA (1937), p. 112. Thoreau: Journal, 15 March 1842

  18 Hopkins: ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland’ 4. Coleridge: ‘The Watchman’; N 495

  19 Grosseteste: see James McEvoy, The Philosophy of Robert Grosseteste (OUP, 1982), pp. 158–60. Coleridge: N 2006. Thoreau: Walden, ‘The Ponds’. White: Journal, 4 Nov. 1791. Palmer: AHP, p. 117. Blake: Letter to Thomas Butts, 11 Sept. 1801 (WBW, p. 1552). Jefferies: ‘The Pageant of Summer’

  20 Palmer: 1824 Sketchbook, p. 121. Ravilious: to HB, 3 June 193
5 (LLD 142). Thoreau: Journal, 19 Oct. 1858

  21 Dante: Vita Nuova XXIII

  22 Dante: DC, Paradiso VIII, 53–54; X, 67–69; II, 139–46. Herbert: ‘Mattens’, ‘The Pearl’. Hopkins: Journal, 22 July 1873. Goethe: Faust, Sc.1, ‘Night’. Hopkins: Journal, 22 July 1873. Palmer: AHP, pp. 111, 173

  23 Blake: ‘The Golden Net’. Pearl: 136, 9. Coleridge: N 1489. Hopkins: Journal, 24 May 1871

  24 Al-Kindi: Works, S 224; Hopkins: Journal, 1871 (HH, p. 204)

  25 Al-Kindi: Works, S 220. Dante: DC, Paradiso I, 66; IV, 139–40. Coleridge, N 4036; ‘Lines Written at Shurton Bars’

  26 Donne: ‘The Extasie’. Dante: Vita Nuova II

  27 Dante; DC, Inferno V, 28; Paradiso CXX, 11–15. Al-Kindi, Works, S 220–23. Newton: Opticks, Book Two Part IV, Obs. 5. Coleridge: N 1256; ‘The Eolian Harp’

  28 Dante: DC, Paradiso XIV, 118–19. Donne: ‘Break of Day’. Pearl: sts 7, 10. Blake: Letter to William Hayley, Jan. 1804 (WBW, p. 1589). Palmer: AHP, p. 195. Clare: ‘Rural Evening’

  29 Newton: Opticks, Book 3 Part I, Qus 12–15

  30 Coleridge: N 1974

  31 Newton: Opticks, Book 3 Part I, Qus 29, 26; Book 2 Part III, Prop. viii; Book 3 Part I, Qu. 28; Book 2 Part III, Prop. x; Book 3 Part I, Qus 29, 30

  32 Newton: Opticks, Book 1 Part I, Exper. 15; Book 3 Part I, Qu. 18. Van Gogh: Letters, passim

  33 Galileo: Frove and Marenza, op. cit., p. 414n. Milton: PL III, 21–26; I, 288

  34 Goethe: Conversations with Eckermann, 1824, 1828. Newton: Opticks, Book 2 Part III, Prop. XII. Einstein: Letter to M. Besso, 1951

  35 Goethe: Faust, Part 1, ‘Faust’s Study’. Traherne: Centuries, 3.9–13; 3. 22; ‘Constancie’

  36 Ravilious: to DT, 8 May 1939 (LLD 415). Clare: Natural History Letters (CP, pp. 167–68)

  37 Clare: John Clare, The Journal, Essays and The Journey from Essex, ed., Anne Tibble (Carcanet, 1980). Appendix 9