Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

  ‘Azuring-over greybell’ was another phrase he used for them: strange words, suggesting again that the colour drifted above the flowers. (Coleridge, though, had seen the same effect on the Lakeland fells in October, as the leaves changed: ‘colors upon a ground, not colored Things’.43) And there is a sense in which colour appears, like their honey-scent, to detach from bluebells in the mass, that improbable cobalt sea that washes the bases of the trees and splashes unhindered through arches of old barbed wire, while fresh green beech leaves float above. Anticipation of bluebells in April is so strong, amid the dusting and tinting blue of spring, that light and earth alike seem to carry their presence, even where they have never been known to grow. They do not grow in Friston Forest, between West Dean and East Dean; or so people say.

  Friston ForestApril

  Mysterious notion

  But nonetheless true,

  If you wish them, you see them

  The whole greenwood through –

  Saturate blue

  Hopkins was convinced, however, that the blue sky did not stain light. He declared both in poetry and sermons that it could not alter the sunlight, ‘though smoke and red clouds do’. This was because, for him, blue sky had become a metaphor for Mary-without-stain:

  Again, look overhead

  How air is azurèd …

  Yet such a sapphire-shot,

  Charged, steepèd sky will not

  Stain light. Yea, mark you this:

  It does no prejudice.

  Christ-light had passed through Mary, as St Bernard of Clairvaux had described the Incarnation, as a pure ray through glass; but, though ever pure in essence, light’s look was bound to change by falling to polluted earth. Looking out, as Hopkins often did, over industrial Birmingham and Liverpool, it was hard to conclude differently.

  Goethe would have none of this. His most passionate belief, outlined in his Theory of Colours and defended more fiercely than any other, was that ‘shade and colours are not light itself’, merely ‘the deeds and sufferings of light’ at the margin where it wrestled with the dark.44 Colours were ‘half light and half shadow’. Light itself never changed, but appeared to be darkened by the thickness of the medium through which it was viewed. The blue of shadow, smoke or candle flame was merely darkness seen through light. When in 1829 his young friend Eckermann began to see ‘coloured light’ in moonlight, at dawn or on snow, Goethe snapped: ‘You belong in the fourteenth century!’ – the gaudiest age of stained glass. Light, he insisted, streamed from the sun in rays essentially unaltered by refraction or reflection, and its colourless purity arrived in the world unchanged, immutable as God himself.

  Amid earth’s turbulence, too, it did not alter. Light was ‘a kind of abstract principle’, Goethe said, which, on the slightest cause, could strike colour out of darkness. It could be acted on; it could be circumscribed, as by the dark, with which it continually struggled. (Light ‘smiting … upon the shade’ produced the tenderest tints in cast shadows, as Palmer reported; it reminded him of his own ‘death-grapple with colour’.) But it was never weighed down or polluted. And it made itself known not by texture or staining, like some material thing, but by the energy it displayed, and the way it moved and lived.

  Goethe’s disagreement with Newton seemed white-hot, but in reality they were not quite so far apart.45 Near the beginning of the second part of the first book of his Opticks, Newton added a Definition:

  … if at any time I speak of Light and Rays as coloured or endued with Colours, I would be understood to speak not philosophically and properly, but grossly, and according to such Conceptions as vulgar People in seeing all these Experiments would be apt to frame. For the Rays to speak properly are not coloured. In them there is nothing else than a certain Power and Disposition to stir up a Sensation of this or that Colour … [by propagating] this or that Motion into the Sensorium.

  He too thought in terms of the ‘deeds and sufferings of light’, or its ‘innumerable vicissitudes’, in his words. Light’s alternating ‘Fits of easy Reflexion’ and ‘Fits of easy Transmission’ passed through his prism as many waves of successive light and dark. As a result colours sprang up still endowed with Light’s qualities, nimble, ‘copious’ and ‘brisk’: especially his favourite ‘very fair and lively’ scarlet, and a ‘good’ willow-green. But to speak properly, the rays that painted colours on his walls and papers were ‘blue-making’, ‘red-making’ or whatever it might be, according to how thick and strong they were. In themselves, they were as purely white as the sun was.

  Turner, the man who came nearest to painting light, was astonished at first by Newton’s spectrum. He flooded his paintings with it – yellow, orange, red, blue, green, indigo, violet – but mostly in the hope that some re-combination of these colours would recreate light itself. After all, Newton had seemed to suggest it would, and had even tried to prove it by experiment.46 The great scientist had had a go himself with painter’s powders, mixing them by trial and error and sometimes on his study floor. By combining one part of red lead and five parts of viride aeris, he had achieved ‘a dun Colour like that of a Mouse’. By adding ‘a certain full purple which Painters use’ to yellow orpiment, then dribbling in a little green and blue, he got ‘a Colour equal in whiteness to that of Ashes, or of Wood newly cut or of a Man’s Skin’. It looked considerably better when placed in the full dazzle of the sun: so much better, that a passing visitor glancing through the door thought Newton’s puddle of mixed daubs looked whiter than white paper. Reading between his lines, though, ‘dun’ was the colour he mostly made.

  Coleridge, ever seeking the One through the many, shared his enthusiasm for the all-inclusiveness of white. He delighted in the thought that white was ‘the very emblem of one in being the confusion of all’, and noted that a large single pearl, glowing with rainbow iridescence from that form-creating, cut-glass-faceted, shape-shifting sea, was called a union. All this was far easier for the philosopher to proclaim than for the artist to reproduce; but, nonetheless, Turner tried. Behind all colours, he felt, there was an essence, a something, to be discovered: he wrote of the eye ‘piercing the mystic shell of colour in search of form’. Faced with a cliff of white chalk by the seaside – another relic and composite of that seething primeval ocean – he drew out the blues, reds and yellows in it, as if challenging real light to reveal itself. When one buyer grumbled that cliffs were only ‘chalk, and stone and grass’, and that he failed to see those colours in them, Turner snapped: ‘Hm, but don’t you wish you could?’47

  He was forced to conclude, though, as the years passed, that even the most daring colour mixtures would not recreate light. Perhaps, therefore, Goethe’s ideas were worth exploring. He read the Theory of Colours in his friend Eastlake’s translation, kept a margin-scrawled copy in his library, and debated the issue as violently as Goethe himself did, until the subject of light had to be banned from conversations with his friends. He could still paint it, though, and in 1843 he did, as a blazing whirlpool of chrome orange, vermilion, chrome yellow, viridian, red lake and Prussian blue, giving way at the centre to yellow ruled by white, the sun’s colours. He called this Light and Colour (Goethe’s Theory) – the Morning after the Deluge – Moses Writing the Book of Genesis; or teasingly, when people asked, ‘Red, blue and yellow’. He also added an explanatory poem of his own:

  The Ark stood firm on Ararat; th’returning sun

  Exhaled earth’s humid bubbles, and emulous of light,

  Reflected her lost forms, each prismatic guise

  Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly

  Which rises, flits, expands, and dies.

  Where light forced out colours from the dark, in Goethe’s view, it also conjured life. This thought too, in those humid bubbles, seethed in Turner’s poem as a crowd of dim souls surged on his canvas, emerging out of the turmoil. Am farbingen Abglanz haben wir das Leben, declared Faust, rising from sleep in a sort of ecstasy of understanding: from the glance (or echo) of colours, we have l
ife. It sprang forth from them, evanescent as the rainbow joining heaven and dark earth, shifting and misting away even as it formed: each prismatic guise, Hope’s harbinger, ephemeral as the summer fly.

  On that same chalk track from Firle, in white-hot August, I had seen flints throwing off spectra like diamonds, as if about to spark fire; or life. (Hopkins once knelt before such spectra, flashing at dawn from potsherds on a frosted gravel path.) On the lower field in September I startled two peacocks, escapees from Firle Place, among the dun-white colours of ploughed chalk, gleaning the stubble verge as unconcerned as if they were in Rajasthan or Paradise, trailing their rainbows behind them. As Blake fell to wondering on Felpham beach, was everything, then, light? Line, raiment, life; Firle’s great shoulder, its cloak of grass and the lovers laughing, as they swung down past me and I folded my book away.

  FALLING EARTHWARDS

  Below the top of Firle Beacon, looking south towards the sea, there was once a field of oilseed rape that stretched for almost four square miles. We had a history, this field and I. In a baking July, I crossed it once, believing it was the shortest route from Newhaven to Charleston farmhouse to reclaim a scarf I had mislaid the night before. It was indeed the shortest, by the map; but there was a price to pay.

  The walk began well enough. It was good to turn my back on Newhaven, a town now with none of the quaintness Ravilious loved it for, save the elegant white lighthouse on the jetty and the night ferry that slides, sidelit with windows, out of the port towards France.1 In 1940 he would go up to the cliffs above town ‘twice a day like a man to the office’. Newhaven then was deep in war preparations, mound and ditch, concrete and gun emplacements, in which Ravilious nonetheless found lines of beauty as he painted on hazardous clifftop and quayside. Nights in Newhaven, he had written five years earlier, were ‘so wonderfully pretty to look at’ and obviously still were, ‘except for raids’, which hardly seemed to bother him. ‘I could jump for joy sometimes,’ he added. Now the town boasts a monstrous shiny incinerator, tangled ring roads, empty pedestrianised streets and tired pebbledash houses, from which beauty has long since fled into the hills.

  I started out across the field. The turnip smell of the warm flowers was intense, their yellow dazzling. Ravilious would have loved them if they had filled the fields in his day, but I felt much less confident. They were tall, up to my neck; this was a yellow sea in which I might drown, one arm flailing, with no one there to notice. I had no compass, which might have been a comfort; though in light country, where the sea marks south, I could hardly miss where north was. It lay ahead, and there was no way but through. The path was perhaps a foot wide, apparent as I walked it but narrowing to nothing before and after, as if it opened only to the uncertain pressure of my boots. To north, south, east, west, the yellow field swept relentlessly away.

  At its centre – roughly, I suppose, for I had no way of knowing – I began to panic. My chest was tight, my breathing too shallow. The silence of the flowers roared in my ears; their glare deafened me. Nothing lay beyond shoulder-high yellow except the hard blue sky. Then, for some reason, I glanced down among the stalks. Thinner stems were tangled through them and, above the stems, a small pale face observing me, eye to eye. To my joy I realised it was heart’s-ease, the wild pansy of southern croplands: a cure for palpitations, I learned later, appearing just in time. It was still shy, shaded by the rape flowers and comprehensively outdone by them, until pulled close. Then it revealed its own power: a tiny orange blaze at its centre, fading out into yellow and pinpointed by tapering black rays as fine as if Palmer, Blake or Ravilious had taken his pen to them.

  In fact a trio of small flowers edged the path there, all of them tokens of light more delicate, and much more comforting, than the glare I was trudging through. Speedwell, the blue-eyed companion of dry summer walks, pressing, like its namesake Veronica, a cool cloth to the brow; eyebright, the sight-healer, its minuscule diamonds twinkling out of couch grass; and heart’s-ease, the calmer of thoughts, carrying at its centre that glowing mark of the sun. All these appeared to have fallen from the sky, rather than to have pushed up from the earth. The heart’s-ease, especially, seemed unrooted, woven into the tapestry of stouter, darker stalks as if a swallow, flying through, had left behind the straw it carried; as if it had materialised from some diviner place. Certainly Wordsworth took it so, as he recalled the little yellow mountain pansy, cousin to heart’s-ease, in his ‘Intimations of Immortality’:

  The Pansy at my feet

  Doth the same tale repeat:

  Whither is fled the visionary gleam?

  Other flowers too seem to have a higher origin: convolvulus, mayweed, even purple vetch, floating on their green wires. Favourite flowers of the poets were often loved for their sudden salutations of light. For Coleridge it was yellow broom; for Clare it was ragwort, with rough and tattered leaves, which nonetheless ‘littered gold’ about the fields; for Whitman the large drab yellow mullein, a weed of waste ground, which yet contained ‘the suggestion of everything else’ in his life, and whose soft leaves glittered with ‘countless diamonds’.2 The sunflowers van Gogh loved, ‘my own flowers’ as he thought of them, were best painted in a yellow vase, he wrote, as ‘light on light’.3 But many flowers might do that service. Jefferies said that to hold any flower in his hand – a rose, trailing honeysuckle, the first harebell – was to see his soul reflected, as the sun in the brook.

  Flowers of spring can appear so swiftly as to shock. White violets left beside the lane; crocuses ‘dropping in’, as Clare put it; glossy celandines piled underneath the hedge, cushioned by leaf-mould dark; a snow bank that separates into pink-flushed wood anemones at a glance. Their budding goes unnoticed; they arrive as full-blown light, ‘like the thing that never knew the earth’, as Hopkins wrote, each one apparently a gift for the eye that spots it. Thus, by my London bus stop, I saw an old man in a fisherman’s waistcoat bend to greet bindweed with its paper-white, gleaming, flourishing trumpets, his mouth slightly and wonderingly agape, as if he had never seen such loveliness before; and on Worthing promenade I followed an elderly woman in a blue coat, hunched against the wind as if to protect, and keep secret, the bunch of fresh snowdrops in her stiff veined hands.

  Primroses, especially, spill through the woods and on the railway cuttings as intense, condensed drops of the first warm sun of spring. Donne, ‘being at Montgomery Castle, upon the hill’, thought they made ‘a terrestriall Galaxie,/As the small starres doe in the skie’; they might even turn into manna from heaven, if watered right. Clare thought each early primrose ‘as delightful as if seen for the first time’. Hopkins in 1871, having put a few in a glass, marvelled at ‘the instress of – brilliancy, sort of starriness’ in them; and even massed on the banks, in their ‘plots and squats’, they looked like ‘little spilt till-fulls of silver’, Donne’s galaxies indeed.

  These light-shows of spring often come as unannounced as snow, and may be mistaken for it. On a mild January day at Cuckmere Haven, the sparse blackthorn blossoms on the hedge may be ‘cloaths hung out to dry’, as Clare called them – or perhaps paper decorations, blown on the twigs and tied there – or scatterings of stinging flakes out of the low grey sky.4 One February brought a solitary blackthorn tree to the southern slope of Parliament Hill, a white candelabra of fragile, almond-scented flowers. It must have been there before, but had not been there to me; and it was surely destined soon to melt away again.

  Jefferies once found a bank of stitchwort that he greeted as stars, ‘delicately white, in a whorl of rays’; they held ‘but feebly to the earth’, and often came away entire in his hand. Star-flowers or snow-flowers among the numberless fallen, in the war between winter and spring.

  Above East DeanMarch

  The wind belonged to Winter,

  Pledged to him from the start:

  Whipping the raw unguarded face,

  Frosting the heart.

  The sky overhead was Winter’s too,

  Scoured clear and blue
at a blow,

  But the clouds were Spring’s, insubordinate,

  Too delicate to snow.

  Flints on the turf were Winter’s shot,

  Hard as enamelled glass,

  But Spring deployed snowdrops, whose split pearls

  Littered the grass.

  In a downland copse, the last redoubt,

  Blossomed a thin, bare tree

  Tricked out by Winter in old man’s beard

  Where flowers should be.

  But out of the brakes where Winter

  Had marshalled his mounds of white,

  Three sheep sprang up, stumbling, unwieldy,

  Pregnant with light.

  A mile or so from where those sheep surprised me, the first few daisies were open on the chalk: stemless, tiny, their round leaves drawn under them, scattered on the scrubbed turf as if they too were pebbles fired from the slingshot of spring. As a child I was so excited by daisies that I would run among them, and fall into them, as readily and scattily as I fell into the sea. Like waves, there was a suddenness about them, an unexpectedness in their swarming white presence round my feet. They surely did not grow or unfold in the ponderous way of roses or poppies, from their fat garden buds. Surely they were thrown down wholesale, as I tossed out breadcrumbs for ducks. Like waves, too, daisies were prodigal and inexhaustible: you picked them, pricked the so-thin stems with a slow nail, draped yourself with their strangely heavy heads in wilting dozens, and still there were more. From Walmer Castle and Polesden Lacey, two special days out, I remember the studded lawns of daisies and nothing else.

  These were Geoffrey Chaucer’s dearest flowers.5 In The Legend of Good Women he, or a poet much like him, walked in rapture among daisies, the eyes of the day, on ‘the smale softe swote gras’: