Six Facets of Light

by Ann Wroe

  Palmer’s first memory of the moon – or of anything – was ‘long shadows’ of moonlight stealing across his bedroom, seen through the branches of a great elm outside. He was then ‘less than four years old’, a child in petticoats. Later in boyhood he imagined Milton’s ‘Shady roof/Of branching Elm Star-proof’ as this tree. Stars were caught by dozens in its branches, ‘glistering … through the loop holes in the thick woven canopy’, though the tree gently permitted the moon to disengage and rise. Beside him in memory stood his nurse Mary Ward, who had first read Milton to him and, years later, bequeathed him her treasured two-volume edition of his poems. Softly she repeated lines from that best-selling book of the time, one Blake had already illustrated, Edward Young’s Night Thoughts:

  Fond man! The vision of a moment made!

  Dream of a dream, and shadow of a shade!

  In later years Palmer often tried to paint this scene – himself, the shifting moon, the shades that were light – but could not do so to his own satisfaction.28 Instead he focused on the moon strong, steady, amber and supreme, or a tilted ark of peace. At nineteen, as he recorded in his one surviving sketchbook, he saw her as she rose standing tiptoe on a green hill, ‘to see if the day be going and the time of her vice-regency be come’. At her height a surge of unwavering silver turned the world strange, as she turned milk and metal; he preferred to show her just rising or just setting, assuming or tenderly relinquishing her full command of the sky.

  There was no doubt, though, that she was ‘his’ moon, the ornament of his visionary landscapes, the guardian of his dark green dusks and apple trees, accompanied by her train of stars. At Shoreham, where the Ancients sustained themselves mostly on eggs, milk and gunpowder tea, many nights were spent walking or waking to watch ‘natural phenomena’; the moon seemed then to ‘blush and bend herself towards men’ as she did not do elsewhere. Palmer, who loved the Endymion story, drew his young sleeping shepherds sparkled and showered by moonbeams, as he was when he walked with her.

  She was ‘our moon’ equally to little Philip Traherne, who not only jumped boldly over her but, ‘brought home from Nurse’ and running to the cottage door29

  To do som little thing

  He must not do within,

  With Wonder cries,

  As in the Skies

  He saw the Moon, O yonder is the Moon

  Newly com after me to Town,

  That shin’d at Lugwardin but yesternight,

  When I enjoy’d the self-same light.

  As for Ravilious, who thought it ‘a waste’ not to look long at the moon whenever it appeared, he left a college friend in 1927 with the remark: ‘I should like to spend a whole night walking towards the moon – Good night’ – and strode away in better company. In his country, on the clifftop near Beachy Head, I once saw a picnic seat set out for the moon as she hung, full, solicitous and undecided, at the shoulder of a well-dressed man determined to read by her, and keep her close, as soon as the sunset light had gone.

  Men and women could be just as casual and familiar with light in its sun-guise. In common parlance it ‘rose up’ and ‘went down’ as if it circled the earth, or just one place in it. Clare as a child assumed that the sun of Emmonsales Heath, down the road, was not the one he knew at Helpston, ‘shining in a different quarter of the sky’.30 Even as an adult he supposed that Newark-on-Trent had its own sun, rising in the west and setting in the east. Every day brought a new one to serve him. Coleridge as a child waited for the sun to beam fully and particularly on his gilt-covered copy of The Arabian Nights before he would open it each morning; that service done, he would bask and read. The boy Ravilious covered his school sketchbook with spiky red-crayon suns in the midst of which his name, just as resplendent, rose over the hills.

  Long after Galileo had declared the truth of the matter, the sun was still widely considered subservient to earth and men. ‘The Sun serves us as much as is Possible, and more than we could imagine,’ wrote Traherne. But like some silly servant, or some persistent pedlar, it might push in light where it was not yet wanted. Folk in the Scottish Isles talked of the neb, or nose, of the sun poking above the hills at dawn, and his loud scriach, or snuffling, at cockcrow. Donne shooed the ‘busie old foole’ away from gaps in the bed-curtains, eclipsing him ‘with a winke’, but he got through the glass. He climbed into the bedroom, into the nest of love itself. There, though, Donne put him in his place:

  Thou sunne art halfe as happy as wee,

  In that the world’s contracted thus;

  Thine age askes ease, and since thy duties bee

  To warme the world, that’s done in warming us.

  Shine here to us, and thou art every where;

  This bed thy center is, these walls thy spheare.

  The sun was often dallying, or in beds, when he descended. Clare, in his poem ‘Rural Morning’, was relieved to see a sensible farm maid milking in the shade of a tree, where ‘scarce a sunbeam to molest her steals’. In Wales shy young Francis Kilvert, after a parish visit in July 1870 to a fatherless girl at Penllan, found himself imagining that the sun had got there before him:31

  [He] looks through her window which the great pear tree frames and lattices in green leaves and fruit, and the leaves move and flicker and throw a chequering shadow upon the white bedroom wall, and on the white curtains of the bed. And before the sun has touched the sleeping village … he has stolen into her bedroom and crept along the wall from chair to chair till he has reached the bed, and has kissed the fair hand and arm that lies upon the coverlet and the white bosom … and has kissed her mouth …

  Some similar visitation may have inspired the haunting observations, precise and gradual, gradual and cumulative, as if lit by a sunbeam entering and strengthening, of a fifteenth-century poem:

  The maidens came32

  When I was in my mother’s bower;

  I had all that I would.

  The bailey beareth the bell away;

  The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.

  The silver is white, red is the gold;

  The robes they lay in fold …

  And through the glass window shines the sun.

  How could I love and I so young?

  The bailey beareth the bell away;

  The lily, the rose, the rose I lay.

  Ravilious came across this poem in an anthology of ‘Amorous and Fanciful Medieval Verse’ he read in 1940. It was ‘as moving as any’, he told a friend; ‘I loved it’, though ‘Heaven knows what it means’. There lingered in it some of the atmosphere of the bedrooms he painted, in a Navy hostel in Dundee and in farmhouses in Sussex and Wales, with their patterned wallpaper and high single beds, embroidered coverlets and neatly turned sheets. Here was that same quiet registering of everything on which light fell: the orderliness of it, and the sense of place. A chair would wait on the bare boards, by the wall. A door would stand open, perhaps leading to a stair down which someone has just gone; but the room would be empty, save for the sun.

  Kilvert’s Diary may have been in his thoughts, for Ravilious read and recommended him. The young minister heard from his parishioners that the sun did not merely enter houses but also sometimes plunged, like a bold young blood, under water. An old woman told him that at the Wild Duck Pool above Newbuilding, on Easter morning, it came down to dance and play in the lake to celebrate the feast. Modern travellers who fly above the Bay of Bengal see something similar: through the high cloud of the stratosphere the dazzling latticework of creeks, lagoons and paddy fields imprisoning the otherwise unseen, shaking-Shiva sun, like a gold crab under glass.

  The sun in water, Jefferies believed, had ‘more to do with us’, and was ‘a part of earth’.33 Its ‘long, loving touch’ left dreams there for him; when he scooped and sipped the sparkling water, he held the sun in his hand. (Less lyrically, he also thought he held it when he smoked a cigarette, that tight-rolled tube of ‘sunshine dried and preserved’.) Beneath the surface its face could be surveyed at leisure, and its halo obser
ved – though in a puddle, where Traherne once ambushed it, tramping feet got in the way, fascinating him with their suggestion of the order of things inverted. Turner, too, studied the underwater sun attentively, for hours, while he was fishing. Colleagues might have imagined he was contemplating only the effects of light on water. But he was also communing, in agreeable silence, with the great submerged star.

  The alternative was to gaze at the sun through branches or a screen of leaves. I did this once in childhood through autumn chestnut trees on a day strangely warm for conkering, and with enough of the polished treasures in my pocket anyway. Gazing up from the grass, with the same sort of flashing defiance with which I would jab, then snatch, my finger from a flame, I found to my surprise not only that the rays were iridescent but that they swarmed in circles or spirals about two opposite poles, north and south, like iron filings round a magnet: movement inwards, as well as movement out. The orb seemed to pulse, too, like a heart – my own heart? – dilating and contracting. Since I couldn’t look longer, I left my close acquaintance with the sun at that. Maybe Jefferies did better beneath his favourite apple and elm trees, absorbing rather than looking; maybe Hopkins did in July 1873 under ‘one light raft of beech … the sun sitting at one end of the branch in a pash of soap-sud-coloured gummy bimbeams rowing over the leaves but sometimes flaring out’, almost like a frolicking child.34 At times he dared to look it straight in the face, glancing up from mackerel-fishing off the Isle of Man in 1872 – cormorants screaming round him – to see the cliff brow ‘crowned with that burning clear of silver light which surrounds the sun, and then the sun itself leapt out with long bright spits of beams’.

  Ravilious seemed cavalier about it. His paintings, like Turner’s, proved that he often gazed straight in that direction. ‘I … looked into the eye of the sun as long as it could be borne,’ he reported from Beachy Head in February 1939; ‘the sun is no trouble, it is the wind I don’t like.’ His unflinching gaze seemed to tell him that the sun shone in a pattern of geometrical webs, something like a dartboard (he loved darts), towards which he could send his feathered missiles flying. In his engravings the sun was typically central, brutal and close, tangling in trees and once striking to the ground a terrified bird-nesting boy. He felt no such fear himself. He dreamed once of a sun with six rays, close enough to count, hanging in the sky with a gibbous moon, and his cartoon of himself on observation duty in Essex in 1939 (‘Here is a picture of me saving the country,’ he told Helen) showed him, in trench coat and tin hat and armed with a steaming cup of tea, calmly outfacing at dawn the spiky old sun of his schooldays.

  Not so far from Beachy Head, as the crow or the gull flies, John Dudeney the shepherd boy also outstared it. Observing the transit of Mercury across the sun through some lenses he had ‘met with’, fixed in his pasteboard telescope, he forgot the danger in his eagerness, ‘and in looking at it without due precaution I very much injured one of my eyes’. The damage not only made ‘lookering’ difficult for a while but, worse, curbed his joy in the close, cramped types of his hidden store of books. One sort of enlightenment drove out the other.

  Another such risk-taker was Benvenuto Cellini, sometime goldsmith, permanent brawler, who in 1539 was escorted from his dungeon in Rome by a beautiful, sadly un-wanton young man, and taken to a strange street in what appeared to be heaven.35 Cellini had prayed to see the sun in his dreams, for daylight never slipped inside his prison; and here it was. Like a huge lamp, it shone on the wall of a house; by climbing a great staircase, with care, backwards, he came right up beside it, the whole sphere dazzling while its rays shifted to the left and fell away. He saw visions in that circular ‘bath of gold’ of Christ on the Cross, Our Lady and St Peter, before he was thrust into the oubliette again. Strangely, his coat of mail had been replaced, during his sun-gazing, by a white shirt. In the sonnet he managed to scrawl afterwards, on a sheet of paper the castellan gave him, he wished he had left some mark of himself, some carved graffito, on the wall under the sun, just to prove he had been there.

  The risk of any such boldness, though, was blindness, or possibly the shock of immense and real fire as the sun plunged near and landed. Walking in Lambeth around 1802 Blake saw the sun descend, ‘fierce glowing fire’ burning his back and then his very face; it stooped low, in the form of Los, and helped him bind on the jewelled sandals in which he could walk through eternity. Then, like some old friend, it wished him health and kissed him.

  Another point of view held that the sun was never a threat, since he was lazy, timid and weary with advancing years. (‘Thine age askes ease,’ Donne had told him.36) The cock and the lark, after all, had to prick him to make him rise. Herbert once said he would find another ‘willing shiner’ if the present one would try no harder. Traherne, typically, could easily imagine ‘a better Sun, and better Stars’. Palmer’s sun sank behind the hills like another labourer going home, though his strength still glowed in sheaf and fleece. Clare’s lingered ‘as a traveller glad to rest … leaning his enlarged rim on the earth like a table of fire’. As for Vaughan, having watched the sun’s slow decline each evening, he would then more or less dismiss him: ‘There’s one Sun more strung on my Bead of days.’

  The masculinising of the sun, like the feminisation of the moon, seemed to draw him closer. Newton invited him, almost bowing at the honour, to shed his beams through the holes he had cut for him in the shutter, and to paint his yellow-white body on the study wall – much as he had invited him, when a boy, to run across the pegs and balls on strings he had hammered up all over the farmhouse, and thereby tell the time for him. He noted the equal days and nights ‘when the Sun comes to his Tropicks’, a royal progress. Galileo, though, had spotted blemishes in the sun as well as the moon, for which he paid with the sight of his eyes; and by the late eighteenth century William Herschel, using a giant telescope fitted with reflectors, found the solar face covered with ‘ridges, nodules, corrugations, indentations and pores’, like a grotesque old man. Turner, whose father had been a Covent Garden barber, sometimes painted the sun that way, as if with an impudent shaver’s brush. He may have cried on his sun-filled deathbed, as some claimed, ‘The Sun is God!’; but he could take the measure of him, cheek and chin, between his thumb and finger.

  Close shaves with the sun were rare. Heaven-light, though, could become familiar in the shape and guise of angels. They made for trees, roosting and resting there, and were sometimes summoned in Irish legends to interpret the songs of birds. St Brendan on his voyage in mid-Atlantic identified angels on Paradise Island, flapping their white wings and singing the offices of vespers, compline, sext and lauds; St Columba found miniature versions on every leaf of the oaks of Derry, where he kept his cell. Blake as a boy spotted some in the sootier trees of Lambeth, modern Peckham, ‘the bright angelic wings bespangling every bough like stars’.37 (His father made to thrash him, but the next moment the irrepressible boy saw winged Joys there, ‘sitting singing’.) At Felpham – a good place for ‘Celestial inhabitants’, with no London vapours clouding his windows – small silver angels ‘planted in Hawthorn bowers’ grew prettily from each twisted branch. Blake might almost have caught one; after all, he had once caught a fairy in his hat ‘as boys knock down a butterfly’. Nor did they disappear when dusk fell. Around his poem ‘Night’ in Songs of Innocence, angels loitering in the forks of trees slid down to patrol the sleeping earth, accompanied by stars. Coleridge, who all his life invoked the four angels round his bed against his screaming nightmares, loved both the poem and the ‘very wild and interesting pictures’, tentative though he was about Blake himself.

  Kilvert, whether ministering in mid-Wales or Wiltshire, often thought he saw angels.38 On July 21st 1873, as he sat under the linden tree reading Memorials of a Quiet Life, a figure in an azure robe strolled towards him across the lawn; ‘but it was only the blue sky through the feathering branches of the lime’. At Clifford Priory, again in July, the light dresses of the ladies and the tall garden lilies made him th
ink that heavenly visitors were there. Three more angels appeared in a summer sunset, in the little open glade by the gamekeeper’s cottage at Langley Burrell, when the keeper and two other men walked among the oaks ‘in the gilded mist’. Vaughan confirmed that angels liked not only to rest but to ‘grow’ beneath trees, especially oak and juniper, where the shade was strong. Light and dark ever needed each other.

  The purest angels were those that did not linger; they delivered their message quickly, and sped away. In most medieval depictions of the Annunciation the Archangel Gabriel did not venture far from the doorway, as if contact with earthly clutter – that chair, that book of hours, that vase of irises and modestly dinted bed – would pollute him. He stayed in his own light, the Virgin in her world of half-shuttered casements, and handed the lilies over from his realm to hers. They did not touch. Fra Angelico’s crimson-robed angel at Cortona, his gold wings brushing the marble columns, shouted his ‘Ave!’ from the terrace, one foot poised to flee back through the garden, the golden letters delicately ranged in the air before him. The word of light became incarnate, though in code or shorthand, indicated by the angel’s finger raised before his lips. (Blake said his writings were ‘published’ this way, the fire-words flying round the room as soon as an angel had dictated them to him.) In some instances, the message may have been hard to catch. In Edward Burne-Jones’s painting of the scene Gabriel hovered as a tree of mild flame just beside the door, out of which Mary came with an expression suggesting that she had noticed nothing. The daylight had shifted somehow, perhaps; but nothing else had changed.