by Ann Wroe
Traherne as a boy conceived ‘a most infinit Desire’ that an angel would come down to him like this, carrying from heaven ‘som fair Book Fill’d with Eternal Song’ to leave it at his foot. For surely legions of them were employed about God’s business, in busy and continuous motion between earth and heaven.39 Jacob, dreaming in a place he later called Bethel, saw them ceaselessly climbing and descending a ladder, that back-and-forth motion of light; Blake’s vision made this a broad spiral staircase down which his angels wandered with scrolls, charts and compasses, to build the world. In Dante’s Paradise they wheeled, paused and wheeled again on every step, like a throng of sparkling birds; in Milton’s Eden the cherubim, approaching to drive Adam and Eve from the garden, were as numerous as the ‘will o whisps’ that had chased Clare across the fens:
Gliding meteorous, as Ev’ning Mist
Ris’n from a River o’er the marish glides,
And gathers ground fast at the Labourers heel
Homeward returning.
Gliding implied silence; and it seemed that angels did not say much, as if their light was message in itself. There were exceptions, however. The Archangel Gabriel, visiting Blake in his study as he sat reading, got into heated debate with him about the merits of Michelangelo as a painter of angels. (‘How do you know?’ Blake asked. ‘I know, for I sat for him,’ Gabriel snapped back.) Blake challenged Gabriel to prove himself; with that ‘confident insolence’ angels had, he swelled up in light, forced open the roof of the study, ascended into heaven, stood in the sun and ‘beckoning to me, moved the universe’. That settled the matter.
Blake claimed always to write ‘under the direction of Messengers from Heaven, Daily & Nightly’ – welcome or not, dangerous or not.40 Perhaps artists were visited more than others: young Palmer’s sketchbook contained careful sketches of birds’ wings rotated vertically, or angels’ wings, as though they had unusually stood still for him. (He was of the opinion later that ‘a whipping from an angel each Monday morning would … do us all much good’.) In a set of mysterious drawing plans Ravilious wrote that the eye, hand and brain of an engraver ‘might be various angels’ and his soul their graving block, their possession of him complete. Cecil Collins caught one in his sitting room among the Windsor chairs, entering without knocking, naked, with a flower of inspiration in his hand.
Modern spotters of angels, especially in America, often see them beside highways and at bus stations, casual in T-shirts and jeans, helping the lost or distressed. They sometimes travel country districts as pedlars or salesmen in strange, patchwork clothes. Characteristically they say little or nothing, perform their acts of rescue, and vanish. They are also continually on the move, as light is bound to be, barely eating or sleeping between one small town or farmstead and the next. Having materialised in an instant, they are gone. I have never knowingly seen or heard an angel; but perhaps one bounced past me in full Lycra on a racing bike as I stood, completely lost, at twilight in a field on the Downs, pointing the way as he zigzagged uphill to a faint stile on the horizon. The sudden appearance and disappearance, the silence, the rescue, were all typical and thought-provoking; and the shiny Lycra, with its coloured flashes at thigh and shoulder, perhaps as good as wings.
Wings might be a hindrance anyway, for much angel-work was menial or hazardous. In Ireland Ariel and Uriel were supposed to attend the laying of each cottager’s morning peats, the kindling of the flame and, at evening, the ‘smooring’ of the fire that left the room in darkness. They stood on bright guard beside the ash, as Milton’s ‘Bright-harnest’ angels sat ‘in order serviceable’ round the dingy stable at Bethlehem.41 The angels St Cuthbert met on Lindisfarne made messy poultices of milk and wheat flour, thrust packages of bread into old roof-thatch and laboured, manhandling rough stones and filthy peat, to build his hut for him. Ravilious, to illustrate July, engraved the star-figure of Andromeda – a sort of secular angel – in short, plain work-robes on a Sussex haystack, too far up her ladder, teetering and about to fly, or fall.
For angels often fell too fast, violently as a peregrine smashing into the hedge. They could be hurt. The original fall of the bad angels, ‘Hurld headlong flaming’ into the dark, was not the end of the matter. On the west face of Bath Abbey they not only climbed Jacob’s ladder but pitched headfirst down it, arms outstretched and hair streaming, like the terrified speeding angel engraved once by Ravilious in wild snow-flecked robes and with lightning in its hair. Milton’s Uriel, ‘Light-of-God’, spying on Satan, plunged in haste perilous himself,
On a Sunbeam, swift as a shooting Starr
In Autumn thwarts the night …
The crepuscular rays sent out by the sun are surely not to be climbed up, especially over water; they pour down slippery as oil, and at their base the gold of fresh-fallen angels pools on the bitter cold of the sea.
They also fell over land. Blake at fourteen, already imagining himself an angel or a lark, got tangled in Phoebus’ silken nets while his golden wings were still wet with dew, too heavy to bear him up.42 Cecil Collins etched an angel spiky as a grasshopper, broken among broken rocks, his wings useless – as shocking as the dead swan I saw wrecked in the lane in Alfriston, somehow impossible as well as wrong. Gabriel García Márquez wrote of an angel grown old, trailing enormous buzzard wings and dressed like a rag-picker, who was found in a courtyard on the coast of Colombia and shut up in the hen coop. At first people threw stones and fruit peel at him, as if he was some sort of circus animal. Then they came to him for miracles, but he was no good at those. (A paralytic almost won the lottery; a leper’s sores sprouted sunflowers.) When at last he flew away, his wings pecked clean of parasites and freshly feathered, little had been established about him and little deduced from his ‘antiquarian’ eyes: save that he did not know Latin, did not care to eat mothballs and was not, as some had supposed, a Norwegian with wings.
Or even a Finn; though a painting of a fallen angel by Hugo Simberg is almost a symbol of that country. It hung, the only picture, in my almost bare pine-plank bedroom in the farmhouse near Hankasalmi where I stayed in the summer of 1970, learning to drink sour yogurt from a glass, sew blue felt and swear in Finnish, and to sweat in the sauna until the outside air stung me like a flicking knife. Mosquito bites as large as boils kept me in bed for a day or so. I had only Simberg’s strange picture to stare at; that, or the view from the small window of unbroken forest into which a white path ran, and vanished.
The painting showed two peasant boys carrying a primitive stretcher through drab fields past a bay near Helsinki (the same landscape in which Sibelius saw sixteen wild swans flying, their wings rising and falling in alternate beats). On the stretcher, clinging on to the struts, sat a young angel robed in white with his head hanging down. He was blindfolded, so as not to see the muddied dreariness of the strange earth; or bandaged, perhaps, because wounded in the forehead, as well as in one faintly bloodied wing. He held a bunch of fresh snowdrops, as though to announce the spring.
What had happened? No one could say. The children of the family I stayed with, pale-haired and pale-skinned as angels themselves, did not understand the painting either; Simberg had always refused to explain it, or even to give it a name. This was perhaps an angel astray, drifting down into the wilderness without maps or instructions: out of orbit, like the Russian cosmonauts carried out carefully in blankets, silver suits shining, from the scrubby wheatfields of Kazakhstan. Or something stranger and crueller: a vertical crash through the forest, like one of those tapering streamers of sunlight suddenly blocking a path, spinning with wasps and dust; or an angel simply discovered, grounded, wings lifting painfully from the mud and thaw, with snowdrops in his hands.
Once out of heaven, however, angels were earthy as often as celestial. Blake saw one steal a peach from a tree and then, with a wink, ‘enjoy’ the lady who sat beneath it.43 The angels in the Book of Enoch mated like stallions with earth-girls, engendering babies with wool-white hair and sun-blazing eyes. At Bethel an angel wres
tled till daybreak with Jacob; he played unfair, pretending to be an ordinary man, dislocating Jacob’s hip (with a mere touch) when he saw he could not win, and refusing to give his name when Jacob asked him. ‘Let me go, daylight is coming!’ he cried, the words of any wriggling vampire, but Jacob would not, until the angel blessed him. Dante was surprised by an angel in his chamber as, wretched with love for Beatrice, he slept the fitful, tearful sleep of a beaten child; the angel would speak to him only in Latin riddles, before answering his one timid question in crude, ordinary Tuscan. Non dimandar piu che utile ti sia: Don’t ask more than is good for you.
In heaven the mouths of angels opened only to sip and sing; but nectar and ambrosia were not necessarily their chosen food when they descended. Milton’s Raphael, feathered head-to-toe with rainbows, cleared his plate with real hunger when Adam and Eve invited him. (‘Think not I shall be nice,’ he said, and fell to.) The angels who ate with Abraham feasted on roast veal and flatbread until Sarah exclaimed at it; Rembrandt drew them unshaven and thick-winged, squatting to eat. The Archangel Raphael, sent to guide young Tobias, knew how to take a fish with a bent hook, disengage the bloodied gills, slit the pale underbelly, scoop out the greenish guts and fling them away, wiping his hands like a fishmonger on his pure white shirt. In the twentieth century Roger Wagner, an English artist, painted angels with blue wings and greasy robes like plumbers’ overalls, picnicking in the shadow of the Sizewell B nuclear power plant.
Wagner was, and is, imbued with Fra Angelico, Blake, Palmer and Traherne. His light was theirs, and his angels were often rough. Typically they were reaping ‘the harvest of the end of the world’, sun-bronzed and strong-armed, barefoot, and with black straw hats crammed on their heads. (Whitman had seen them before him, ‘Three scythes at harvest whizzing in a row from three lusty angels with shirts bagged out at their waists’.45) These celestial beings would sweat, undoubtedly; they would drink and swear (though their thrown-away beer bottles surely shone opalescent in the straw). Implacably they cut down the wheat with scythes and then, fiercely, tied it into stooks. In regular order they moved through the flat Suffolk fields, their wings spread taut as the blades of a machine. If any sign was left behind them, it was likely to be the sort preserved from the Archangel Gabriel in a church in Mecklenburg, as Clare read in the newspaper in May 1825: big, brawny, yellowish wing feathers, like those of a goose or a swan. One of Kilvert’s parishioners heard angels of this kind overhead at night as ‘great birds travelling’, which ‘sang and whistled most beautiful … down the mountain towards Caedwgan’.
In a night sky, angels and clouds could be hard to tell apart. Both, according to the Book of Job, were God’s agents:
… by watering he wearieth the thick cloud: he scattereth his bright cloud:
And it is turned round about by his counsels: that they may do whatsoever he commandeth them upon the face of the world … whether for correction, or for his land, or for mercy …
Dost thou know when God disposed them, and caused the light of his cloud to shine?
Dost thou know the balancings of the clouds?
It was, and is, a common pastime to make something out of clouds; to shape them to things familiar, as Clare said, remembering his cattle-minding summer days spent dreaming on the grass. Hamlet twitted Polonius with camels, whales and weasels in them (‘Very like a whale!’ agreed the foolish good old man.) Yet other clouds, as in Job, seemed more purposeful. They came low, as though they had something to say; as though they might disturb the trees, graze the river, enter buildings. Adam and Eve after the apple-tasting, trembling with apprehension, wondered why they saw in the east
Darkness ere Days mid-course, and Morning light
More orient in yon Western Cloud that draws
O’er the blue Firmament a radiant white,
And slow descends, with something heav’nly fraught …
This was the Archangel Michael, coming to expel them. In the Vita Nuova Dante saw a smaller cloud, una nebuletta bianchissima, that was the soul of Beatrice going before a band of praising angels as one of them. (Coleridge in Keswick saw a ‘little fleecy cloud … above the mountain ridge … rich in amber light’ that acted as a rearguard for the unseen setting moon.) Clouds too raced overhead, their white forms barely visible, by night – or stretched above the hills, protectively, at evening – or even fell to earth, as the poet John Masefield reported, when in his boyhood a cumulus like ‘two enjoined beings’ came speeding towards him, its long legs dangling over the hills. Jefferies, too, was startled when after a hailstorm a cumulus dragged along the ground,
and one curved fragment hurled from the ridge fell in the narrow combe, lit up as it came down with golden sunset rays, standing out bright against the shadowed wood. Down it came slowly as it were with outstretched arms, loth to fall, carrying the coloured light of the sky to the very surface of the earth.
On the footpath that climbs up from Litlington towards West Dean I once encountered a chaotic cloud of trembling pink and white on the grass: an old apple tree in full blossom, blown over by the wind.
Single clouds, pillows puffed full of light, were ‘gateways to Paradise’ to Cecil Collins when he watched them from bed as a boy; later he would put them in his paintings ‘to make everything happy’.47 Others took them for harbingers of hope – announcing, for Jefferies, the first blossoming of gorse in the hedge, and for Whitman the longed-for election of Lincoln as he stepped out, in March 1865, on the portico of the Capitol. A ‘curious little white cloud’ hovered over him then, like a dove. ‘What do I heartily love?’ Palmer asked himself in his notebook, and answered: ‘One focus of cream white cloud.’ He often painted this ‘glorious’ effect, and in one picture, The Bright Cloud, showed lovers on a hill entirely overshadowed by soft, massy heaps of radiant white. At Shoreham not only the moon, but those clouds too, ‘rolling volumes and piled mountains of light’, involved themselves almost overwhelmingly in the world of man.
Other avatars of light were less apparent. They stirred and flashed among pebbles, or thistles in the wind, or in the dappled leaf-fall under apple trees. One, no bigger than my hand, burst out in blue flame on the downland turf and, in a moment, vanished. They glanced, and were gone. ‘Some lovely glorious nothing’, Donne said angels were; ‘Extreme, and scattring bright’, with ‘face and wings/Of aire, not pure as it, yet pure …’ Milton’s bad angels on the wing were compared to ‘Starrs of Morning’, but tiny –
Dew-drops, which the Sun
Impearls on every leaf and every flower.
In Dante’s Paradise they gleamed ‘as through the still and cloudless evening a sudden fire shoots from time to time, moving the eyes that were at rest, and seeming a star that changes place, save that from where it kindles no star is lost’.48 These celestial oddities and sparklings could be all the more mischievous on earth. García Márquez’s ragged old angel last appeared ‘as an imaginary dot on the horizon of the sea’. Coleridge was teased with something similar over Ullswater, while the lake itself lay unmoving like a slab of silver. ‘A bright ruffledness, or atomic sportiveness – motes in the sun? – Vortices of flies?’ he asked himself. Who knows.
Like him, pausing in mid-wander (this time at a stile, the foot-plank still glistening with frost), I fished the notebook out.
These things half-settled
uncatchable by eye or word –
shade-shift at my shoulder,
flight of a frightened bird –
a glance from the blank sky,
inscrutable Morse code –
my shadow, the day sunless,
cast on the curving road –
There was no end to the tricks, the winks, the distractions and the optical illusions. But nor was there an end to the efforts to pin light down.
CATCH AS CATCH CAN
‘I can’t recognise that,’ says Jack to George. ‘Can you make it out?’
‘No, I can’t recognise it. Not at all,’ agrees George.
The two
old men are sitting at a corner table in the sun lounge of the Birling Gap café, a mile or so west of Beachy Head. It is a winter Friday afternoon; they are in no hurry to finish their tea. They have wind-beaten faces and silver hair and wear many layers of matted wool, like fishermen. From their slow, ambling talk, they turn out to be retired policemen. This was their patch in the old days: a terrace of drab Victorian coastguard houses slowly tumbling down the cliff, the café with a chain-link fence along the precipitous edge, and the steep metal steps down to the beach. At the top of the steps is a planking deck where a few small girls, armed with chunks of chalk, are carefully sketching out six-pointed stars.
Ravilious knew it well.1 In October 1927 he bought a postcard of the Devil’s Chimney at Beachy Head by moonlight, above the lower lighthouse with its great beam shining, and drew on the tip of the pinnacle a lean young man reading a book. ‘The stylite meditating is not a self-portrait – not this time,’ he wrote, though it certainly looked like him. Some years later, from roughly the same spot (‘a projecting bit of cliff about four yards square’), he fervently admired ‘an immense bar of light on the sea [that] is splendid and must be done’. His postcard stylite, however, was contemplating a huge full-breasted cartoon Venus, rising from the regular moonlit waves with gladly open arms.
