by Ann Wroe
Hermes Trismegistus reported that the inner light was less dazzling than the sun, that it ‘did not make the eyes close’: obviously, perhaps, since they played no part in seeing it. Like that divine light that had pierced first chaos and then the waters above the earth, it was ‘rather sharp and penetrating, but not injurious and replete with all immortality’. It was nothing created, added the monk-theologian Symeon in the eleventh century, and therefore could not be found among created things. His mind had searched for it everywhere, in the air, in the heavens, in the deepest abysses, but in the end it came when it wanted – left when it would – seeming to envelop his head in a luminous cloud, so that he cried out in fear. ‘Then I realised suddenly that it was within me, and shone in the midst of my heart like a spherical Sun.’
Symeon often compared this light to the sun above him.35 Rays streamed from its disc; it dazzled and blazed. On the other hand it was inaccessible, ineffable, and never set; and it shone sometimes in his hands, as if he held it like a bird, as well as in his heart. This was light enshrined, lux rather than lumen: lux perpetua. ‘I see You like the sun and like a star,’ he wrote, ‘I carry You in my belly like a pearl and see You like a lamp that is lit inside a vessel.’ He was sure, despite all this, that it was bodiless, formless, non-composite and indivisible. In short, it could never be caught in the retina or by prisms, belonging as it did to some other world; and the puzzle remained impenetrable. ‘With all your science,’ cried Thoreau in 1854, ‘can you tell me how it is, and whence it is, that light comes into the soul?’
Traherne, too, wondered. He knew there was a ‘Hev’nly Ey’ within him, a lantern-ray of love he sometimes had the ecstasy of seeing. But as a man intrigued by mechanisms, compasses and clocks, he longed to know how it came there and how it worked. He concluded that it was a mirror reflecting divine light: a mirror that was lidded like an eye, so that it could blink out God, refusing His guidance, as men blinked out the sun. That tiny point of ineffable brightness lay ‘as deep within the Glass as it is high within the Heavens’. This, perhaps, was the ‘hidden manna’ and the white stone mentioned in Revelation, that mysterious pebble of spiritual power. For Böhme, as for Symeon, it was a pearl, ‘glimmering’ in the consciousness just as the glimmering-through of light haunted Blake and Palmer; and the mystical meaning of the Pearl poem was the loss, as of a pearl dropped carelessly in grass, of the pure and illumined soul.36 Dante wrote that he and Beatrice in Paradise were received within ‘the eternal pearl’, l’etterna margarita, quite seamlessly, as though they entered their own light.
The within-ness of this light, its minuteness and its apparent compression, as in a case or box, was striking. Vaughan saw it as a tiny star within a tomb; Julian of Norwich was shown it in a secret chamber of the heart, ‘God in a single point’. For Hopkins it was that ‘vital candle in close heart’s vault’ that corresponded, though utterly still, to the small, hopeful candles set by lovers in windows: what St Paul called a love letter written not with ink but by the Spirit, and not on tablets of stone but ‘in the fleshy tables of the heart’. I will put my law in their inward parts, and write it in their hearts, God had told Jeremiah. To glimpse it was rare, almost unhoped for. But at the moment of encounter this light did not pale, wriggle or escape, because it was divine love: a ray falling from the very beginning, defining the form and then, from each angle or facet, reflecting back. And not just reflecting, mused Coleridge (hoping ardently it might happen in his his own heart) ‘like the polish’d mirror by rejection from itself, but by transmission thro’ itself’.
In the physical world Newton had unearthed a similar principle. The ‘least parts’ of natural bodies – those fibres of feathers, gossamers of spiders, dust-grains of metals – being transparent, reflected and transmitted light. In opaque bodies the process was deeper and un-apparent on the surface, but it happened nevertheless. ‘Shadows are transparent … full of REFLECTED LIGHT, though very deep,’ wrote Palmer, remembering what he had learned at nineteen, lying in the grass; ‘clear, beautiful and clean in colour.’37 The process seemed universal. As Newton said, ‘The changing of Bodies into Light, and Light into Bodies, is very conformable to the Course of Nature, which seems delighted with Transmutations.’
He had drawn up a list of ‘refractive power in respect of density’: it began with a yellow pseudo-topaz, progressed through air, selenites, ‘Glass vulgar’, ‘Crystal of the Rock’, ‘Island Crystal’ (Icelandic feldspar, ‘that strange Substance’ in which, bafflingly, he had seen light polarised), borax, rainwater, linseed and turpentine, and ended with amber and diamond. Of all the substances he tried, diamond possessed the greatest power both to refract and reflect. Traherne took the thought on as a man of the cloth would, imagining Susannah’s transfiguration among the ‘Things of Heaven’: ‘As Light is in a Piece of Chrystal, so shall you be with every Part and Excellency of them.’
Hopkins, who had found crystalline star structures everywhere in Nature, endeavoured to describe this. For as stones, kingfishers, ash trees and oak trees selved in light, so too did human beings. ‘Self ∙ flashes off frame and face,’ he wrote; the brow of the humblest shepherd blazed with ‘forked lightning’; and all natural action flamed with divine beauty, in man and woman most of all. Ploughman, sailor, swimmer all expressed it, even in the swing of arms and the tramp of feet. Their essence was light. This was man’s answering awareness of God’s illumination, as the eye and the flower replied to the sun: ‘the aspiration in answer to his inspiration’. For the human creature was Nature’s ‘clearest-selvèd spark’, marked out with a ‘firedint’ to shine ‘sheer off, disseveral, a star’–and then
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ∙ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ∙ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ∙ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.
Human beings were already prisms: taking in light, transmitting it, refracting it into colours. Each man and woman painted creation in their own way, with their own eyes, and even simple people could do that creative work, he said, if they only knew. In the ‘shook foil’ of God’s grandeur, that ‘network of small many-cornered facets’ made a blaze of reflected light. Hopkins himself offered not only his ordering vision but also the flare and flash of his poems, his strict, fierce stresses sparking out (‘stress is the life of it,’ he wrote of ‘The Loss of the Eurydice’), or the ‘bright and more lustrous emphasis’ of his sprung rhythms.38 A good poem had to have inscape, a distinctive self, and ideally had to be ‘explosive’ – as God beat him out into chaff and grain, ‘sheer and clear’, which was also the stuff of his stars. When he made a poem work, to God’s glory, not his own, the lines glowed, the rhyme and alliteration producing ‘brilliancy, starriness, quain, margaretting’. By ‘margaretting’ he seemed to mean the lustre of a pearl.
This power was limitless. It contained the scope, freedom and speed of light: one instant here, the next among the stars. Thus Dante in Paradise felt his spirit spring towards light, like to like: ‘and in the time that a crossbow bolt strikes, flies and is released from the catch, I saw myself arrived’.39 Vaughan’s tiny star-lamp, the tomb lid lifted, would fill the globe; Dame Julian’s secret chamber became, in an instant, palaces, spires and towers, ‘all earth and all heaven’. ‘No Churlish Proprieties, nor Bounds, nor Divisions,’ wrote Traherne of his childhood, when his soul led him; no ‘Hedges, Ditches, Limits, Bounds’, therefore, though his young world was thickly circumscribed by them, his clothes torn by briars and green hawthorn as he scrambled for apples, nuts or birds’ eggs. He jumped banks as nimbly as his brother jumped the moon, joyous as Adam in Paradise in his ‘sweet and Curious Apprehensions of the World’:
No Confines did include
What I posses
t, no Limits there I view’d;
On evry side
All endless was which then I spy’d.
Within him teemed his thoughts, ‘brisk Divine and Living Things’, tumbling inexhaustibly. Like the sun he darted his rays before him, occupying the hills ‘with Light and Contemplation’ before they were even climbed. He took in the trees; they grew within him, though taller far than he was. The hedgerow hazels in their straight stands might be white, unripe, hard to shake down; or ready to be cracked out of the thin double-clustered shell, their meat chewy and sweet. The Irish hermit poets spoke of a nutshell as coich anama, which also meant ‘soul shrine’. This did not imply confinement. On the contrary, a man held in that nutshell – as Shakespeare’s imprisoned Richard II observed – could count himself ‘a king of infinite space’. A ball the size of a hazelnut that might ‘fall into nothing for littleness’, placed in the nervous palm of Julian of Norwich, contained ‘all that is made’. Traherne’s ‘busie, vast, enquiring Soul’ within such a shell – one of dozens scattered in the lane, each one toothed by a squirrel – could find ‘the whole globe of the earth’, waiting. ‘It doth entire in me appear/ As well as I in it.’40
His words chimed with Blake, who declared that ‘in your own bosom you bear … all you behold’. And with Goethe, who had felt the moon he gazed on wandering in his own breast. He keenly believed in the ‘universe within’, especially when gazing at the Harz mountains across the Thüringer Wald, sipping wine from a gold cup he had brought with him in which the scene was reflected; or, in younger years, when he skated on the Main near Frankfurt, feeling his body soar in undetermined space. (The physical release, almost disembodiment, of skating also intrigued Coleridge and Wordsworth, who noted the enchanted tinkling that seemed to merge skaters, frost, woods and stars; Hopkins saw his windhover swoop ‘as a skate’s heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend’, king of air and earth.) ‘If we had no light and colour in our own eyes,’ Goethe told Eckermann, ‘we should not perceive the outward phenomena; had I not the world already in my soul, I should have remained blind … There is nothing without us that is not also within us.’
Whitman needed no telling. He already included the landscape within his giant, sprawling, marvellous self, his ‘fluid and swallowing soul’.41 He had watched in deliberate solitude (as I watched, though only a child, but the compass-pivot of the world on my slow, creaking swing), ‘the copiousness, the removedness … of that stellar concave spreading overhead, softly absorb’d into me, rising so free, interminably high, stretching east, west, north, south … and I, though but a point in the centre below, embodying all.’
And I said to my spirit When we become the enfolders of those orbs, and the pleasure and knowledge of every thing in them, shall we be fill’d and satisfied then?
And my spirit said No, we but level that lift to pass and continue beyond.
He did not forget, either, the image of the creator-spider, whose weavings were thought – or light – spanning all he could see, or begin to imagine.
And you O my soul where you stand,
Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,
Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing, seeking the spheres to connect them,
Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,
Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.
For Thoreau, that thread was a lasso he carried ‘coiled at his saddlebow’; it put the galaxies almost in his grasp.42 ‘I cannot see the bottom of the sky,’ he wrote, ‘because I cannot see to the bottom of myself.’ One hair of his head, or the white crescent on his fingernail – one flicker of light – was ‘the unit of measure for the distance of the fixed stars’.
Such thoughts did not come only from a land of immense horizons. Herbert, labouring in the tidy study beside his little church at Bemerton, knew that his eyes could ‘dismount the highest starre’. Traherne declared that ‘the rays of our light are darted from everlasting to everlasting’. Vaughan, too, gazing in his ‘Angell-infancy’ on a flower or gilded cloud,
… felt through all this fleshly dresse
Bright shootes of everlastingnesse.
Coleridge continually comforted himself with the vastness of mind and soul, and their nimbleness.43 He imagined looking at his soul through a telescope: irregularities on the surface, to be sure, but what universes beyond! To be traversed in an instant! A few days after his ‘glory’ on the voyage to Malta, he seemed to contain a terrifying flash of lightning within the ‘enlarged circumference’ of his thoughts – indeed, grimly hailed the lightning as one of his Love-starts, love being light, which (‘so help me God!’) might eventually kill him. On one Lakeland walk his soul darted like a boy along a dry-stone wall, skipping the top stones daringly and fast, leaping then ‘like a Kite’ or a chamois goat to the far mountain slopes and peaks. (‘Looking down upon the sky – stars – Lamps – Lambs.’) Nothing constrained it. No knapsack of notebooks weighed it down. Time and distance had no meaning. He was behaving like light, in short – as any poet could, by opening out and illuminating what was hidden in things, the beauties, the connections. What did a poet add to a scene? he asked himself; and answered, ‘Lights and Relations.’ Not least, it was through his own light-reflecting and conferring eye that the many became One: One in himself.
The stumbling beginnings of that light-work are vivid from my childhood. From the earliest book I read alone at school, The Greedy Grocer, I remember how the grocer’s gold coins leapt out of the shadows of his shop; how the crystals of white sugar sparkled, even when he wickedly sifted them with sand, and the tin buckles glinted on his shoes. No pictures helped me; this was something I did myself, mixing light in. From another book I pulled out one strangely startling sentence: ‘Aunt Jane peeled the silver foil from the chocolate and popped it into her mouth.’ That crinkling, flashing foil was magic, somehow. It gleamed out of the page, alive: like the pin with which Pigling Bland’s important licence papers were fastened in his jacket pocket.
I first tried the alchemy of writing to describe the way sunlight played in pom-poms of pink blossom on a flowering cherry in Chiltern Drive, where I walked to school. The moment was so important that I remember the desk I was sitting at, ridged and sloping, in the front right-hand row of the class; the dress I was wearing, one I vaguely disliked, blue and white check with a white collar; the messy sunken inkwell and the silver-capped fountain pen, with which I was still nervously clumsy; and, most strangely, the image of the tree as it lay in my mind, still as a photograph, waiting to break free. The words I found were nothing special, just the definitions of the parts: tree, petals, sky. But with them came the triumphant sense that my letters gradually made branches in which the pink blossom blew again, this time my own creation, and light flashed and leapt, like a dancer. Van Gogh described this experience as ‘being deep’ in the yellow leaves, the corn or the grass.44
Blake, hemmed in by sooty London, never doubted his power to make new worlds: ‘The desire of Man being Infinite, the possession is Infinite and himself Infinite.’ ‘The possession’ meant, of his visions – which, he insisted, all men could see ‘if they chose’. When these appeared he would cry, to Mrs Blake or any nearby friend, ‘Reach me my things!’ – and would create, in pencil first, a new universe of forms. One thought, he wrote, filled immensity – as light filled it. When scientific talk at a friend’s house turned to how long light took to reach the earth, and suchlike subjects, he suddenly cried: ‘It is false. I walked the other evening to the end of the earth, and touched the sky with my finger.’ Palmer, following close, imagined his world instantly expanding ‘from the dock-leaf at our feet, far, far away to the isles of the ocean’, and thence ‘into the abyss of boundless light’. (‘O! what heavenly grays does this suggest!’)
The smallest thing might ignite both the desire and the wild trajectory: a cloud, a grain of wheat, a shell, a stone. Wordsworth suggested in his ‘Intimations of Immortality’ that one
tree might do it, or ‘a single field which I have look’d upon’; those small particular fields on which light paused, as he did, and passed on.
Both of them speak of something that is gone:
The Pansy at my feet
Doth the same tale repeat:
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?
For in the zigzag swallow-way of light, the infinite future might also turn out to be the infinite past.
When Blake first heard Wordsworth’s ode in 1825 he reacted with violent emotion, going into raptures when the tree and the field were mentioned. ‘You know what happened to crazy Blake,’ wrote Hopkins to a friend in 1886 – Blake being, Hopkins added, ‘himself a most poetically electrical subject both active and passive’:45
when the reader came to ‘The pansy at my feet’ he fell into a hysterical excitement. Now commonsense forbid we should take on like these unstrung hysterical creatures: still it was a proof of the power of the shock.
Few understood better than Hopkins, though, why Blake had behaved that way. He might not ‘take on’ in that fashion himself, but the ode was still ‘better than anything else I know of Wordsworth’s … so charged and steeped in beauty and yearning’. And truth, as far as he and Blake were concerned.
The pansy, in Blake’s philosophy, contained heaven.46 Heaven lay in each wild flower; eternity in each well-spent hour. But he had begun that meditation from the minute to the infinite with a grain of sand. Sitting on the beach at Felpham – as he reported to Thomas Butts – he saw ‘in particles bright/The Jewels of Light’ shining in the morning sun. And not just ‘Newton’s Particles’, as he mockingly called them; for to his amazement, all were ‘Human-form’d’. Every mote of the yellow sands he gazed on, every stone and blade of grass, glittered, swarmed, and lived. Was everything, then, light? The tiny jewels became, as he considered them, ‘One Man’ tenderly enfolding him in limitless gold, burning ‘all my mire & my Clay’ away. And such transmutations did not happen only in Sussex, in the light of the sea.
