'The age of the statue is dead'

 The unveiling of the latest appalling public statue – of the late Queen and her (rather more lifelike) corgis, in Rutland, a delightful little county that doesn't deserve such an outrage – prompts an excellent piece by Ben Lawrence in the Telegraph. He's right that 'the biggest problem with modern statues is that they're awful' – think, if you can bear to, of the Diana statue in Kensington Gardens, or the giant Lovers looming over St Pancras station. However, there are exceptions – one, indeed, being the statue of John Betjeman that also stands at St Pancras, another the Larkin statue (also by Martin Jennings) in Hull. Only recently a pretty good statue of Coleridge (by Nicholas Dimbleby) was unveiled at Ottery St Mary. I should also mention that Lichfield has two good public statues – of Erasmus Darwin and St Chad, by Peter Walker. However, these are outliers, and Ben Lawrence is surely right that 'the age of the statue is dead' – the age, that is, of the naturalistic public monument, a statue that served a purpose, was skilfully made, and invoked a kind of grandeur that has become quite alien to our levelling, denigrating culture. Alas. 

A Cather Anniversary

 On this day in 1947, Willa Cather died in her Park Avenue home, at the age of 73, not of the cancer that she had been living with for some while, but of a cerebral haemorrhage. Her life partner Edith Lewis, in accordance with Cather's instructions, subsequently destroyed most of the manuscript of an unfinished final novel, Hard Punishments, set in medieval Avignon. Fragments of it have subsequently surfaced, and it sounds like yet another departure for an author who, as A. S Byatt put it, reinvented the novel form with each new work she wrote: this would have been her only novel set entirely in the Old World. Cather was interred in the Old Burying Ground of Jaffrey, New Hampshire, where Edith joined her 25 years later. 
  For years Willa Cather was little more than a name to me, as to most readers on this side of the Atlantic, so I came to her very late – in 2012, I think – initially by way of My Antonia, the last of the 'Prairie Trilogy', soon followed by another little masterpiece, A Lost Lady. As I read on through her novels (search 'Willa Cather' on this blog for my reactions), finally devouring all of them – and much of the shorter fiction – my admiration and wonder grew and grew, and I realised that I was dealing with a truly classic writer, one of the greats. Indeed, if someone has to be the Greatest Novelist of the 20th Century, I would be happy to nominate her – and, as the reputations of many of the male contenders for that title continue to fall away, that might come to seem a pretty sound choice.

Birthday, Rain

 Vladimir Nabokov was born on this day in 1899, though by the old calendar it would have been the 10th of April, and the following year it became the 23rd, so he celebrated his first birthday on our St George's Day. Anyway, here in England it's been a day (and night) of incessant rain, so here is a fitting poem by Nabokov, written in 1956...

Rain

How mobile is the bed on these nights of gesticulating trees when the rain clatters fast, the tin-toy rain with dapper hoof trotting upon an endless roof, travelling into the past. Upon old roads the steeds of rain slip and slow down and speed again through many a tangled year; but they can never reach the last dip at the bottom of the past because the sun is there.

'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'

 This morning, I thought I'd try another Blindfold Poetry Selection. The slim volume I blindly took from the shelf turned out to be A Choice of Thomas Hardy's Poems – an attractive little book edited by Geoffrey Grigson, illustrated by Glynn Thomas, and published by Macmillan – and the poem it fell open at was 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me'. I hadn't remembered reading it before, though I must have done: once, years ago, I even embarked on a doomed venture to read the Collected Poems, a volume of some 900 pages. Hardy, like many another poet, wrote too much, but the best of it is, for all its sometimes tortuous diction, very fine indeed. 'A Man Was Drawing Near to Me' is a haunting, mysterious affair – who is this man drawing near, and what does his 'gaze that bore My destiny' reveal? It could almost have been written by Walter de la Mare, though the result would have been smoother and more musical. The place names, by the way, are all from north Cornwall...

    On that gray night of mournful drone,
    Apart from aught to hear, to see,
    I dreamt not that from shires unknown
    In gloom, alone,
    By Halworthy,
    A man was drawing near to me.

    I'd no concern at anything,
    No sense of coming pull-heart play;
    Yet, under the silent outspreading
    Of even's wing
    Where Otterham lay,
    A man was riding up my way.

    I thought of nobody – not of one,
    But only of trifles – legends, ghosts –
    Though, on the moorland dim and dun
    That travellers shun
    About these coasts,
    The man had passed Tresparret Posts.

    There was no light at all inland,
    Only the seaward pharos-fire,
    Nothing to let me understand
    That hard at hand
    By Hennett Byre
    The man was getting nigh and nigher.

    There was a rumble at the door,
    A draught disturbed the drapery,
    And but a minute passed before,
    With gaze that bore
    My destiny,
    The man revealed himself to me.

London, Glass

 

Yesterday I was in London – always something of a shock to the system these days ('I had not thought death had undone so many', etc.) – to have lunch with an old friend. Afterwards we crossed the river to have a look at the Glass Heart exhibition at Two Temple Place – or rather, to visit Two Temple Place, which is always a pleasure: the extraordinary neo-Gothic house built for William Waldorf Astor in 1895 is like nothing else in London (or at least nothing open to the public – and indeed Temple Place wasn't until quite recently). The Glass Heart exhibition was interesting, mostly for some informative stuff about glass making and the glass industry, rather than what was on show. This included rather too much lumpish and unattractive recent work, and too little in the way of traditional stained or painted glass, though the Wahls, father and daughter, get a look-in, and there are bits of Morris & Co. material, mostly designs and sketches (and, in a different line, some nice engraved glass). Of course the best stained glass is, by its nature, in situ, and best seen in situ. Indeed, I found the two great windows that are in situ in the great hall of Temple Place the most enjoyable things I saw. They are by Clayton and Bell, and represent Sunrise (the East window) and Sunset (the West). And now I am back in Lichfield, with the cathedral and its wonderful Flemish glass ten minutes' walk away...

Chasing the Devil Out of Texas

 Today is the centenary of the birth, in Vinton, Louisiana, of Clarence 'Gatemouth' Brown (who got his nickname from a teacher who said he had 'a voice like a gate'). Brown was a popular performer but also something of a musician's musician, a versatile multi-instrumentalist – guitar, fiddle, drums, piano – who worked in a variety of genres, though he was at heart a blues man: he won a Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album in 1983 (for Alright Again!). Here he is showing he could also play a mean country fiddle – and still find time to enjoy a few puffs on his pipe during the keyboard solo...

Rowland Suddaby

 This image from the golden age of motoring – an age when oil companies commissioned quality artwork (and quality books, in the form of the wonderful Shell Guides, edited by Johns Betjeman and Piper) – caught my eye today. It shows Folly House in Darley Abbey, a place I've visited a few times: it's a village in the Derwent valley that is now part of the city of Derby and has some fine buildings dating from its 18th-century industrial heyday. Of the medieval abbey little remains, and Folly House I don't recognise at all –maybe I missed it? Adjoining Darley Abbey is the magnificent Darley Park, one of the country's finest public parks (IMHO). 
  Anyway, I like the picture, which looks rather like a cross between Eric Ravilious and recent David Hockney. The artist's name was new to me – Rowland Suddaby. He is, it seems, a pretty minor figure, with a decidedly meagre Wikipedia entry and not a lot more information online, though his pictures are dotted about the country here and there. His dates are 1912 to 1972, he studied at Sheffield Art College, moved to London, where he had some small success, then settled in Suffolk. He was a founder of the Colchester Art Society, whose exhibitors included Edward Bawden, John Nash and Cedric Morris. Suddaby worked largely in landscape, painting in a distinctive brushy style and favouring bare trees (rather crudely drawn) and grey skies. Along the way, though, he developed another speciality – arrangements of flowers placed in a window against a view. These, I think, work very well. Here are two I particularly like: first, a Window at 5 Portland Place (overlooking the BBC, All Souls and the then Langham Hotel) – 

And this one, with a more rural (and vernal) view, is titled Flowers in a Window –

And here, for good measure is a bright Still Life with Flowers –

Daffodils, and the Walter Scott Publishing Company

 The daffodils are largely faded or gone, but there's still time for Robert Herrick's beautiful lyric, 'To Daffodils' – 

Fair Daffodils, we weep to see
You haste away so soon;
As yet the early-rising sun
Has not attain'd his noon.
Stay, stay,
Until the hasting day
Has run
But to the even-song;
And, having pray'd together, we
Will go with you along.
We have short time to stay, as you,
We have as short a spring;
As quick a growth to meet decay,
As you, or anything.
We die
As your hours do, and dry
Away,
Like to the summer's rain;
Or as the pearls of morning's dew,
Ne'er to be found again.

My Herrick is an attractive little volume – date unknown, probably around 1900 – in the Canterbury Poets series, published by the Walter Scott Publishing Company at one shilling (5p in today's money) each. The company had nothing to do with the famous Walter Scott, but was founded by a Newcastle man of the same name, whose mission was to bring cheap but high-quality books – covering literature, ideas, history and much else – to the common man. The company was such a success that Scott, having started with nothing, died a millionaire.
The back pages of my Herrick volume give some idea of the range of the company's publications, and in doing so provide a fascinating snapshot of the mass-market end of the publishing industry at the turn of the last century. As well as the Canterbury Poets – over 100 volumes, each with an authoritative introduction (by Ernest Rhys in the case of Herrick) – the Scott Library (another hundred-plus volumes, slightly more expensively produced at one shilling and six pence) is also listed. This includes essays, letters, philosophy, and classics in translation. Anyone reading through both these libraries would end up well read indeed. And if they wanted to find out more about the lives of the authors, they could move on to the Great Writers series, each with a bibliography by J.P. Anderson of the British Museum. The life of Johnson, I notice, is by one Colonel F. Grant (who he?), but others are by more familiar names, including W.M. Rossetti, Edmund Gosse and Richard Garnett. Also advertised are 'Booklets by Count Tolstoy' (his sententious essays, attractively packaged) and, on a very different plane, The Useful Red Series, factual works on such topics as bridge, indigestion, consumption and choosing a piano. Finally, one volume gets a full-page announcement to itself: billed as 'A Book for Every Dinner Table', it is titled Musicians' Wit, Humour and Anecdote: Being On Dits of Composers, Singers and Instrumentalists of All Times, by Frederick J. Crowest, profusely illustrated with quaint drawings by J.P. Donne. 'Among the hundreds of stories abounding in wit and pointed repartee which the volume contains, will be found anecdotes of famous musicians of all countries and periods.' I think my own dinner table will get by perfectly well without this particular volume. 

Birthday

 It's Samuel Beckett's birthday today (born 1906). I would have thought I'd have marked the date quite often on the blog, but it seems I've only done so once. Since that was in 2009 – fifteen years ago, long enough for everyone (myself included) to have forgotten – I take the liberty of reprinting that piece. It has some choice quotations in it –

'Well, today is Samuel Beckett's birthday - he liked to claim that it was Good Friday the 13th, but that happy coincidence didn't occur in 1906, his natal year. It is also - despite all evidence to the contrary here in grey cold drizzly London - Spring, a season which always brings to mind the 'brief statement' (26 unparagraphed pages) made by the gentleman in the green baize apron in Watt, before he leaves Mr Knott's house, the gentleman who of course regrets 'everything' and who takes a dim view of the natural world and the turning seasons -
"The crocuses and the larch turning green every year a week before the others and the pastures red with uneaten sheep's placentas and the long summer days and the new-mown hay and the wood-pigeon in the morning and the cuckoo in the afternoon and the corncrake in the evening and the wasps in the jam and the smell of the gorse and the look of the gorse and the apples falling and the children walking in the dead leaves and the larch turning brown a week before the others and the chestnuts falling and the howling winds and the sea breaking over the pier and the first fires and the hooves on the road and the consumptive postman whistling 'The Roses Are Blooming in Picardy' and the standard oil-lamp and of course the snow and to be sure the sleet and bless your heart the slush and every fourth year the February debacle and the endless April showers and the crocuses and then the whole bloody business starting over again."
  The gentleman may regard the whole business as 'an excrement', 'a turd' - but isn't this an extraordinarily vivid and evocative piece of nature writing? In fact, Beckett often demonstrates a remarkably sharp eye (and ear) for landscape and close-up detail, for the sights and sounds of nature - the bleak landscapes of Molloy, for example (clearly rooted, as is the passage above, in the author's memories of Ireland), are brilliantly realised and linger long in the mind. Perhaps Beckett's attention to nature is all the sharper for his sense of man's inescapable alienation from it - it is a scene across which a man passes but of which he can never fully be (or feel himself) a part. There's another lovely passage earlier in the gentleman's monologue -
"The long blue days for his head, for his side, and the little paths for his feet, and all the brightness to touch and gather. Through the grass the little mosspaths, bony with old roots, and the trees sticking up, and the flowers sticking up, and the fruit hanging down, and the white exahusted butterflies, and the birds never the same darting all day into hiding..."

It seems to me that among Beckett's less celebrated talents is that of a brilliant, if eccentric, reluctant and against-the-grain, nature writer.'

In the Slave Market

 In the course of the book I'm reading for review, Sir Samuel Baker, the English explorer who named Lake Albert, makes an appearance – and so does his travelling companion and presumed wife, Florence. Samuel, we are told, 'had found nineteen-year-old Florence in 1859 at an auction of white slaves in a Turkish-administered town in Bulgaria. Her parents had been killed in the 1848 uprising in Hungary, and Baker bought her, and subsequently fell in love with her...' An eyebrow-raising passage – and there was more to the story than this: Baker had been on a hunting trip in the Balkans with the Maharajah Duleep Singh when, to amuse the Maharajah, they visited the slave market in Vidin. There Baker spotted Florence, who was destined for the harem of the Ottoman Pasha of Vidin, and was instantly smitten. In the auction the Pasha outbid him, but the resourceful Baker bribed the girl's guards to release her, and they made off together in a carriage. They were inseparable ever after, and Florence accompanied her husband (they were properly married on their return to England) on even his most arduous travels, in Africa and elsewhere. 
  White slaves, eh, and in Europe in the mid-nineteenth century? Surely slavery was invented by the racist imperialist British to service their sugar plantations in the West Indies and enrich Britannia? Surely there was no slavery in the world but the wicked triangular trade? This is certainly the impression one would get from the BBC and from the kind of history teaching that goes on in schools. Of course it is entirely fallacious and ahistorical, but such is its traction that it has thoroughly permeated our 'woke' establishment culture, to the point where cringing apologies and even reparations are seriously entertained. I may be wrong, but I rather doubt that the Turkish government is intending to offer either apologies or reparations to anyone any time soon.

How Libraries Saved a Life

 When I saw the front page headline 'Libraries Saved My Life', I had to buy a copy of the Birmingham Mail. It's a great story – here's the link...

https://www.birminghammail.co.uk/news/midlands-news/libraries-saved-life-after-dads-28820089

... and the subject of the piece, Tracy King, has written a book about it: about how her father lost his life in a brawl with teenagers in a local shopping centre, how Tracy, at the age of 12, was left traumatised and adrift, unable to attend school, and how she spent her time in public libraries educating herself, in effect saving her life, or at least laying the groundwork for a successful one. There's a twist in the tale too: Tracy discovered, years later, that her father wasn't the heroic victim she thought he was...
The inspiring story of Tracy's self-education – a wonderful example of the life-changing possibilities of public libraries, even in a supposed age of affluence – must now be seen in the context of Birmingham City Council's proposal to close 25 of its 35 libraries as it tries to climb out of a deep financial hole (of its own making, no doubt). Naturally Tracy King, now a writer, producer and science communicator, is vehemently opposed to this, and determined that these vital community resources must, one way or another, be kept open and remain available to all. Let's hope they do, for all our sakes.
Her book, Learning to Think, is published by Doubleday and has already been widely praised. 

Review

 By public demand (hem hem), here is my latest contribution to that fine magazine Literary Review – a review of a book I greatly enjoyed reading. As ever, I urge you to take out a subscription – LR is far and away the most readable magazine of its kind...

The Book Forger: The True Story of a Literary Crime that Fooled the World
By Joseph Hone (Chatto & Windus 336pp £18.99) 

    This book has a great story to tell – the author calls it, without exaggeration, ‘perhaps the most sensational literary scandal of the last hundred years’ – and Joseph Hone tells it brilliantly. Strictly speaking, it was not quite a ‘literary scandal’ but rather a bibliographical one, as it involved the faking of physical books, not of their contents. It was a scandal affecting the most exalted levels of book collecting and the book market, and the man responsible for the faking was one the most revered authorities and collectors of his time, Thomas James Wise.
   The story of Wise’s crimes was first told by the two men who uncovered them (though there were more to be discovered later, by Hone himself among others). Booksellers John Carter and Graham Pollard published their findings in 1934 in a book with the deceptively bland title An Enquiry into the Nature of Certain Nineteenth Century Pamphlets – and it caused an instant sensation, not only shaking the antiquarian book trade and dethroning Wise, but becoming a news story in itself. It was the result of a long process of painstaking detective work, making use of the latest forensic techniques, notably the chemical analysis of paper, to provide clinching evidence. Carter and Pollard’s exposé stuck scrupulously to the facts, and the authors took care to stay out of the courts by never actually stating Wise’s guilt. The evidence they presented was so overwhelming that they didn’t need to.
  Hone expertly spins two narrative strands, at first in parallel, then increasingly intertwining, until they finally come together in Pollard’s climactic face-to-face confrontation with the cornered Wise. One narrative strand follows Wise from his early days in the various literary societies that thrived in late Victorian times to his first forays into illicit book-making, and his rise to fame and honours as a giant of the book world – and, ironically, scourge of the forgers. ‘He is the terror of all fraudulent booksellers,’ declared one admirer, ‘and fakes are to him what rats are to a terrier.’ In fact, fakes were to him a lucrative, absorbing and perversely enjoyable sideline.
 Wise got the idea for his particular line in forgery from his work with the literary societies, who liked to bring out scholarly limited-edition facsimiles of early and obscure works by their revered authors – Shelley, Browning, Tennyson, Swinburne and the like. These often became sought-after items, but it was always made clear that they were facsimiles. Wise’s bright idea was to bring out editions of works by these authors bearing earlier dates than the known first editions, and to pass them off as genuine, with carefully concocted stories of provenance to explain why they had never before seen the light of day. Wise already had a formidable reputation as a book hunter and an expert knowledge of book production, so he was sure to be believed. Soon he was doing very well out of the rising commercial value of what were then ‘modern firsts’. But his nefarious activities went beyond this: as Carter and Pollard did not know, Wise was also a thief, tearing out pages from books in the British Museum library to make up ‘perfect’ copies of rare volumes.
  But what of Pollard and Carter? They were an odd couple – Carter a suave, debonair product of Eton and King’s College, Cambridge, and Pollard a scruffy, rather louche one-time communist, leading a double life as bookseller and MI5 agent, spying on his former ‘comrades’. An Oxonian, Pollard was a member of the hard-drinking Hypocrites Club and credited as ‘the Jesus man who introduced corduroy trousers to polite society’. It was the book trade, and their passion for book collecting, that brought these two together, and gave them their great project – to expose Wise, who was widely disliked, and regarded by the younger generation of bibliophiles as something of a dinosaur. Hone makes a page-turning narrative of their detective work, technical though it often is, and the reader will be cheering them on, especially as Wise was such an unpleasant character, for all his ability to ingratiate himself with those who could be useful to him – including the very authors whose works he was set on faking.
  Why did he do what he did? Hone suggests that he was driven by a burning desire to take his seat at the top table of the book world, despite his obscure background and limited education (he was no Oxbridge man). The obverse of this insecurity was an overweening arrogance that in the end seems to have convinced him he could run rings round everybody and get away with anything. ‘Wise never served his books,’ Hone concludes; ‘they served him’, just as the many people he duped and exploited served him. Wise died a few years after the publication of An Enquiry, his reputation severely damaged. His huge library of beautifully bound books, the so-called Ashley Library, was bequeathed to the British Museum. They still reside in what is now the British Library, where, curiously, access to any and all of them is severely restricted. Having managed to examine some of them, Hone finds that the books ‘look odd’ and somehow wrong, products of a time when paper in suspiciously ‘virginal’ condition and elaborate ‘buttery’ leather bindings were desired. Tastes change. The book trade, though, remains as mad as ever: when Wise’s forgeries turn up today, they can sell for more than they did when they were made. 

Colour in Birmingham

 Yesterday I was in Birmingham, to see the (partly) reopened city art gallery and, en route, drop in on the cathedral church of St Philip. This is a baroque God-box designed by Thomas Archer very early in the 18th century and extended eastwards in the following century – essentially a grand town church rather than a slow-growing, centuries-old cathedral. I knew Burne-Jones had designed some windows for it, but my expectations weren't especially high. And then I saw them – four large windows, one (a Last Judgment) at the West end, three (Nativity, Resurrection, Crucifixion) at the East – and I was simply stunned. The colours are extraordinarily intense – I believe they were restored recently – and the designs and drawing strong and impactful. Nothing wishy-washy about these windows: indeed I've seldom felt such power in any Victorian glass. Seeing them was an astonishing, and unexpectedly powerful, experience.
   And then came the art gallery, a grand Victorian building of which enough has reopened to house an exhibition titled Victorian Radicals, showcasing the gallery's extensive holdings of Pre-Raphaelite and related art (and craft) works. Some of what is on show is of peripheral interest, but the exhibition is worth seeing for the sake of the big, in-your-face masterpieces, which have to be seen to be believed – Ford Madox Brown's massive Work and An English Autumn Afternoon, The Last of England and The Pretty Baa-Lambs, Millais's The Blind Girl, Henry Wallis's The Death of Chatterton, Arthur Hughes's The Long Engagement. As with Burne-Jones's windows, the colours are startlingly intense and the impact stunning. No reproduction can do these works justice; they have to be seen in their physical reality, and examined closely: there is always more to see in paintings as packed with significant detail as these. They are pictures that I felt I had known all my life, but seeing them in situ in this exhibition somehow felt like seeing them for the first time. Now I feel I really know them – and I'll be back to see more of Birmingham's art gallery when the rest of it has reopened. 

American Fiction

 Last night, in a rare moment of intersection with the Zeitgeist, I watched American Fiction, a film of shockingly recent vintage (2023, for heaven's sake). I'm happy to say the I enjoyed it greatly, it gave me many a laugh, and impressed me with its cleverness and with the sharpness and boldness of its satire. As all the world probably knows, American Fiction tells the story of Thelonious 'Monk' Ellison, a black academic and frustrated writer, who loses his job (after a student objects to his writing the name of a certain Flannery O'Connor short story* on the whiteboard) and who finds himself facing big problems in his life – notably his mother's Alzheimer's – and with no money. Out of despair and cynicism, and as a kind of dark joke, he decides to pose as a stereotypical blaaack badass and write a grisly, foul-mouthed, clichéd blaaack memoir of the kind that is likely to attract the interest of an increasingly deranged publishing industry, making big money off condescending stereotypes of black life. To his amazement it works, and our hero is soon passing himself off as fugitive criminal 'Stagg R. Leigh' and trousering a huge advance, as well as attracting the interest of a hot-shot Hollywood producer. His memoir is initially called My Pafology, but in one of the funniest scenes in the film 'Stagg' forces the publishers to give it the even 'blacker', even more 'authentic' title Fuck.
   It might seem improbable that an obscure academic could convincingly pretend to be 'Stagg R. Leigh', but happily he is played by the excellent Jeffrey Wright, who makes it all seem perfectly believable (the rest of the cast are spot-on too). Events move to a climax, with an awards ceremony at which Monk, one of the judges, finds Stagg R. Leigh's book winning. How will it play out? In several different ways, as it turns out: what begins as a straight satire ends as metafiction, with alternative endings tried out by the hot-shot Hollywood producer, who finally, inevitably opts for the bloodiest and most stereotyped, the most 'black'. American Fiction (which is based on a novel, Erasure by Percival Everett) is the debut movie of director Cord Jefferson. He is clearly going to be one to watch.

* 'The Artificial Nigger', one of her best.

'He is a brittle crazy glass'

 Born on this day in 1593 was the great devotional poet George Herbert. 
Here he is in full flow –

The Windows

Lord, how can man preach thy eternal word?
    He is a brittle crazy glass;
Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford
    This glorious and transcendent place,
    To be a window, through thy grace.
 
But when thou dost anneal in glass thy story,
    Making thy life to shine within
The holy preachers, then the light and glory
    More reverend grows, and more doth win;
    Which else shows waterish, bleak, and thin.
 
Doctrine and life, colors and light, in one
    When they combine and mingle, bring
A strong regard and awe; but speech alone
    Doth vanish like a flaring thing,
    And in the ear, not conscience, ring.

Quite so. The window above, by Christopher Webb, was installed in 1953 in Salisbury cathedral, just down the road from the parish where Herbert was Rector. It illustrates Herbert's poem 'Love-Joy' –

AS on a window late I cast mine eye, I saw a vine drop grapes with J and C Anneal’d on every bunch. One standing by Ask’d what it meant. I, who am never loth To spend my judgement, said, It seem’d to me To be the bodie and the letters both Of Joy and Charitie. Sir, you have not miss’d, The man reply’d; It figures JESUS CHRIST.

April

Here's a painting for the new month – April, Epping by Lucien Pissarro, painted in 1894, a few years after the artist and his wife had settled in England. It shows a landscape somewhere near the small semi-suburban house where the Pissarros lived in Epping. There is nothing very distinguished about either the painting or its subject, but what struck me about it was Pissarro's use of cleverly modulated dabs of different colours, in a manner similar to the 'divisionism' of Seurat and Signac, with whom Pissarro had associated before leaving France. This took me back to art classes at my grammar school, when I was around 11 and 12. The teacher, a youngish, dark-haired woman whose name I have forgotten, was apparently on a mission to teach her young charges to paint in something very like a divisionist manner, applying little dabs of different colours placed together so as to give the impression of another colour altogether (like the oranges, mauves and blues that create the shadow of a tree in the left foreground of April, Epping). As you may imagine, her mission was doomed to failure, and even I, who loved to paint and draw, found myself struggling with this strange way of doing things. As I recall it, the teacher began to take a more relaxed approach in time, and I was able to paint more freely. As for my next art teacher, he was certainly encouraging, but inclined to, what shall we say, excessively affectionate behaviour towards his favourite pupils – but that is another story...

Addendum

 The Easter Day Solemn Evensong in the cathedral was a beautiful and richly satisfying service, with the choir on top form – Stanford's wonderful setting of the Magnificat and Handel's glorious Worthy Is the Lamb the high points.
I've found lately that it's impossible to attend a religious service without the mind turning to the recent terrible events in Israel. The Old Testament readings have a new, and potent, resonance – and this was certainly the case with today's reading from Ezekiel 37, in which God takes the prophet and sets him down 'in the midst of the valley which was full of bones ... And he said unto me, Son of man, can these bones live, and I answered, O Lord God, thou knowest.' Through the 'prophesying' of his prophet, God brings the bones back to life, 'and they lived, and stood up upon their feet, an exceeding great army. Then he said unto me, Son of man, these bones are the whole house of Israel: behold, they say, Our bones are dried, and our hope is lost: we are cut off for our parts. Therefore prophesy and say unto them, Thus saith the Lord God; Behold, O my people, I will open your graves, and cause you to come up out of your graves, and bring you into the land of Israel. And ye shall know that I am the Lord, when I have opened your graves, O my people, and brought you up out of your graves, And shall put my spirit in you, and ye shall live, and I shall place you in your own land.' 

Easter

The day has come, and it's time to wish a happy Easter to all who browse here.
The painting is Edward Burne-Jones's The Morning of the Resurrection, completed in 1886. An unusually muted treatment of a subject more often depicted in triumphant terms, it shows a slightly hunched Jesus standing at the edge of the composition, his head turned away from the viewer to engage with the terrified Mary Magdalen, whose figure and gesture dominate the picture. Mary is flanked by two symmetrical angels, both looking full of trepidation.  A dubious, even reluctant resurrection?
  I know I've been posting a lot of R.S. Thomas lately, but how could I not on Easter Sunday? Here is his take (one of his takes) on the resurrected Christ...

Suddenly

As I had always known
he would come, unannounced,
remarkable merely for the absence
of clamour. So truth must appear
to the thinker; so, at a stage
of the experiment, the answer
must quietly emerge. I looked
at him, not with the eye
only, but with the whole
of my being, overflowing with
him as a chalice would
with the sea. Yet was he
no more there than before,
his area occupied
by the unhaloed presences.
You could put your hand
in him without consciousness
of his wounds. The gamblers
at the foot of the unnoticed
cross went on with
their dicing; yet the invisible
garment for which they played
was no longer at stake, but worn
by him in this risen existence.

Good Friday

 It's Good Friday, and I feel I haven't put up any music for a while, so...
Here is the sublimely beautiful final chorus of Bach's St Matthew Passion. 

[The picture is a detail from Tintoretto's magnificent Crucifixion in the Scuola di San Rocco, Venice.]

Inchbold

 On a cold, grey, relentlessly rainy March day – one of far too many such days this month - it's good to be reminded of how glorious March can look when the sun is shining. I don't think many paintings capture the crispness and intense clarity of early spring sunlight as perfectly as John William Inchbold's Study in March, which lives in the Ashmolean.
  Inchbold was not one of the Pre-Raphaelites, but was clearly working along similar lines, and he attracted the praise and patronage of Ruskin, with whom he spent some time in Switzerland. Despite such patronage, he seems to have had a difficult career, perhaps reflecting a 'difficult' personality,  and he rarely had enough money for comfort.
  He was a fine painter of sea and sky, as in this view of Anstey's Cove in Devon...

And here he captures the sea and sky of Venice in the luminous On the Lagoon...

In Venice, Inchbold even found water indoors, sketching An Inundation at St Mark's in, appropriately enough, watercolour...

Inchbold spent much of his later life abroad, partly for financial reasons. According to his somewhat snooty Wikipedia entry, 'a year or two before his death he had returned from Algeria with a large collection of sketches, in which the ordinary defects of his manner were less apparent'. What those 'ordinary defects' were, we are not told. 
  He died in 1888 at the age of 57, and Swinburne, a long-time friend, wrote an effusive funeral ode for him. It begins 'If far beyond the shadow and the sleep/ A place there be for souls without a stain...'

Let Us Now Praise Fat Men

Remember Robert Morley? Once seen, he was hard to forget, with his startled-owl eyes, bushy eyebrows, thick lips, quivering jowls and triple chin above a mighty belly. He was, in a word, a fat actor, and he enjoyed a long and successful career, not only in character and comedy parts. Morley was a product of a time when there were far more fat actors around – Sydney Greenstreet, Charles Laughton, Peter Ustinov, (late) Orson Welles and, nearer our own time, Zero Mostel and Richard Griffiths, not to mention fat ladies Margaret Rutherford and Hattie Jacques, or such vintage comedy fat men as Oliver Hardy and Roscoe Arbuckle. Nowadays, if you see a fat man on screen, chances are it's a normally built actor engulfed in a prosthetic fat suit – and you can usually tell, not least because a man in a fat suit doesn't move in the manner of a fat man accustomed to carrying weight and unencumbered by prosthetics. 
   If anyone was ever going to dedicate a poem to Robert Morley, it would have to be Les Murray, the great Australian poet, who was himself decidedly corpulent. His 'Quintets for Robert Morley' salutes Morley as a representative of the legions of fat men who have always been, Murray contends, at the cutting edge of civilisation (and, in those cases where they weren't, the world would have turned out better if they had been)...

Is it possible that hyper-
ventilating up Parnassus
I have neglected to pay tribute
to the Stone Age aristocracy?
   I refer to the fat.

We were probably the earliest
civilised, and civilising, humans,
the first to win the leisure,
sweet boredom, life-enhancing sprawl
   that require style.

Tribesfolk spared us and cared for us
for good reasons. Our reasons.
As age’s counterfeits, forerunners of the city,
we survived, and multiplied. Out of self-defence
   we invented the Self.

It’s likely we also invented some of love,
much of fertility (see the Willensdorf Venus)
parts of theology (divine feasting, Unmoved Movers)
likewise complexity, stateliness, the ox-cart
   and self-deprecation.

Not that the lists of pugnacity are bare
of stout fellows. Ask a Sumo.
Warriors taunt us still, and fear us:
in heroic war, we are apt to be the specialists
   and the generals.

But we do better in peacetime. For ourselves
we would spare the earth. We were the first moderns
after all, being like the Common Man
disqualified from tragedy. Accessible to shame, though,
   subtler than the tall,

we make reasonable rulers.
Never trust a lean meritocracy
nor the leader who has been lean;
only the lifelong big have the knack of wedding
   greatness with balance.

Never wholly trust the fat man
who lurks in the lean achiever
and in the defeated, yearning to get out.
He has not been through our initiations,
   he lacks the light feet.

Our having life abundantly
is equivocal, Robert, in hot climates
where the hungry watch us. I lack the light step then too.
How many of us, I wonder, walk those streets
   in terrible disguise?

So much climbing, on a spherical world;
had Newton not been a mere beginner at gravity
he might have asked how the apple got up there
in the first place. And so might have discerned
   an ampler physics.

['Quintets' is another word for 'quintains', stanzas of five lines that can follow any rhyme scheme or meter. Shelley's 'To a Skylark', a most un-Murraylike celebration of weightlessness and insubstantiality, is also written in quintains.]

The Walk

 So I walked. I walked, in fact, from Dover to Canterbury, in three stages, following various pilgrim routes and long-distance paths, and it was a great walk. 
  We began on Thursday, in cold sea fret, doing little more than strolling around the mighty castle and its precinct, with its ancient church – hideously redecorated and far from numinous – and the Roman pharos that served as its bell tower. The walking began, in lightly hungover conditions, the following morning, and the first challenge was to get out of Dover, which, for all its peppering of architectural and historical gems, is an all too typical depressed and depressing English seaside town. Once through the outskirts, though, and out along the Dour valley, things picked up rapidly, and the afternoon walking was good, despite cold and persistent rain accompanying us, and despite the necessity of a stiff climb up to the downs. Returning to Dover, we found many of the previously closed churches opened for an evening event, and were able to see inside even the little St Edmund's Chapel, a tiny 13th-century building that somehow survived the Reformation, wartime bombing and even the city planners.
 The countryside showed to better effect on Saturday, with intermittent sunshine on the blackthorn and cherry blossom, celandine, daffodils, primroses, violets and glorious drifts of wood anemones. Mud and flood posed problems from time to time, as they often do at this time of year, especially after much rain, but the churches were almost all open, and full of interest: one, the extraordinary Romanesque survival of St Nicholas, Barfreston, is an absolute gem, 'the Kilpeck of the South', richly carved with religious and mythological figures, zodiac symbols, labours of the year, cavorting beasts, crude faces, abstract and natural forms, all united in an elegant overall design, the work of very superior masons and craftsmen. That's the South door, with its intricately carved tympanum, below...

  Also open whenever we happened on them were the pubs, and each of those we visited was a lively, friendly and genuinely local 'local' – proper English pubs, though one of them, surprisingly, was run by a Turkish family, with the glamorous young daughter at the bar and the matriarch cooking up excellent Turkish food in the kitchen. This was all very heartening, in all sorts of ways. Despite what is going on in some of our cities, a deeper, nicer England endures. 
  I shan't attempt even to outline the wonders of Canterbury Cathedral – Pevsner takes 60 pages – but I was struck anew by its sheer magnificence, by how much there is of it, and how many are its beauties. One that caught my eye, almost incidental amid such splendour, was a fine, decorous memorial to the great Orlando Gibbons [below] on the North wall of the nave. Gibbons was at the cathedral in 1625, organising the music for a service blessing Charles I's marriage to Henrietta Maria of France, when he died suddenly, 'of an apoplexy', and was 'transcribed to the celestial choir'. 

  To return to Dover, Auden wrote a fine poem about the port as it was shortly before the war – very different, but recognisably the same place...  

Dover

Steep roads, a tunnel through chalk downs, are the approaches; A ruined pharos overlooks a constructed bay; The sea-front is almost elegant; all the show Has, inland somewhere, a vague and dirty root:     Nothing is made in this town. A Norman castle, dominant, flood-lit at night, Trains which fume in a station built on the sea, Testify to the interests of its regular life: Here dwell the experts on what the soldiers want,     And who the travellers are Whom ships carry in or out between the lighthouses, Which guard for ever the made privacy of this bay Like twin stone dogs opposed on a gentleman's gate. Within these breakwaters English is properly spoken,     Outside an atlas of tongues. The eyes of departing migrants are fixed on the sea, Conjuring destinies out of impersonal water: 'I see an important decision made on a lake, An illness, a beard, Arabia found in a bed,      Nanny defeated, Money." Red after years of failure or bright with fame, The eyes of homecomers thank these historical cliffs: 'The mirror can no longer lie nor the clock reproach; In the shadow under the yew, at the children's party,      Everything must be explained.' The Old Town with its Keep and Georgian houses  Has built its routine upon such unusual moments; Vows, tears, emotional farewell gestures, Are common here, unremarkable actions      Like ploughing or a tipsy song. Soldiers crowd into the pubs in their pretty clothes, As pink and silly as girls from a high-class academy; The Lion, The Rose, The Crown, will not ask them to die, Not here, not now: all they are killing is time,      A pauper civilian future. Above them, expensive, shiny as a rich boy's bike, Aeroplanes drone through the new European air On the edge of a sky that makes England of minor importance; And tides warn bronzing bathers of a cooling star     With half its history done. High over France, a full moon, cold and exciting Like one of those dangerous flatterers we meet and love When we are utterly wretched, returns our stare: The night has found many recruits; to thousands of pilgrims      The Mecca is coldness of heart. The cries of the gulls at dawn are sad like work: The soldier guards the traveller who pays for the soldier, Each prays in a similar way for himself, but neither Controls the years or the weather. Some may be heroes:      Not all of us are unhappy.

 

The Walking Cure

The first day of spring, and I have succumbed to what we medical men call a stinking cold (Coryza odorata). This is especially annoying as tomorrow I am heading for Kent – 'Kent, sir – everybody knows Kent – apples, cherries, hops and women,' as Mr Jingle sums it up – to spend a few days walking in agreeable company. A cold, stinking or not, won't stop me, and the walking will surely speed my recovery – Solvitur ambulando, as they say: a phrase on which I dilate in my forever forthcoming book (the ostensible subject of which is butterflies). Here, to give you something to read if I fall silent over the long weekend, is an exclusive, never before seen extract: 

There is a Latin saying, Solvitur ambulando (it is solved by walking), which originally had a philosophical meaning, referring to problems that can be solved by practical experience or demonstration. Diogenes the Cynic is said to have applied it literally, refuting Zeno’s paradoxes about the impossibility of motion by getting up and walking away (much as, many centuries later, Samuel Johnson addressed Bishop Berkeley’s theory of the immateriality of objects by kicking a large stone and declaring, ‘I refute it thus!’). Over time, solvitur ambulando took on a wider meaning, one more related to the beneficial effects of walking, an activity that can indeed play a useful part in solving problems, if only by stimulating thought (I’ll be returning to that theme shortly). The phrase got a new lease of life when the travel writer and novelist Bruce Chatwin used it in The Songlines, having picked it up from his friend and mentor Patrick Leigh Fermor. Fermor was a heroic walker (and self-mythologiser) who in his youth had travelled on foot from the Hook of Holland to Istanbul, and Chatwin was a man who ‘passionately believed that walking constituted the sovereign remedy for every mental travail’. When he heard Fermor use the Latin phrase, it went straight into his notebook, and re-emerged in The Songlines, a book about the ‘songlines’ or ‘dreaming-paths’ of aboriginal Australians that celebrates the deeply human, richly satisfying activity of walking about.
 Butterfly watching is, in essence, a form of walking – not, like golf, ‘a good walk spoiled’, but rather a good walk greatly enhanced by the chance of seeing some very beautiful creatures. Walking brings with it all the pleasures and benefits of being in the open air and in motion – a particular form of motion, the steady, easy pace of walking. Unlike running, walking takes us slowly, at a human pace, through the landscape, with time to take in the sights and sounds and scents of nature, to enjoy them all and reap the benefits. I need hardly add that the kind of walking I am talking about here is not the Serious Activity, involving specialist kit, objectives and challenges, that drives some across the landscape, hideously dressed and with grim purpose in their eyes – no, it is more like a form of sauntering. The American sage Henry David Thoreau, in his essay/lecture on ‘Walking’, declares that ‘I have met but one or two persons in my life who understood the art of Walking, that is, of taking walks – who had a genius, so to speak, for sauntering…’ He goes on to give a fanciful account of the origins of the word ‘sauntering’ (‘from idle people who roved about the country in the middle ages, and asked charity under pretence of going à la Sainte Terre, to the Holy Land’), but never mind: Thoreau, one of the greatest, most observant and receptive of walkers, commends sauntering as the ideal form of walking. Watching butterflies is a kind of focused sauntering: walking with a purpose, yes, but one that is fluid and unpredictable, that might lead us anywhere or nowhere, and will abide no rigid programme. It is essentially walking for pleasure, but it brings with it tangible benefits. I have mentioned the health benefits of walking above. It is also, importantly, something that stimulates mental activity, for the rhythms of walking are the rhythms of thought. There is no better way of thinking through a problem than taking a walk. I’m sure I am not the only writer who gets most of his better ideas and composes most of his better passages when walking: I even had the idea for this book (which may or may not turn out to be one of my better ones) while walking – among butterflies, needless to say. Walking – especially walking alone – offers a kind of suspensive freedom in which the mind can operate more freely than when hemmed in by circumstance and moving to rhythms imposed by necessity. Nietzsche, who was a prodigious walker, believed that ‘All truly great thoughts are conceived while walking’, and once wrote an entire book (The Wanderer and His Shadow) from notes made while on his epic walks. Never one to understate his case, Nietzsche counselled his readers to ‘give credence to no thought that is not born in the open air and accompanied by free movement’, and even declared that sitting still was ‘the real sin against the Holy Ghost’. Kierkegaard, a philosopher of a less fire-breathing disposition than Nietzsche, wrote in a letter that ‘every day I walk myself into a state of well-being and walk away from every illness; I have walked myself into my best thoughts, and I know of no thought so burdensome that one cannot walk away from it … but by sitting still, and the more one sits still, the closer one comes to feeling ill … Thus if one just keeps on walking, everything will be all right.’ Solvitur ambulando indeed.

'So that when I stretch'd out my hand.....'

 It was on this day in 1768 that Laurence Sterne died, at the age of fifty-four, less than three weeks after the publication of his Sentimental Journey through France and Italy. What happened after his death is a strange saga of interment, 'resurrection', reinterment, disinterment and eventual burial of at least part of the remains in their rightful grave. I've written about it before here – and there's a fine account of Sterne's long duel with death in the excellent Public Domain Review: here's the link – 

https://publicdomainreview.org/essay/alas-poor-yorick-the-death-and-life-of-laurence-sterne/?fbclid=IwAR1GY3vik7LM4FiqFA0NXuqZnCNEfq_ZrDCQFKnvTpRcxkVU4NJzFPrNTns

Sterne's creative life closed more elegantly, with the gloriously inconclusive ending of A Sentimental Journey,  at once deathly and bawdy. Yorick, Sterne's alter ego, has been obliged to share a bedchamber with an attractive young Piedmontese lady, who has an equally attractive maid. Having negotiated a 'treaty' designed to get them through the night with no impropriety (rather in the manner of Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert in It Happened One Night), Yorick, restless and unable to sleep, exclaims 'O my God!'...

'– You have broke the treaty, Monsieur, said the lady, who had no more slept than myself – I begg'd a thousand pardons – but insisted it was no more than an ejaculation – she maintained it was an entire infraction of the treaty – I maintain'd it was provided for in the clause of the third article. 
   The lady would by no means give up her point, though she weakened her barrier by it; for in the warmth of the dispute, I could hear two or three corking-pins fall out of the curtain to the ground.
   Upon my word of honour, Madame, said I – stretching my arm out of bed by way of asseveration – 
   (– I was going to have added, that I would not have trespass'd against the remotest idea of decorum for the world) – 
   But the fille de chambre hearing there were words between us, and fearing that hostilities would ensue in course, had crept silently out of her closet, and it being totally dark, had stolen so close to our beds, that she had got herself into the narrow passage which separated them, and had advanc'd so far up as to be in a line betwixt her mistress and me – 
   So that when I stretch'd out my hand, I caught hold of the fille de chambre's

                                   END OF THE SECOND VOLUME


  

Graceful Monuments to the Obvious

 For reasons of research (mostly), I've been looking at a 1978 volume, edited by Kingsley Amis – The Faber Popular Reciter, an anthology of 'all the poems you've really enjoyed and which you can never remember properly' (to quote the back jacket). Amis's introduction is, as you'd expect, a fine, punchy little essay, one that strikes something of an elegiac note: he knows he is writing in the last days of a once vigorous tradition. 'When I was a schoolboy before the Second World War,' he begins, 'the majority of the poems in this book were too well known to be worth reprinting. If they were not in one anthology, they were in a couple of others; they were learned by heart and recited in class, or performed as turns at grown-up gatherings; they were sung in church or chapel or on other public occasions [Amis's anthology is unusual in containing a scattering of hymns and songs]... Most of that, together with much else, has gone.' Nowadays 'any adult who commits a poem to memory does so for personal satisfaction; if he utters it in company he does so to share it with like-minded friends (or as a harmless means of showing off), and as one who quotes, not one who recites.' Despite its title, Amis's anthology is not intended for recitation as such, but rather for reading aloud – not as a performance but as a way of 'finding out more about a piece of writing and so enjoying it more'. This is perhaps the best reason to read poetry aloud, and to at least attempt to learn it by heart. Reading aloud broadens out our experience of a poem from something on the page to something more intimately, more physically known, on the pulses, as you might say. 
  What Amis offers is an anthology of popular (or once popular) poetry that lends itself particularly well to reading aloud, by virtue of strong rhythm and rhyme, clarity of expression and some stirring or inspiriting quality. He recognises that Orwell was perhaps right to judge most such verse as 'good bad poetry', but Orwell added that 'A good bad poem is a graceful monument to the obvious. It records in memorable form ... some emotion which nearly every human being can share.' As Johnson said of Gray's Elegy, ' The Church-yard abounds with images which find a mirrour in every mind, and with sentiments to which every bosom returns an echo.' And what can be wrong with that?  
  Thomas Gray's great elegy features, quite rightly, in the Popular Reciter. And so too does a much later poem of the same (almost) name, G.K. Chesterton's 'Elegy in a Country Churchyard', a short, angry poem, written in the aftermath of the First World War, and ending on a bitter note to which, in these times, many a bosom might still return an echo – 

The men that worked for England

They have their graves at home:

And birds and bees of England

About the cross can roam.

 

But they that fought for England,

Following a falling star,

Alas, alas for England

They have their graves afar.

 

And they that rule in England,


In stately conclave met,


Alas, alas for England


They have no graves as yet.

Radio, Television, and That Man Again

 Ever since I broke with Radio 4 and made Radio 3 my default network, with all my radios tuned to it, I have of course been a happier, healthier, wiser and saner man. Although Radio 3 has its faults – it is, after all, a branch of the BBC – it offers a musical menu that is rarely unlistenable and in its totality includes the greatest, most beautiful and soul-enriching music ever written. However, speaking as a semi-insomniac – one who has no trouble falling asleep but often finds it hard to stay that way in the small hours, and resorts to low-volume radio as a soporific – I find the musical menu on offer during those difficult hours thoroughly unsatisfactory. Whenever I turn to Radio 3 for something quiet and calming, I find that there is nothing on offer but thumping, bombastic orchestral music, symphony after symphony, concerto after concerto, with little or nothing in the way of chamber music – and, what's worse, it's mostly live, so if I have managed to nod off despite everything, I'm liable to be jolted awake by a burst of applause. This goes on right through to 6.30, when Petroc Trelawny comes on with a  more varied and altogether less jolting musical menu. I've no idea why 3 fills the small hours with all those orchestral fireworks, just when 'relaxing classics' (as Classic FM likes to call its own output) are what is called for. What's worse, when in small-hours desperation I turn to Classic FM, I usually find that even they are playing the same sort of stuff as 3. Why do both networks do this? Are they going for the Antipodean audience? I wish there was a night-time radio station playing only chamber music, with maybe a bit of soothing choral stuff – I'd be tuning in to that. 
  From radio to television (I don't suppose I'l be writing again about either any time soon) – I was astonished to discover recently that the massively 'transgressive' comedy Little Britain is available for all to see on one of the outlying digital channels. David Walliams and Matt Lucas's show got into a fair bit of trouble when it first went out (2003-6), but in these woke times there is not the slightest chance it would ever get made. With sketches revolving around a revolting, supposedly disabled man who is actually faking it, two unmistakably male men who insist on behaving like and being treated as 'ladies', and the extravagantly caricatured young homosexualist, Daffyd, who insists, in the teeth of all the evidence, that he's 'the only gay in the village', I think it's safe to say that Little Britain would be shot down in flames and Walliams and Lucas barred from polite society, at the very least. Anyway – to my point: the village in which Daffyd believes himself to be 'the only gay' is called Llanddewi-Brefi, and at first I assumed this was an invented name. Later I discovered that it is a real village in west Wales (Cardiganshire), and one of some historical importance, as the site of the sixth-century Synod of Brefi, a gathering of Welsh saints and bishops (in those days practically every bishop was a saint), and the scene of various miracles performed by, among others, St David (Dewi), the patron saint of Wales. On one occasion during the synod, the ground mysteriously rose up under David while he was preaching, allowing him to be seen and heard by the whole of the large crowd that had gathered around him. This miracle is recalled in a poem by R.S. Thomas – yes, it's that man again...

Llanddewi-Brefi

One day this summer I will go to Llanddewi,
And buy a cottage and stand at the door
In the long evenings, watching the moor
Where the sheep pasture and the shadows fall
Thick as swathes under the sun's blade.
And there I will see somewhere beyond the wall
Of the old church the moles lifting the ground,
And think of the saint's cunning and how he stood
Preaching to the people from his secret mound,
A head's breadth above them, and they silent around.