Well, it's February, and on this first of the month, with the sun almost shining, there is indeed a certain 'gay lucidity' in the air. The phrase forms the first line of a neat little poem by 'Michael Field', the name under which Katherine Harris Bradley and her niece Edith Emma Cooper wrote, with considerable success, attracting favourable attention from Walter Pater, George Meredith and Robert Browning, the last of whom inadvertently let slip the true identity of 'Michael Field'. The two ladies were passionately involved with one another, and were no doubt in what we would now call a lesbian relationship; such arrangements barely raised an eyebrow in Victorian times. Their poetic output was forgotten after their deaths (within months of each other, in 1913 and 1914), but the rise of 'Queer Studies' has led to some revival of interest. Here's the poem –
February
Gay lucidity,
Not yet sunshine, in the air;
Tingling secrets hidden everywhere,
Each at watch for each;
Sap within the hillside beech,
Not a leaf to see.
And here is one of 'Michael Field's translations from Sappho –
XXXVI
Lovely.
ReplyDeleteLovely.
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ReplyDeleteDale Nelson
Thu, Feb 1, 10:19 PM (21 hours ago)
to me
In C. S. Lewis's preface to his anthology of excerpts from George MacDonald, he refers to the excitement and delight he experienced reading the author's fantastic tales. He came to realize that the quality that "enchanted" him was actually a quality of the real world we live in, "goodness." This goodness must be distinguished from flat "prosaic moralism" such as is suggested in our minds by the word. Real goodness is greatly desirable. Lewis said that its "elusive Form" is "the thing (in Sappho's phrase) 'more gold than gold.'"
So reading that is how the phrase came to be familiar to me, and now I have seen it in context -- thanks.
And thanks for these postings. Sometimes they are the last or almost last thing that I look at before turning off the computer, when I want my mind to become attentive to something better than most of what I save seen that day on my screen.
Dale Nelson in North Dakota
Well thank you Dale. A very interesting C.S. Lewis connection – and I think he is right about real goodness.
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