Herbert

Born on this day in 1593 was the great religious poet and all but saintly priest George Herbert. With Easter coming, here is/are his Easter Wings, a fine example of 'pattern poetry' or shaped verse, in which the lines assume a form that illustrates and expresses the meaning of the poem. Here each stanza shortens its lines towards a terse bisyllabic centre, from which they then expand outwards again to complete the pair of wings, an image of the potential (God-assisted) human state, of the wings of angels, perhaps of the contracting and expanding of the human heart. The word 'imp' in the last lines, by the way, means to graft...

Easter Wings

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,
Though foolishly he lost the same,
Decaying more and more,
Till he became
Most poore:
With thee
O let me rise
As larks, harmoniously,
And sing this day thy victories:
Then shall the fall further the flight in me.
My tender age in sorrow did beginne
And still with sicknesses and shame.
Thou didst so punish sinne,
That I became
Most thinne.
With thee
Let me combine,
And feel thy victorie:
For, if I imp my wing on thine,
Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Rather wonderfully, the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert was - or believed himself to be - a distant descendant of his namesake George.

Larkin About

Over on The Dabbler, I pass on a little Philip Larkin...

Butterflies, Schubert

Yesterday may have been All Fools Day, but it was also a good butterfly day for me. Without straying at all far from home and garden, I encountered by first Holly Blue of the year (basking briefly on ivy beside a railway bridge) and my first Orange Tip (a fine fresh male, cruising the garden, pausing for a brief sunbathe on a Periwinkle leaf - then returning on the same route half an hour later, but skipping the sunbathe). With another Holly Blue in the garden, and an Orange Tip quartering the lawn in front of a block of flats - plus a couple of Small White sightings - this was a fine April 1st, the culmination of an unusually butterfly-rich early spring. It's all been down to the unseasonally warm dry weather of course - and that, if the Met Office is to be believed (a big if, admittedly), is about to come to an end, with dramatic temperature plunges and some pretty vile weather. Well, we'll see...
The weekend also included the culmination of Radio 3's Spirit of Schubert season - I fell asleep late on Saturday night to the great String Quintet. What has been most striking about this feast of Schubert has been the emotional warmth of listeners' - and, often, presenters' - responses to it. For many it has clearly been quite a journey, in the course of which many have, in effect, fallen in love with this uniquely loveable composer. To know his music is to know him, and to know him (to quote Phil Spector) is to love him - or that's what it feels like. Loveable geniuses are few and far between - in literature, Keats is the obvious example, and in a different way Chekhov. It's hard to think of many more of the greats who have quite this particular quality - any suggestions?

The Pasty War - It Had to Happen...

Just when you thought domestic politics couldn't get any more farcical, a full-scale pasty war breaks out, with our leaders and would-be leaders competing to be seen eating the most disgusting downmarket snacks they can find, from so-called 'Cornish pasties' to cheap sausage rolls. When the mysterious rash of pasty shops started spreading across London and elsewhere a few years ago, I knew there would be trouble - and now it's come... The principal mystery of the pasty shop plague remains, though - you never see anyone in them, even in these hard times, and yet they somehow stay in business. Perhaps the 'pasty tax' is a last desperate attempt to get rid of them - if so I back it wholeheartedly...

Surprise

A beautiful surprise in Holland Park earlier today - two Speckled Woods fight-dancing, rising and falling together gracefully in a perfect double helix. As they do. I think this is the earliest I've ever seen a Speckled Wood (though, amazingly, the first of this year was spotted on January 13th by someone in Cornwall). I've also seen Red Admirals, Brimstones, Small Whites and a fast-flying Peacock - and it's still only March. A good start, but this wonderful heatwave is expected to end any day now and the early flyers will go to ground...

Aah Schubert...

What with one thing and another - life, work, my late-Lent immersion in the St Matthew Passion - I haven't heard as much as I'd like of Radio 3's Spirit of Schubert season - his complete works across the entire schedule for eight and a half days. But it's been a joy to find Schubert there every time I tune to Radio 3, and once or twice I've fallen asleep to Schubert and woken in the morning to more Schubert, surely to the great benefit of my soul.
In my musically formative years, such a project would have seemed outlandish, as Schubert occupied a place a long way down the evolutionary ladder from the great, universally worshipped Beethoven. And, as it happened, when Radio 3 first scheduled a continuous broadcast of one composer's complete works, in 2005, it was Ludwig Van that they chose, launching (with some trepidation) the six-day Beethoven Experience. It proved an unexpectedly massive hit, emboldening Radio 3 to do it again in the same year, this time with Bach: A Bach Christmas filled ten days of the run-up to Christmas with the complete works of Bach. After that, in 2007, Tchaikovsky and Stravinsky got the treatment. Then, belatedly, came Mozart, across the first ten days of 2011. And now we have the Spirit of Schubert, which comes to a glorious end on Saturday night with a concert of his last works, including the sublime C Major Quintet and B Flat Sonata...
The question is: Who should be next for this immersive, completist treatment? My own suggestion would be Purcell, who's been well served in the past by Radio 3 (especially in his anniversary years, with a Purcell Weekend in 2009) but he was certainly prolific enough - and great enough - to qualify, and his music is still too little known and appreciated (by me indeed, until quite recently). Any more ideas?

Hirst Has Jumped the Shark

Julian Spalding's long overdue attack on Damien Hirst is welcome, and is echoed by murmurs from the art market that also seem to suggest an almighty bubble is about to burst. As he says, if you bought a shark in a tank what you've got is a shark in a tank (albeit one with a fancy name) - and the conservation problems don't bear thinking about... I believe Spalding is wrong to finger Marcel Duchamp as being ultimately responsible for this kind of 'con art' or 'non art' - Duchamp was after all a real artist as well as a prankster. The man who, more than any other, paved the way for Hirst and his kind was Andy Warhol, a non-artist who turned 'art' into a blatantly money-making mass production business (though despite this, he and his people did produce some striking work, and it's hard not to like Warhol - just as it's hard not to loathe the loutish Hirst). Anyway, it's rather wonderful that the Hirst bubble is in danger of bursting just as Tate Modern launches its mighty blockbuster exhibition of.. Damien Hirst, backed by two Channel 4 documentaries, and no doubt a BBC Culture Show special and much puffery from our old friend Will Gompertz. Perhaps we should all go and see it, on the grounds that there will never be another, and we can tell our bemused grandchildren that we were there. They probably wouldn't believe us though.