Ten Years Ago

 On this day ten years ago – the day the result of the Brexit referendum was announced – I was walking in Surrey, where I took this picture. This is what politicians used to look like (take note, Andy Burnham)...

https://nigeness.blogspot.com/2016/06/picture-of-day.html

Cometh the Hour...

 McGonagall, thou shouldst be living at this hour...

'Twas in the year twenty twenty-six, on the twenty-second day of June
– Which many political commentators and others said was not a day too soon –
That the Prime Minister, Sir Keir Starmer, stood outside 10 Downing Street and announced his resignation 
To the reporters and cameramen assembled there, and also to the nation.
His successor is expected to be the popular King of the North, Andy Burnham,
But, when it comes to the fortunes of the Labour party and indeed of the nation, the question many are asking is 'Can he turn 'em?'

'Lying flat in the bracken...'

Here's one for Father's Day, tangentially. A loose, joyful almost-sonnet, written by Gavin Ewart, sixty years ago this month...

June 1966

Lying flat in the bracken of Richmond Park
while the legs and voices of my children pass
seeking, seeking: I remember how on the
13th of June of that simmering 1940
I was conscripted into the East Surreys,
and, more than a quarter of a century
ago, when France had fallen,
we practised concealment in this very bracken.
The burnt stalks pricked through my denims.
Hitler is now one of the antiques of History,
I lurk like a monster in my hiding place.
He didn't get me. If there were a God
it would be only polite to thank him. 

Never Dull

 More than a year ago, I bought a copy of Carlyle's The French Revolution, all three volumes of it contained in one slim India-paper volume. It has been my bedtime reading, off and on, ever since, and last night I finally reached the end, Chapter VIII of volume three, aptly titled Finis: 'Homer's Epos, it is remarked, is like a Bas-relief sculpture: it does not conclude, but merely ceases. Such, indeed, is the Epos of Universal History itself...' After a long, overheated passage of 'prophecy' from Alessandro Cagliostro, described by Carlyle himself as 'the Quack of Quacks', the author returns to take an elegant farewell: 
'And so here, O Reader, has the time come for us two to part. Toilsome was our journeying together [you're not wrong, Tom]; not without offence; but it is done. To me thou wert as a beloved shade, the disembodied or not yet embodied spirit of a Brother. To thee I was but as a voice. Yet was our relation a kind of sacred one; doubt not that! For whatsoever once sacred things become hollow jargons, yet while the Voice of Man speaks with Man, hast thou not there the living fountain out of which all sacrednesses sprang, and will yet spring? Man, by the nature of him, is definable as 'an incarnate Word'. Ill stands it with me if I have spoken falsely: thine also it was to hear truly. Farewell.'
   Well, it was quite a ride. This was a book that, as Carlyle put it, came 'direct and flamingly from the heart', and that is how it reads – impassioned, vivid, personal, written as if by an eye-witness who was in the thick of the action and now invites us to be there alongside him. Exclaiming, apostrophising, drawing the reader in with the first-person plural, he takes off into sometimes obscure flights of prose poetry, bringing in myths and scripture, scattering metaphors, references, personifications, archaisms and new-coined words left and right, always with an eye to bringing alive the extraordinary, often terrible events he chronicles. The effect at times is almost cinematic, wholly unlike any other history, and, God knows, it is never dull. 

 

So cross that he postponed his bath...

 I'm greatly enjoying Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, finding it rather more agreeable reading than Lytton Strachey's Eminent Victorians. Reading about the egregious press baron Lord Northcliffe brought home to me what a very Northcliffean organ his creation, the Daily Mail, still is – or at least was when I served my 22 years in Northcliffe House – and how Northcliffean the management style is/was. But I'll say no more (and Paul Dacre was always very nice to me). 
  I'm now reading about the languid aristocrat Arthur Balfour, Cambridge 'Soul', 'scented popinjay' and charming ornament of the highest society, who was steered into a political career by his uncle, Lord Salisbury, and ended up being Prime Minister from 1902 to 1905, leading his party into the political wilderness for 20 years. As his government fell apart around him, nothing dented his aplomb: Brendon writes that 'The only reverse that evoked a gleam of passion in him was the Duke of Devonshire's resignation in 1903; the Prime Minister was so cross that in order to write the Duke a stiff letter he postponed his bath.' Not exactly The Thick of It, is it?
  Balfour found it hard to reconcile himself to being in Opposition, and could scarcely believe that the 'natural rulers' of the country were no longer in power. He 'found himself compelled to "go about the country explaining that I am 'honest and industrious', like a second footman out of place" and enduring those "attendant horrors" of public meetings, the "subsidiary luncheons and dinners, which are fatal to one's temper at the moment, and to one's digestion afterwards.' He was surprised to find that his reappearance in the Commons as Opposition leader was 'the signal for ill-mannered interruptions' – and for a most ungentlemanly attack from the new Prime Minister, Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman, 'a man who resembled nothing so much as an enraged sheep', and whose name the absent-minded Lord Salisbury had never been able to remember. C-B caddishly attacked Balfour for the very thing he most prided himself on – his silky forensic technique, 'the spinning of diaphanous webs in which his adversaries became fatally enmeshed'. This art the enraged sheep denounced as mere 'foolery' – and much of the House agreed. Times had changed, and Balfour's ideal of parliamentary debate as 'concord enlivened by mellifluous displays of intellectual counterpoint' had, alas, gone for good.  
  Still to come: Mrs Pankhurst and General Baden-Powell. I'm looking forward to them both. 

Cheers to Beer

 I've only just realised, with a start, that today is National Beer Day.
 The date was chosen because it's the anniversary of the signing of Magna Carta, which has something to say about standard measures of beer and other drinks – and also, one would like to think, represents our traditional liberties, of which the drinking of beer, preferably in a pub, is a pretty good embodiment. Johnson was a great advocate of what we now call the pub: 'There is nothing which has yet been contrived by man, by which so much happiness is produced as by a good tavern or inn.' I think he would have loved Wetherspoon's, that most convivial of national institutions – and famed for its cheap, well kept beer. 
  National Beer Day enjoins us to raise a glass at 7pm in a national Cheers to Beer toast. I'll drink to that.

'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House...'

 Born on this day in 1811 was Harriet Beecher Stowe, author of the abolitionist bestseller Uncle Tom's Cabin. She was born, I was interested to see, in Litchfield, Connecticut, a small town that wisely changed its name from Bantam township, adopting the name of the great Mercian cathedral city, but inserting, for reasons unknown, an extraneous 't'. 
  Following the sensational success of Uncle Tom's Cabin, and in the second year of the Civil War, Mrs Stowe and family visited President Lincoln at the White House. Alas, it seems he did not greet her with the famous words, 'So you are the little woman who wrote the book that started this great war.' However, her daughter recalled, intriguingly, that 'It was a very droll time that we had at the White House, I assure you ... it was all very funny – and we were ready to explode with laughter all the while.' Mrs Stowe herself told her husband in a letter: 'I had a real funny interview with the President.' It seems Presidents were cut from a different cloth in those days. 
  As a boy, I made a rash attempt to read Uncle Tom's Cabin. I don't think I even reached the end of chapter one, and all I remember is a single image, of a man holding a glass of some kind of wine up to the light and admiring a bee's wing floating in it. This struck me as very odd, and the image stayed with me for years – until I realised that what was being described was not the wing of a bee but a flake of the translucent 'crust' of port or old red wine, a sign of long ageing in the bottle. Composed of potassium bitartrate (cream of tartar), it's called 'beeswing' because of its resemblance to the delicate veined wing of a small flying insect. This adds a new, appropriately alcoholic, level of meaning to Betjeman's description of Wilde's 'bees-winged eyes' in his poem, 'The Arrest of Oscar Wilde at the Cadogan Hotel', one of the best he ever wrote – 

He sipped at a weak hock and seltzer
As he gazed at the London skies
Through the Nottingham lace of the curtains
Or was it his bees-winged eyes?

To the right and before him Pont Street
Did tower in her new-built red,
As hard as the morning gaslight
That shone on his unmade bed.

“I want some more hock in my seltzer,
And Robbie, please give me your hand —
Is this the end or beginning?
How can I understand?

“So you’ve brought me the latest Yellow Book:
And Buchan has got in it now:
Approval of what is approved of
Is as false as a well-kept vow.

“More hock, Robbie — where is the seltzer?
Dear boy, pull again at the bell!
They are all little better than cretins,
Though this is the Cadogan Hotel.

“One astrakhan coat is at Willis’s —
Another one’s at the Savoy:
Do fetch my morocco portmanteau,
And bring them on later, dear boy.”

A thump, and a murmur of voices —
(”Oh why must they make such a din?”)
As the door of the bedroom swung open
And TWO PLAIN CLOTHES POLICEMEN came in:

“Mr. Woilde, we 'ave come for tew take yew
Where felons and criminals dwell:
We must ask yew tew leave with us quoietly
For this is the Cadogan Hotel.”

He rose, and he put down The Yellow Book.
He staggered — and, terrible-eyed,
He brushed past the plants on the staircase
And was helped to a hansom outside.

 

'If his face looks like this...'

Yesterday's announcement of David Hockney's death was greeted by a wonderful outpouring of affectionate and admiring tributes – and quite right too. He was that rare thing, a genuine artist who was also widely popular and well-liked – the equivalent in painting, perhaps, of John Betjeman in poetry. Not easy to think of another, in either field, with such a combination of attributes...
  I've always loved Hockney's drawings, perhaps rather more than his paintings – certainly more than his late paintings, cheering though they are. The above pen drawing of Auden is a favourite – so economical in means, yet so perfectly capturing the man. Hockney has wisely simplified the prodigious reticulation of wrinkles that covered the ageing Auden's face, giving it the appearance, as he put it himself, of 'a wedding cake left out in the rain'. I wonder – well, I don't really, but you never know – if the lyricist Jimmy Webb had that phrase in mind when he wrote that totally bonkers song 'MacArthur Park': 

'MacArthur Park is melting in the dark,
All the sweet green icing flowing down.
Someone left the cake out in the rain,
And I don't think that I can take it
'Cause it took so long to bake it,
And I'll never have that recipe again.
Oh no!
Oh no!'
(Check out the full lyrics here to savour just how bonkers this song is. I particularly like the line 'Like a striped pair of pants' in the first stanza.)

   To return to Auden's face, Hockney recalled that, when drawing it, he kept thinking, 'If his face looks like this, what must his balls look like?' 
  Scientific Postscript: Some medical experts believe that the state of Auden's face was due to a rare genetic condition known as Touraine-Solente-Golé syndrome. But many years of heavy smoking, supplemented by alcohol and benzedrine, can't have helped. 

Aethelflaed

 Happy Aethelflaed Day, everyone! 
Aethelflaed (870-918), daughter of Alfred the Great, is remembered as the Lady of the Mercians, and is something of a feminist icon. With her brother, who later became King Edward the Elder, she ruled over much of Mercia from 911, successfully fighting off the Vikings. She died on this day 1,108 years ago (have I got that right?).
Above is a strange and, er, somewhat unsatisfactory statue of Aethelflaed, which stands on a traffic island in Tamworth, the Mercian capital. 

An Unplanned Church

 Yesterday I had an appointment at a hospital some little way from Lichfield. For reasons I won't bore you with, I ended up arriving a full hour early. What to do? I'd noticed, on the way in, a red sandstone church standing apparently alone in the fields – Victorian by the look of it, and probably locked – but I thought I'd go and have a look. The hospital is in what might be called a semi-rural location, with the Big House (much Victorianised) close to it, and the village stretching along the main road, inhabited largely by the kind of people who like to build big showy houses behind tall wrought-iron gates and Virginia Water shrubbery. Not very inspiring then, and reeking of money. But the church – that was the thing. And I was lucky: as I drew near I spotted some human activity, which turned out to be the churchwarden and her husband finishing off the flowers with which the church was abundantly decked. This was in honour of the new vicar, who is being installed today. So, by pure luck, I had found the church open. It's wonderful how often this happens – sometimes it seems almost miraculous, as with the Lady with the Key. 
   Anyway, I had a nice chat with the churchwarden, and was able to have a look around the church before she locked up and left. The church is Victorian indeed, small and simple but of high quality, the gift of the then owner of the Big House, with lavish fittings, a spectacular polychrome sanctuary floor, and a couple of good stained-glass windows. Pevsner describes the interior as 'wholly satisfying', and it is indeed. I'm so glad I chanced to find it open. It was one of those happy unplanned moments that have peppered my church-crawling life – and indeed the rest of my life. Reasons to be thankful. 

'There is nothing to do with a day except to live it'

 Another day begins. Here is a starting-the-day poem by the great Richard Wilbur. It's just the kind of celebration of the domestic and the quotidian that got him such a bad reputation among the more 'advanced' taste-makers – more fools them: this is no simple celebration. 

C Minor

Beethoven during breakfast? The human soul,
Though stalked by hollow pluckings, winning out
(While bran-flakes crackle in the cereal bowl)
   Over despair and doubt?

You are right to switch it off and let the day
Begin at hazard, perhaps with pecker-knocks
In the sugar bush, the rancour of a jay,
   Or in the letter box

Something that makes you pause and with fixed shadow
Stand on the driveway-gravel, your bent head
Scanning the snatched pages until the sad
   Or fortunate news is read.

The day's work will be disappointing or not,
Giving at least some pleasure in taking pains.
One of us, hoeing in the garden plot
   (Unless, of course, it rains)

May rejoice at the knitting of light in fennel-plumes
And dew like mercury on cabbage-hide,
Or rise and pace through too-familiar rooms, 
   Balked and dissatisfied.

Shall a plate be broken? A new thing understood? 
Shall we be lonely, and by love consoled?
What shall I whistle, splitting the kindling-wood?
   Shall the night-wind be cold?

How should I know? And even if we were fated
Hugely to suffer, grandly to endure,
It would not help to hear it all fore-stated
   As in an overture.

There is nothing to do with a day except to live it.
Let us have music again when the light dies
(Sullenly, or in glory) and we can give it
   Something to organise.

Ever since I switched my allegiance from Radio 4 to Radio 3, classical music has been a background to my life for rather too much of the day (including even Classic FM pianissimo while I sleep, or not). If I'm awake early, I like to hear the snatch of birdsong that starts the Radio 3 day – but, by the time I'm eating my breakfast, I'm happy to turn the music off for a while. Wilbur is right – Beethoven at breakfast is not a good idea. But what was the C minor piece that was switched off? The expressive key of C minor was a favourite of Beethoven's – it's the key of the Pathétique sonata (and the last, number 32) and the Fifth Symphony. Wilbur talks of 'pluckings', perhaps suggesting a string quartet – maybe it was this one, a fine piece, but certainly not breakfast music...

'The best example of what living constantly with humans leads to'

 I see that the supermarket chain Sainsbury's is doing its bit to cut 'emissions' by removing brown eggs from its shelves in favour of white ones, which, according to its research, have a 12.7 percent lower 'carbon footprint' than their brown cousins. This major contribution to achieving 'net zero' has, of course, nothing to do with the fact that white eggs are cheaper and easier to produce... 
  Anyway, this got me thinking about chickens. The domestic fowl (Gallus gallus domesticus) is the most numerous bird, and the most numerous domestic animal, on the planet, with a population estimated at upward of 26.5 billion (four chickens for every human?). Our debt to them, as producers both of meat and of those natural wonders, eggs, is immense – but are we grateful to them, do we appreciate them? Of course not. Here is the great Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert's tribute to the doughty fowl –

Hen

The hen is the best example of what living constantly with
humans leads to. She has completely lost the lightness and
grace of a bird. Her tail sticks up over her protruding rump
like a too large hat in bad taste. Her rare moments of ecstasy,
when she stands on one leg and glues up her round eyes
with filmy eyelids, are stunningly disgusting. And in addition, that
parody of song, throat-slashed supplications over a thing un-
utterably comic: a round, white, maculated egg.
   The hen brings to mind certain poets.

[translation by Czeslaw Milosz]

Minced Oaths

 An American friend inquires – as well he might – what 'a Herbert Spencer of a cold' might mean. As I told him, I'm probably the only person on the planet who still uses the phrase (to universal bafflement). I came across it years ago in, I think, a novel by H.G. Wells (Love and Mr Lewisham?), where a character says he has had 'a Herbert Spencer of a day'. He means of course a Hell of a day, and it's an example of what is known as a 'minced oath', where an innocuous form of words, with the same initial letter, is substituted for a profanity.  There is no actual connection between Hell and Herbert Spencer, except that neither is a lot of fun. Another example where the name of a famous person is put to this use is 'what the Dickens?', which has nothing to do with the writer, but is simply a way of avoiding saying 'devil'. Similarly the exclamation 'Gordon Bennett' is a way of avoiding naming the deity. The Gordon Bennett thus invoked was the wealthy publisher, sportsman and celebrity (in his day) Gordon Bennett Jr, who, among other things, sponsored Stanley's expedition to Africa to find David Livingstone. And then there's the sad case of 'sweet Fanny Adams' (a way of avoiding the expression 'sweet f*ck-all'). Fanny was an eight-year-old girl whose brutal murder in Alton, Hampshire,  in 1867 caused a national outcry. But that's enough minced oaths. 
   Meanwhile, my own Herbert Spencer of a cold still has me firmly in its grip, so I have entirely missed out on the Devon jaunt I was looking forward to. Hey ho. 

A Cold, A New Month, A Poem

 I spent the weekend with my cousin amid the floriferous glory of Derbyshire at the turn of summer, with sunshine (much of the time) to heighten the beauty. However, along the way I discovered that, annoyingly, I was developing a stinking cold – which is now, on my return to Lichfield, in full dismal swing, a real Herbert Spencer of a cold. Still more annoyingly, I was supposed to be travelling to Exeter tomorrow to join my walking friends for a few days. Now my best hope is to make the journey on Thursday instead, if this tiresome virus has gone into retreat by then. Here's hoping...
   Meanwhile, I notice that May has become June, and today, the 2nd, is the date on which, in 1840, Thomas Hardy, Wessex's Monarch of Mirth, suffered the terrible fate of being born. Did he have something to say about June? Oh yes, he did, but, being Hardy, his thoughts inevitably turned to autumn – 

June Leaves and Autumn

I

Lush summer lit the trees to green;
But in the ditch hard by
Lay dying boughs some hand unseen
Had lopped when first with festal mien
They matched their mates on high.
It seemed a melancholy fate
That leaves but brought to birth so late
Should rust there, red and numb,
In quickened fall, while all their race
Still joyed aloft in pride of place
With store of days to come.

II

At autumn-end I fared that way,
And traced those boughs fore-hewn
Whose leaves, awaiting their decay
In slowly browning shades, still lay
Where they had lain in June
And now, no less embrowned and curst
Than if they had fallen with the first,
Nor known a morning more,
Lay there alongside, dun and sere,
Those that at my last wandering here
Had length of days in store.


[published in Human Shows, Far Phantasies, Songs and Trifles, 1925]

'Paradoxes flung up in the air'

G.K. Chesterton was born on this day in 1874. Max Beerbohm first met him in 1902 and described him as 'like a mountain, and a volcanic one – constant stream of talk flowing down – paradoxes flung up into the air – very magnificent.' They became friends, and Beerbohm admired him – within limits: 'I am not nearly as witty as Chesterton for one, but certainly I have not prostituted and cheapened my wit as he has' – harsh words, by Max's standards, but fair enough: the unstoppably prolific Chesterton did turn out plenty of substandard stuff.
  Beerbohm parodied Chesterton in full flow in the great parody collection A Christmas Garland. Chesterton is represented by 'Some Damnable Errors About Christmas', a fine stream of paradoxes which asserts that 'for nearly two thousand years mankind has been more glaringly wrong on the subject of Christmas than on any other subject. If mankind had hated Christmas, he would have understood it from the first.' Among the 'more obvious fallacies' are the idea that 'Christmas should be observed as a time of jubilation' and that it 'comes but once a year'. Spiritually, Chesterton asserts, 'Christmas Day recurs exactly seven times a week. When we have frankly acknowledged this, and acted on this, we shall begin to realise the Day's mystical and terrific beauty. For it is only every-day things that reveal themselves to us in all their wonder and their splendour.' All very Chestertonian, 'very magnificent'.
  Above is one of Beerbohm's caricatures of Chesterton. He was a huge man, standing six feet four inches tall – my own height, as it happens – and tipping the scales at something over twenty stone (which I don't). His girth was famously immense: there was a story that during the Great War a lady asked him why he was 'not out at the front', and he replied, 'Madam, if you go round to the side, you will see that I am.' And Wodehouse described a loud crash as 'a sound like G.K. Chesterton falling onto a sheet of tin.' In 1931, the BBC asked him to give a series of talks on the radio, and they were a great success, delivered more or less impromptu, with his wife and secretary in the studio with him. Four years later, Beerbohm began his own series of radio talks, which were also a great success, and were later published in the collection Mainly on the Air, one of his best. 

A Painted Lady Summer?

 So there I was, in the supermarket car park, gazing happily at a tough-looking low-growing shrub covered with tiny white flowers (maybe a Contoneaster of some kind) – and there, drinking their fill of nectar, were three glorious Painted Lady butterflies, all in my field of vision at once. Some years that is as many as I see in a whole season, but this year we seem to be having a Painted Lady Summer – they are everywhere, even in town. Those three came on top of another half dozen or so I'd seen on my short walk to the supermarket, and there have been many more in the garden. I do love these butterflies, and have done since early childhood, when I first registered the extraordinary beauty of their intricately marked underwings, and marvelled at the journey they had made to get here. We now know that they fly not only from the Med but all the way from the desert fringes of North Africa, the Middle East and Central Asia, making much of the journey at high altitude. And here they are this year, in glorious abundance. 
   Also this morning, just down the road from our house, I spotted a Hummingbird Hawk moth, feeding on red valerian. This little moth, which does give a very good impression of a hummingbird, has thrived wonderfully in recent years, even surviving the winter in many parts. 
  So there we are – at least two reasons to be cheerful. Also, the oppressive heat of the past couple of days has cooled down to a perfect early summer day (even though it's still spring). 

The Bower

 Today is the day of the Lichfield Bower, a curiously named celebration dating back to the reign of Henry II. Originally it was a muster or array, a way of finding out how many men could be called upon to fight if needed. All those capable of bearing arms would parade through the streets, accompanied by dancers and garlanded effigies of saints, and be handsomely rewarded at the end of the day with beef and wine at a specially erected 'bower house' decorated with laurel and lilac. When gunpowder became available, musketeers would join the procession, firing volleys outside the houses of leading townspeople, who were expected to respond by bringing out offerings of cakes and ale. While other towns abandoned such events, Lichfield continued to stage its Bower every Whit Monday, with a street parade that nowadays features local schools, bands and community organisations, with marching soldiers to represent the military. There are floats and lorries, a funfair, musical performances, the crowning of a Bower Queen (Ruskin would have approved), and of course – this being Lichfield – ample opportunities to eat and drink. I usually miss most of it, and that is perhaps just as well, as such spectacles stir up a strange brew of emotions in my breast – I don't know why – and I have been known to well up embarrassingly. 
  Philip Larkin seems to have been similarly, obscurely affected by such sights, to judge by his poem 'The March Past' (a villanelle of sorts), written on this day in 1951...

The march interrupted the light afternoon.
Cars stopped dead, children began to run,
As out of the street-shadow into the sun

Discipline strode, music bullying aside
The credulous, prettily-coloured crowd,
Evoking an over-confident, over-loud

Holiday where the flags lisped and beckoned,
And all was focused, larger than we reckoned,
Into a consequence of thirty seconds.

The stamp and dash of surface sound cut short
Memory, intention, thought;
The vague heart sharpened to a candid court

Where exercised a sudden flock of visions:
Honeycombs of heroic separations,
Pure marchings, pure apparitions,

Until the crowd closed in behind.
Then music drooped. And what came back to mind
Was not its previous habit, but a blind

Astonishing remorse for things now ended
That of themselves were also rich and splendid
(But unsupported broke, and were not mended) –

Astonishing, for such things should be deep,
Rarely exhumable: not in a sleep
So light they can wake and occupy
An absent mind when any march goes by.

A Bee

Aggrade. 
There's a word we're all familiar with, I'm sure... No? Me neither.
It means to build up or raise the level of a land surface by depositing sediment, and I mention it because it was the word that knocked my 11-year-old grandson out of the Canadian national spelling bee junior finals last night. Thanks to the wonders of modern technology, we were able to watch this event live as it went out, and Ethan (for it is he) sailed into the final five, tackling words such as 'dystopian' and 'spelunking', before 'aggrade' came up and shattered his young dreams – well, actually he wasn't too bothered, and was pleased enough with his performance. But 'aggrade'... really. It was the only word in the competition I didn't know, though I might have had some difficulty as a result of the question master's wayward pronunciation (worst example, 'plaited' pronounced 'plated') and bizarre habit of announcing 'there are two different pronunciations for this word', then saying it exactly the same way twice. 
   I had never seen a spelling bee before – we don't have them over here (perhaps because so few people can spell) – and I was struck by how joylessly the contest was conducted, though my daughter assures me there was plenty of joy in the room (as well as a few tears). I guess you had to be there. 
  The picture below is Norman Rockwell's 'Cousin Reginald Spells Peloponnesus' – a word that happily didn't come up last night (and cousin Reginald could hardly be less like our Ethan).

Tea

 Yesterday was World Bee Day (not to be confused with World Bidet) – and, by chance, I had in my change a £1 coin I'd never seen before, with the face of our King on one side and on the other an attractive design featuring... two bees. Today – how they keep on coming – is International Tea Day. And why not? Tea, if properly made with good leaves and no milk, is a fine drink.
The poets have not had much to say about tea: there's Cowper's much-misquoted 'The cups that cheer but not inebriate', and this from Basho –
 
A monk sips morning tea.
It is quiet.
The chrysanthemum is flowering.

And then there's Wallace Stevens's 'Tea at the Palaz of Hoon', from his astonishing first collection, Harmonium. This is not, it must be admitted, a poem about tea. It has a Wikipedia entry to itself, which I have battled my way through, emerging unenlightened and drained of all pleasure in life. So I return to the poem, which is a thing of beauty...

Tea at the Palaz of Hoon

Not less because in purple I descended
The western day through what you called
The loneliest air, not less was I myself.

What was the ointment sprinkled on my beard?
What were the hymns that buzzed beside my ears?
What was the sea whose tide swept through me there?

Out of my mind the golden ointment rained,
And my ears made the blowing hymns they heard.
I was myself the compass of that sea:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.


    Finally, and with apologies for lowering the tone, here is a lyric that is definitely about tea, sung by the great Jack Buchanan, and surely a fitting anthem for International Tea Day. His account of the genesis of Schubert's Unfinished Symphony is, I fear, unsound.

Danish

 Last night I watched an episode of Andrew Graham-Dixon's The Art of Scandinavia. The subject was Danish art, so I was expecting good stuff. Alas, I was disappointed: for one thing, this was more a potted cultural history of Denmark, from Christian IV and the Frederiksborg Palace to the original Legoland, by way of Hans Christian Andersen (no Kierkegaard). But more importantly, the coverage of actual Danish art was at best patchy. Plenty of  Thorvald's heroic neo-classical sculpture (a little of which goes a long way), and more than enough of Eckersberg's unalluring nudes – after which it was straight on to Hammershoi's pallid interiors. So, no sighting of the greatest of the Golden Age painters, Cristen Koebke, no Golden Age landscapes (that's one of Købke's above), and nothing of Krøyer and the Skagen painters – in other words, all the most beautiful and enjoyable Danish art was missing. 
   Though I can't say I like him, I know Graham-Dixon has made some excellent TV programmes, many of which I've enjoyed – but this certainly wasn't one of them. He's also written a big fat book about Vermeer, which everyone is raving about (just as they were about Laura Cumming's recent book on Dutch art, Thunderclap, which I found disappointing). I don't think I'll be reading it – life seems too short.

Britain's Favourite Butterfly – and Mine

I see that the charity Butterfly Conservation is running a poll to find Britain's Favourite Butterfly. At present, the Peacock is leading the vote, unsurprisingly, and in second place I'm delighted to see the Orange Tip, ahead of the Red Admiral. Has anyone voted for the Dingy Skipper, Britain's dullest butterfly, I wondered? They have – it's there at number 37 (of 60 eligible species). So what is at number 60, the bottom of the poll? Incredibly, it's the Silver-Spotted Skipper, a beautiful little butterfly that gladdened my heart on many a late-summer walk in the Surrey Hills. Of my own favourites, I was also startled to see the lovely Dark Green Fritillary way down the chart at number 49. But Nige, I hear you ask – if you were to vote, what would it be? Readers of this book need hardly ask – yes, it would have to be the White Admiral (currently at number 26). The special magic of this butterfly is as much in its flight as in its beautiful wing markings. Jeremy Thomas writes that 'No account can do justice to the White Admiral's dainty movements, or convey the character of a creature so ideally suited to gliding in and out of dappled shade among the branches of mature woodlands.' Indeed. 
  This video gives some idea of the beauty of Limenitis camilla...

Dark

 And here, by way of counterweight to the International Day of Light, is a poem by Edward Thomas. As with the Donald Justice, it is one of his last and most beautiful (and untitled), written on his last Christmas at home with his family. A few months later, on Easter Monday 1917, Thomas was killed in action at Arras, shot through the chest. 

Out in the dark over the snow

The fallow fawns invisible go

With the fallow doe ;

And the winds blow

Fast as the stars are slow.

Stealthily the dark haunts round

And, when the lamp goes, without sound

At a swifter bound

Than the swiftest hound,

Arrives, and all else is drowned ;

And star and I and wind and deer,

Are in the dark together, – near,

Yet far, – and fear

Drums on my ear

In that sage company drear.

How weak and little is the light,

All the universe of sight,

Love and delight,

Before the might,

If you love it not, of night.

Light

  I'm sure it can't have escaped your attention that today is International Day of Light. I must admit it was passing me by until it got a mention on the radio this morning. I've no clear idea what it is – some kind of Unesco invention, it seems – but it gives me the perfect pretext to post again one of my favourite poems – one of the last, and most beautiful, written by Donald Justice. Three six-line stanzas, rhyming by repetition, the last stanza directly paraphrasing Chekhov's Uncle Vanya – that's all there is to it, and yet it creates something far bigger than the sum of its parts. I find it intensely moving, and I rate it among the great short poems of the twentieth century...

1 
There is a gold light in certain old paintings
That represents a diffusion of sunlight.
It is like happiness, when we are happy.
It comes from everywhere and nowhere at once, this light,
  And the poor soldiers sprawled at the foot of the cross
  Share in its charity equally with the cross.

2
Orpheus hesitated beside the black river.
With so much to look forward to he looked back.
We think he sang then, but the song is lost.
At least he had seen once more the beloved back.
  I say the song went this way: O prolong
  Now the sorrow if that is all there is to prolong.

3
The world is very dusty, uncle. Let us work.
One day the sickness shall pass from the earth for good.
The orchard will bloom; someone will play the guitar.
Our work will be seen as strong and clean and good.
  And all that we suffered through having existed
  Shall be forgotten as though it had never existed.

West Wind

 The mid-May weather here has been unseasonally cold, with sudden violent showers of rain and hail. The swifts have withdrawn to await better things; only the doughtiest butterflies – holly blues (amazingly abundant this year) and speckled woods – are showing themselves, in the rare moments of relative warmth; and me, I'm back in my herringbone tweed jacket. The worst of it is the relentless, hard-blowing West wind. I'm no fan of strong winds, from whatever quarter, but the West is undoubtedly the worst, scrambling my brain in a way no other wind does. If I were to write an Ode to the West Wind, it would consist of three words: Cease And Desist. Or I might adapt the ancient lyric, with apologies to Anon: 
Westron wind, when wilt tha cease?
Thy blowing drives me mad.
All I ask is a little peace
And the quiet I once had.

In the Mediterranean world, away from the rude Atlantic blast, the West wind is regarded as a welcome visitor, a soft, warm breeze,  personified as Zephyr. (Even Chaucer talks of Zephyrus with his sweet breath – really? In England?). Here is a glorious madrigal by Claudio Monteverdi (baptised on this day in 1567, fact fans) in which 'Zephyr returns, and with gentle words warms the air and sets the waters free, and whispering among the verdant boughs, makes the field flowers dance to his glad sound'. If only. 

 

Wartime in Wool

 Yesterday my old friend Bryan (Appleyard) paid a visit to Lichfield. We met, as usual, in the cathedral, which, on his last visit, was hosting an exhibition of Peter Marlow's wonderful photographs of English cathedrals. This time, by way of contrast, much of the cathedral was given over to a vast exhibition, The Longest Yarn 2, which tells the story of wartime Britain in a series of eighty 'wool art' tableaux composed entirely of, er, knitting wool. Above, for example, is VE Day at Buckingham Palace. 
   What can I say? This was clearly a labour of love, created by an army of volunteers over who knows how many man/woman-hours. It covers the whole duration of the war, from Chamberlain's broadcast to VJ Day, taking in the Blitz, rationing, the Battle of Britain, evacuees, bomber raids, D-Day, street parties, the lot. The trouble is that knitting wool has, shall we say, limited expressive possibilities, and knitted figures inevitably look like something from vintage children's television, with their round faces, button noses and vacuous expressions. Despite this, I understand that many people are finding the exhibition moving and impressive – and it is certainly attracting large numbers of visitors: the cathedral was heaving. It is, in its very English way, sweet, charming, and quite bonkers. Perhaps, if I hadn't watched the seriously moving BBC documentary Children of the Blitz the night before, The Longest Yarn 2 might have done more for me...
   Then we walked round Stowe Pool, dropped into St Chad's church, enjoyed an excessively liquid lunch, and had a look around the Samuel Johnson Birthplace Museum, where, in the bookshop, I bought a copy of Piers Brendon's Eminent Edwardians, and a facsimile of a letter from Boswell to Johnson. 

Donovan and Fred

 Today, the singer-songwriter Donovan, a man not given to understating his contribution to popular music, celebrates his 80th birthday. A while back, on the occasion of another Donovan birthday, I wrote this: 
'Today is the 67th birthday of that titan of troubadours, Donovan. Singer-songwriter, poet, mystic, visionary, man of letters, musical and psychedelic pioneer, Donovan was the most influential figure of his time, entirely changing the course of music history. Without him, the Beatles would have been just another beat combo, California's Summer of Love would never have happened, jazz, psychedelia and world music would probably not exist, and no one would ever have heard of Jeff Beck or Bob Dylan.

You might recall the 1965 meeting between Dylan and Donovan captured in D.A. Pennebaker's film Don't Look Back. The director later recalled that
'Of course, when Donovan met him he was very excited and decided to play something for him. Dylan said he liked 'Catch The Wind', but Donovan said, I've written a new song I wanna play for you. So he played a song called 'My Darling Tangerine Eyes'. And it was to the tune of 'Mr Tambourine Man'! And Dylan was sitting there with this funny look on his face, listening to 'Mr Tambourine Man' with these really weird words, trying to keep a straight face. Then Dylan says, Well, you know, that tune ... I have to admit that I haven't written all the tunes I'm credited with, but that happens to be one that I did write! I'm sure Donovan never played the song again.'
   Back in the Sixties, music fandom was intensely tribal, especially in the school playground, but often in the music press as well - Cliff v Elvis, Beatles v Stones (even, briefly, Beatles v Dave Clark Five), and of course Dylan v Donovan, which now looks rather like Beatles v Dave Clark Five. But let's be fair, Donovan - at least in the years when he was managed by Mickie Most - did produce a string of agreeable, even classic, singles. These, and indeed his early albums, were part of the soundtrack of my misspent youth, though A Gift from a Flower to a Garden finished it for me (Dear Flower - Thanks but No Thanks). But then there was the strangely wonderful 'children's album' HMS Donovan, which I remember (with a blush) being played worryingly often in my rooms at university...'

Nothing to add, really – except Happy Birthday, old chap!

As it happens,  Fred Astaire (né Austerlitz) was also born on this day, in 1899. No one could dance like him (especially when he was dancing with Ginger Rogers), and no one could put across a song as effectively as him – no wonder he was the songwriters' favourite. Here is a clip of classic Fred and Ginger – Irving Berlin's 'Cheek to Cheek', from Top Hat (1935). Enjoy...

The Great Centenarian

 Well, there's no escaping the Attenborough centenary – it's everywhere, and will be all day, with a special concert from the Royal Albert Hall on TV this evening. It was 100 years ago today that the Great Man, our most assured National Treasure, was born – in Isleworth, by the Thames in Middlesex (though he did not grow up there). I remember Isleworth from my childhood: it was there that, despite the state of the heavily polluted river, I saw my first (and for a long while last) Kingfisher. A flash of electric blue, unmistakable, unforgettable...
    So, Attenborough. In his prime a great broadcaster and communicator, and even a great Controller of BBC2, responsible for Kenneth Clark's Civilisation and Jacob Bronowski's The Ascent of Man. As regular readers of this blog will know, I found Attenborough in his later years hard to take, such was his insistent focus on Catastrophic Anthropogenic Climate Change. Having bought in to Paul Ehrlich's Malthusian predictions of planetary catastrophe caused by human overpopulation (which hasn't happened), Attenborough then bought in to CACC and its similarly dire predictions, continuing to push the notorious Michael Mann 's Hockey Stick model long after it had been shown up be mathematical nonsense. Though he was a genial fellow, a mensch and an all-round good egg, there was a disturbingly anti-human strand in Attenborough's thought. But never mind: he was, overall, a great good thing, his early achievements, I hope, outweighing later developments – and the quality of his brilliant earlier documentaries outweighing the gee-whiz visuals and lame commentary of much of his later work. Enough: de centenariis nil nisi bonum. Even I salute you, Sir David. 

   And here I'll append my own Nature Note: yesterday I saw my first swifts of the year – a pair flying high and passing from sight, and then, later, a single bird swooping down almost to within touching distance. Always a red letter day (and a little late this year), always a joyful, heart-lifting experience.

  And here, for good measure, what I think is one of the great nature poems (set in a garden, like Attenborough's latest series, The Secret Garden). It's by Emily Dickinson –

A bird came down the walk:
He did not know I saw;
He bit an angle-worm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw.

And then he drank a dew
From a convenient grass,
And then hopped sidewise to the wall
To let a beetle pass.

He glanced with rapid eyes
That hurried all abroad, —
They looked like frightened beads, I thought;
He stirred his velvet head

Like one in danger; cautious,
I offered him a crumb,
And he unrolled his feathers
And rowed him softer home

Than oars divide the ocean,
Too silver for a seam,
Or butterflies, off banks of noon,
Leap, splashless, as they swim.

History

 I've been watching the reruns of Simon Schama's A History of Britain, a sweeping 15-part series that dates back to a time long before Schama became an annoying metroliberal pantomime dame – and to a time when the BBC would put good money into producing a straight, intelligent narrative history, presented without gimmicks and authored by an actual historian. Imagine that happening now, quarter of a century on, when narrative history is barely taught in schools, and profound historical ignorance is the norm. How did this sad state of affairs come about? It's hard not to blame the constitutional vandal Blair, perhaps the first British Prime Minister to entirely lack a sense of history, except as something to be 'on the right side of' – a notion barely less fatuous than 'things can only get better'.  (The right side of history of course meant the left side of politics.) A proper sense of history, i.e. the past, is, it seems to me, essential for any society, any nation to thrive, and ignorance of it can only lead to decline, and indeed fall. But when, like Blair, you are a globalist 'anywhere man', with no firm belief in national identity or cultural roots, the past barely exists; you live in an eternal present. This seems to be what far too many people are now content to do, aided and abetted by institutions that have no interest in transmitting the story of the past, unless through the lens of our present preoccupations. Perhaps it will be down to the novelists and poets to keep alive some genuine sense of the past? 
   Here is Philip Larkin taking a deep dive into history – seventeenth-century Holland, to be precise – in a sonnet written on this day in 1970 and drawing inspiration from the genre paintings of Jan Steen –

The Card Players

Jan van Hogspuew staggers to the door
And pisses at the dark. Outside, the rain
Courses in cart-ruts down the deep mud lane.
Inside, Dirk Dogstoerd pours himself some more,
And holds a cinder to his clay with tongs,
Belching out smoke. Old Prijck snores with the gale,
His skull face firelit; someone behind drinks ale,
And opens mussels, and croaks scraps of songs
Towards the ham-hung rafters about love.
Dirk deals the cards. Wet century-wide trees
Clash in surrounding starlessness above
This lamplit cave, where Jan turns back and farts,
Gobs at the grate, and hits the queen of hearts.
Rain, wind and fire! The secret, bestial peace! 

Birthdays

 Today is Mrs N's birthday – and that of the inventor of the piano, Bartolomeo Cristofori (born 1655). One of his pianos, built in Florence in 1720, survives in playable condition, and this is what it sounds like (the pianist is Dongsok Shin, and the piece is a Scarlatti sonata, K9). Having a wooden rather than a metal frame, a Cristofori piano is a delicate instrument, compared to what came later, but the action (a fiendishly complex affair) is essentially that of a modern piano...

Couples

 An interesting piece in The Times yesterday, about literary couples, i.e. cohabiting couples composed of two writers, each pursuing their own projects or, sometimes, collaborating. American examples include Paul Auster and Siri Hustvedt,  Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne, Noah Baumbach and Greta Gerwig. From this side of the pond, Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath of course, Claire Tomalin and Michael Frayn – and our old friend Kingsley Amis and his wife of 18 years, Elizabeth Jane Howard. Their honeymoon in Spain seems to have been positively idyllic, at least according to Howard: 'In the mornings we wrote sitting opposite each other at the table, our typewriters almost touching in the small space. Then we went to the beach...' 
 As we know, that happy time did not last, as Howard was soon struggling with the domestic demands of looking after the needy and demanding Amis – plus a house full of friends and family – and coping with his drinking. I've written about the Amises' life in their 'bloody great mansion' before, and the wonder is that Howard put up with it for as long as she did (and somehow managed to carry on writing). In happier times, I was interested to learn from the Times piece, she and Amis once 'decided to write a few pages of each other's novels'. The novels were Howard's After Julius and Amis's One Fat Englishman. They duly swapped manuscripts, briefed each other on where the plot was going, and set to work. According to Howard, the chapters that resulted from this work-swap experiment went unnoticed and unsuspected. I guess there's an opening there for a literary sleuth, armed with the latest tools of textual analysis – though perhaps there is more important work to be done...

'One of the most unmeddlesome of women'

 Having recently read Richard Holmes's excellent account of Tennyson's early years, The Boundless Deep, I was amused to come across this picture, in J.G. Riewald's Beerbohm's Literary Caricatures (a great book for browsing in). It shows Thomas Woolner, the only sculptor in the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, sculpting his portrait bust of the still beardless Tennyson in 1857 – the bust that is now in Poets' Corner in Westminster Abbey. The caption reads: 

Mrs Tennyson: 'You know, Mr Woolner, I'm one of the most unmeddlesome of women; but – when (I'm only asking), when do you begin modelling his halo?'

'A single Hound'

 Consciousness. I know I have it, but have no idea what it is or where it comes from (nor does anyone else, whatever they may say). I am equally sure that I have a soul, but again have no idea what it is or where it comes from. Are consciousness and soul the same thing, or aspects of the same thing? Is soul perhaps a deeper form of consciousness, one that somehow connects with a reality beyond time and space? Both consciousness and soul seem identical with our ultimate selves. We inhabit consciousness, and infer everything else. 
  These are deep waters. Over to you, Emily Dickinson –

This Consciousness that is aware
Of Neighbors and the Sun
Will be the one aware of Death
And that itself alone

Is traversing the interval
Experience between
And most profound experiment
Appointed unto Men—

How adequate unto itself
Its properties shall be
Itself unto itself and none
Shall make discovery.

Adventure most unto itself
The Soul condemned to be—
Attended by a single Hound
Its own identity.

This poem was sent to me by my friend, the Emily Dickinson maven, who regards it as one of her most profound. I agree – it's a gem. 

Borges, Scott, Naipaul

This morning I took delivery of a new Panama hat, the old one having become an offence to the eye, and summer being in the offing. The new hat, I was delighted to note, was made by the firm of Borges & Scott – a nice literary double-act. Sadly, Jorge Luis had no connection with the hat-making dynasty, which is based in Ecuador, where they still make their hats by hand, weaving the narrow fibres of toquilla straw into cooling headgear. 
Then, this afternoon, I went with Mrs N to a hospital where she had an appointment with an eye specialist. He turned out to be called Mr Biswas. She didn't ask him if he'd got his own house yet.  

Changed

 Here, for no particular reason, is a poem by Charles Stuart Calverley which perfectly demonstrates what Pope called the art of sinking in poetry – also the perils of ending a stanza with a two-syllable line. 

Changed

    I know not why my soul is rack'd:
        Why I ne'er smile as was my wont:
    I only know that, as a fact,
            I don't.

    I used to roam o'er glen and glade
        Buoyant and blithe as other folk:
    And not unfrequently I made
            A joke.

    A minstrel's fire within me burn'd.
       I'd sing, as one whose heart must break,
   Lay upon lay: I nearly learn'd
           To shake.

   All day I sang; of love, of fame,
       Of fights our fathers fought of yore,
   Until the thing almost became
           A bore.

   I cannot sing the old songs now!
       It is not that I deem then low;
  'Tis that I can't remember how
           They go.

   I could not range the hills till high
       Above me stood the summer moon:
   And as to dancing, I could fly
           As soon.

   The sports, to which with boyish glee
       I sprang erewhile, attract no more;
   Although I am but sixty-three
           Or four.

   Nay, worse than that, I've seem'd of late
       To shrink from happy boyhood — boys
   Have grown so noisy, and I hate
           A noise.

   They fright me, when the beech is green,
       By swarming up its stem for eggs:
   They drive their horrid hoops between
           My legs: —

   It's idle to repine, I know;
       I'll tell you what I'll do instead:
   I'll drink my arrowroot, and go
           To bed.

Calverley was a noted university wit and a brilliant classicist who, uniquely, managed to win the Chancellor's Prize for Latin verse at Oxford (whence he was sent down for misbehaviour – he was an extremely high-spirited undergraduate) and Cambridge. He was a keen smoker, and wrote a heartfelt 'Ode to Tobacco'.

Caine

 It's not only the poets who are getting older (spoiler alert: we all are). Last night, for some reason, I was looking up Michael Caine, and discovered that he is all of 93. I've always liked Caine, who seems to be that rare thing among actors, a proper mensch, a regular guy. I wondered if he'd made an appearance on this blog – and sure enough he had, on this very day in 2009 (yes, the blog is that old, and older). Here's the post:

Quote of the Day

'We've got three and a half million layabouts laying about on benefits, and I'm 76, getting up at 6am to go to work to keep them.' Sir Michael Caine, telling it like it is.
The British 'welfare state' has turned into a national disaster, perpetuating poverty, idleness and dependence - at huge and ever-growing expense. It's a model that could only work in a nation with a strong, homogeneous identity and sense of common cause, and a strong work ethic. None of which apply to modern Britain.
See also De Tocqueville's Memoir on Pauperism, and Corelli Barnett's The Audit of War.

I rather hope Sir Michael is not taking too keen an interest in the state of the nation these days, when there are around ten million people of working age (not all layabouts, of course) on benefits – a situation that is in large part a legacy of the insane policy of 'lockdown'.
Don't tell Caine – it might finish him off. 

A Birthday

 The poets are getting older: Kay Ryan is 80, Dana Gioia is 75, Dick Davis is 81, Billy Collins is 85 – and today Ted Kooser turns 87. He's a poet who tends to get dismissed as a Midwesterner dispensing homely wisdom, but I think this is unfair (and reminiscent of the way some have dismissed Willa Cather as a Midwestern chronicler of life on the Prairie, and nothing more). I've posted a few Kooser poems – here and here (and I hope he's having a happier birthday than that hinted at in the poem 'Birthday').
Like Wallace Stevens, Kooser was for many years an executive in an insurance company – and, also like Stevens, he wrote a poem called 'Sunday Morning', but it is no homage and bears little or no resemblance to Stevens's masterpiece. It is more in the nature of a suburban idyll, and very nicely done, I reckon...

Sunday Morning

Now it is June again, one of those
leafy Sundays drifting through galaxies
of maple seeds. Somewhere, a mourning dove
touches her keyboard twice, a lonely F,
and then falls silent. Here in the house
the Sunday papers lie in whitecaps
over the living-room floor. Among them floats
the bridal page, that window of many panes,
reflecting, black and white, patches of sky
and puffs of starlit cloud becoming
faces. On each bright brow the same light falls,
the nuptial moon held up just out of sight
to the left. The brides all lift their eyes
and smile to see the heavens stopped for them.
And love is everywhere. Cars that have all week
lurched and honked with sour commuters are now
like smooth canoes packed soft with families. 
A church bell strides through the green perfume
of locust trees and tolls its thankfulness.
The mourning dove, to her astonishment,
blunders upon a distant call in answer. 

Miss Bart and Mrs Lloyd

 I'm just back from yet another visit to Worthing (see Nigeness passim). This time my reading on the train was Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, which I resolved to read after enjoying The Age of Innocence so much. I'm about halfway through, and finding it even more impressive than The Age of Innocence, and every bit as enjoyable, with the satirical humour closer to the surface, though the tragic undercurrents are unmissable. Miss Lily Bart – beautiful, witty, sophisticated, and in need of a seriously rich husband – is a wholly convincing and attractive creation, painted in the round, with full awareness of her weaknesses. 
   I have just read the crucial chapter that revolves around an evening of tableaux vivants  – a now defunct form of entertainment in which people posed as famous works of art, with suitable costume, lighting and props. This show is being lavishly staged by luminaries of New York society, under the direction of a fashionable artist, and is designed to impress. Lily Bart does indeed make an impression, eliciting a unanimous, spontaneous 'Oh!' from the spectators as soon as she appears, in the likeness of Joshua Reynolds's 'Mrs Lloyd'. Mrs Lloyd? This was not a painting I know, so I sought it out...

The portrait is of Mrs Richard Bennett Lloyd, wife of a British army captain who served in America, and it shows her as an ultra-elegant lady, carving her marital surname in the trunk of a tree. Lily Bart chose well when she decided to pose as Mrs Lloyd, and Wharton describes the effect: 'Her pale draperies, and the background of foliage against which she stood, served only to relieve the long dryad-like curves that swept upward from her poised foot to her lifted arm. The noble buoyancy of her attitude, its suggestion of soaring grace, revealed the touch of poetry in her beauty that Selden [who is in love with her, but not 'suitable'] always felt in her presence, yet lost the sense of when he was not with her. Its expression was now so vivid that for the first time he seemed to see before him the real Lily Bart, divested of the trivialities of her little world, and catching for a moment a note of the eternal harmony of which her beauty was a part.' Oh dear...
   The edition I'm reading (Virago Modern Classics) has as its cover image a portrait of Lady Colin Campbell by Giovanni Boldini, the 'Master of Swish' – a good choice.

As for Reynolds's Mrs Lloyd, that painting now hangs on the walls of Waddesdon Manor, the grand Rothschild mansion in Buckinghamshire. 

'His ripening talent broke suddenly into song'

 In the course of writing my butterfly book, I spent some time seeking out butterfly-themed poems (the best of them are Emily Dickinson's butterfly poems, and Janet Lewis's 'The Insect', which you can find here, after the snails). A name that did not come my way was Thomas Haynes Bayly (1797-1839), author of a collection titled Loves of the Butterflies and of a lyric, popular in its time, 'I'd Be a Butterfly'. This piece, with a few others from Bayly's hand, finds its way into that wonderfully entertaining anthology of bad verse, The Stuffed Owl. The editors introduce it thus:

'He married (1826) Miss Hayes of Marble Hill, Co. Cork, and during a stay with his young bride at Lord Ashdown's villa on Southampton Water his ripening talent broke suddenly into song with the composition of I'd Be A Butterfly, in which a strong desire to flutter to and fro like that beautiful and colourful insect was very graphically expressed. The poem was written, says a biographer, "in romantic circumstances" – and one may be almost certain that the poet was gratified by the approval of Lord Ashdown himself, who added to singular munificence a true nobleman's patronage of letters, in so far as they are designed to improve public taste.'

Bayly wrote prolifically, mostly songs, ballads and dramatic pieces, and 'among his admirers [the editors of The Stuffed Owl inform us] was Mr Richard Swiveller'. That will be Dick Swiveller, from The Old Curiosity Shop, an amiable fellow who speaks much of the time in quotations. 
   But to 'I'd Be a Butterfly'. Here it is – 

I'd be a Butterfly born in a bower,
Where roses and lilies and violets meet;
Roving for ever from flower to flower,
And kissing all buds that are pretty and sweet.
I'd never languish for wealth or for power;
I'd never sigh to see slaves at my feet:
I'd be a butterfly born in a bower,
Kissing all buds that are pretty and sweet...

What, though you tell me each gay little rover
Shrinks from the breath of the first autumn day!
Surely 'tis better, when summer is over,
To die when all fair things are fading away.
Some in life's winter may toil to discover
Means of procuring a weary delay –
I'd be a butterfly; living, a rover,
Dying when fair things are fading away. 

It's rather sweet, isn't it? I certainly prefer it to Wordsworth's 'To a Butterfly' – 

'Stay near me – do not take thy flight!
A little longer stay in sight!
Much converse to I find in thee,
Historian of my infancy!' 
                                         etc, etc.