And Monuments

That's all very well, but what about monuments? Have you no church monuments to report on?
 Very well, then... Here is the unicorn (sans horn) that lies at the feet of Elizabeth, Lady Williams, whose grand tomb chest stands in St Mary's church, Thame.

And here, equally beautifully carved, is the unicorn's canine companion, a greyhound, who lies at the feet of Lord Williams. The effigies are of alabaster...

And, talking of alabaster, here we are in Derbyshire, in the church of All Saints, Ashover, at the tomb of Thomas Babington and his wife, Edith, erected around 1511 when Edith died. The figures, which have been knocked about a bit, are of alabster, and still retain their original colouring, albeit much refreshed over the centuries. The Babingtons' plain dress belies the grandeur of their tomb.

Thomas's feet rest on what is presumably intended to be a lion.

But the main interest of this monument is in the exquisitely carved, characterful and remarkably lively figures that line the sides of the tomb chest. Pevsner describes them as 'small figures of saints, angels and "mourners"' (and, surely, at least some of the Babingtons' fifteen children). Some are single figures, others are grouped in twos

and in far from mournful threes, all under pretty ogival arches.

Thomas Babington's great-grandson was executed for his part in the 'Babington plot' of 1586. His wife, Edith, was the daughter of one of those Fitzherberts whose magnificent tombs stand in the church of SS Mary and Barlok in Norbury - about which I have written elsewhere.

Ancient and Modern

No, I didn't take a diversion to Finland - this is England. It's the extraordinary interior of the new chapel of Ripon College, the C of E's high-toned training establishment at Cuddesdon in Oxfordshire. The old buildings (in French Gothic style by G.E. Street) are very fine, and the new chapel, which stands alone in the grounds, keeps up the standard, while working in an entirely different idiom. It's built to an ingenious design that allows light to flood in from every angle, offers a range of different spaces for different purposes, and opens views out across the grounds and into the tree tops. Those beautiful soaring arches, which rise to a keel-shaped roof, are made of nothing more exalted than Glulam, laminated glued timber - a lesson in what can be achieved with workaday materials, plus thought and imagination.

And here (below) is St Mary, Nottingham, caught in the light of the setting sun. In the tree at the far right, a very chatty and numerous charm of goldfinches were gradually settling down to roost, but not before many little alarums and excursions. St Mary's is a large and glorious medieval church, in the Perpendicular style (a style that really deserves a better, less geometric name), which is also testimony to how good those Victorian restorers could be when they put their minds to it - and how fine their stained glass could be: there's lots of it in St Mary's, and most of it is of superb quality. The modern age has contributed one very welcome innovation - a heated wooden floor, making this surely one of the warmest large churches in the land.

Aubade and Matin

I'm off on my (English) travels again for a few days, but I'll leave you with a couple more poems from the TLS anthology - one very well known, the other far less so.
 Philip Larkin's Aubade is perhaps the most famous poem to have made its debut in the TLS. The last long poem he published, it is quintessential late Larkin, uncompromisingly bleak, aghast at the prospect of oblivion. But, as ever with Larkin, the beauty of the poem's shaping creates subtle and nuanced counter-melodies...

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.   

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.   

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.   

Till then I see what’s really always there:   

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,   

Making all thought impossible but how   

And where and when I shall myself die.   

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse   

—The good not done, the love not given, time   

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because   

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;   

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,   

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being 

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,   

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,   

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,   

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill   

That slows each impulse down to indecision.   

Most things may never happen: this one will,   

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without   

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave   

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.   

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,   

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,   

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring   

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Thirteen years after Aubade, in 1990, Larkin's friend Kingsley Amis published Matin, his own take on the early-morning experience of groping one's way back to the waking world.  When Larkin and Amis were young, it seemed clear that the former was going to The Novelist and the latter The Poet. As we know, it turned out quite otherwise, but Amis continued to write poems, even after he apparently signed off on his poetic career with his Collected Poems in 1979. Matin is a slighter work than Aubade. Amis awakes more relieved to be free of his troubled dreamworld than terrified of what faces him; his timor mortis is no more than a 'small thought'. If nothing else, this poem makes a fascinating pendant to Aubade.

Matin
(Or: Homage to Mogadona)

Awake at last, groaning with relief,
In dull daylight, I struggle to remember,
Then promptly to forget, that clouded scene
(Urban always) full of unknown people
Busy at something, talking, hurrying,
Perhaps searching or playing. Not that they
Ignore me, no, they are most interested;
They move closer with rapid hands and eyes
And what must be machines, tall ones, small ones
That dart about like animals, and animals
Like no animals anywhere. And I
Have to get out, or get home, find my book,
Or find my wife. What is this place?
Three jockeys - are they jockeys? - strut forward,
Walls lurch and crinkle, a dark sky shows through;
A headless bulk bobs at me, stirring up
Only sluggish bewilderment, not fear,
Not so much fear.
                              Awake at last, I huddle,
Swill water, grope for glasses, slippers; now
Mocktown must fade, but not the small thought
Of being suddenly back
Among the frozen tramcars and thick poppies
With no daylight at the end.

From the Fifties

To return to the Fifties (ah, there's a prospect), it's certainly the best decade in the TLS 100 anthology - things go downhill with the Sixties and never really recover. As well as the poetic luminaries mentioned in my earlier post, others represented include Muriel Spark, with this -

Chrysalis

We found it on a bunch of grapes and put it
In cotton wool, in a matchbox partly open,
In a room in London in wintertime, and in
A safe place, and then forgot it. 

Early in the cold spring we said "See this!
Where on earth did the butterfly come from?"
It looked so unnatural whisking about the curtain:
Then we remembered the chrysalis. 

There was the broken shell with what was once
The head askew; and what was once the worm
Was away out of the window, out of the warm,
Out of the scene of the small violence. 

Not strange, that the pretty creature formalised
The virtue of its dark unconscious wait
For pincers of light to come and pick it out.
But it was a bad business, our being surprised. 

A shame she isn't more descriptive of the butterfly (or moth, as it might have been), but that last stanza is very good.
And there's a well-made, bittersweet piece by John Betjeman, aching with nostalgia -

Norfolk

How did the Devil come? When first attack? 
  These Norfolk lanes recall lost innocence, 
The years fall off and find me walking back 
  Dragging a stick along the wooden fence 
Down this same path, where, forty years ago, 
My father strolled behind me, calm and slow. 

I used to fill my hands with sorrel seeds 
  And shower him with them from the tops of stiles, 
I used to butt my head into his tweeds 
  To make him hurry down those languorous miles 
Of ash and alder-shaded lanes, till here 
Our moorings and the masthead would appear. 

There after supper lit by lantern light 
  Warm in the cabin I could lie secure 
And hear against the polished sides at night 
  The lap lap lapping of the weedy Bure, 
A whispering and watery Norfolk sound 
Telling of all the moonlit reeds around. 

How did the Devil come? When first attack? 
  The church is just the same, though now I know 
Fowler of Louth restored it. Time, bring back 
  The rapturous ignorance of long ago, 
The peace, before the dreadful daylight starts, 
Of unkept promises and broken hearts.

And in 1958 the TLS published a poem by R.S. Thomas that was to become one of his best known. It's a sonnet of sorts, in four-stress lines with much enjambment, no rhyme scheme and no turn. A meditation on time and death, on Christian ministry, on God of course - present or absent - it evokes a world already gone in Thomas's time. The tone is certainly not nostalgic, but this is Thomas in tender mode - and somewhere near his best.

The Country Clergy

I see them working in old rectories
By the sun's light, by candlelight,
Venerable men, their black cloth
A little dusty, a little green
With holy mildew. And yet their skulls,
Ripening over so many prayers,
Toppled into the same grave
With oafs and yokels. They left no books,
Memorial to their lonely thought
In grey parishes; rather they wrote
On men's hearts and in the minds
Of young children sublime words
Too soon forgotten. God in his time
Or out of time will correct this.

Birthday Flowers

It's become something of an annual tradition on this blog to celebrate the birthday (in 1832) of the great, unclassifiable French painter Edouard Manet (often gracing the occasion with an excruciating pun - but we've had too manet of those, so please, no more).
 This year's picture, Pinks and Clematis in a Crystal Vase, is one of many beautiful flower paintings Manet executed in his long final illness. It was painted in 1882 and now hangs in the Musée d'Orsay. As with most of these late studies, the arrangement of the flowers seems artless and casual, as if Manet is happy to paint whatever comes his way, to absorb it with his hungry gaze and recreate it in paint. These are flowers put in a vase with little thought - you can even see the twine still on the bunch that forms part of this display - but glorified by Manet's art, by the rapt attention he directs on them and on the crystal vase in which they stand. These paintings are almost as much studies of light on glass and water as they are of flowers. They radiate light; casual though they seem, they are a kind of apotheosis of flower painting.
 A few years ago the Royal Academy staged a fine exhibition of Manet's portraits. I do wish they'd devote one to his flower paintings - it would be a surefire hit and, more importantly, a wonderful aesthetic experience.

Wallace Stevens under the Sail of Ulysses

The TLS 100 anthology is, among other things, a reminder of how many distinguished poets were still active in the Fifties. Those represented include W.H. Auden, Marianne Moore, Walter de la Mare, Siegfried Sassoon, Robert Graves, Dylan Thomas, John Berryman, Robert Frost - and Wallace Stevens. In 1954 the TLS published this magisterial piece:

Presence of an External Master of Knowledge

Under the shape of his sail, Ulysses,
Symbol of the seeker, crossing by night
The giant sea, read his own mind.
He said, "As I know, I am and have
The right to be." He guided his boat
Beneath the middle stars and said:

"Here I feel the human loneliness
And that, in space and solitude,
Which knowledge is: the world and fate,
The right within me and about me,
Joined in a triumphant vigor,
Like a direction on which I depend . . .

A longer, deeper breath sustains
This eloquence of right, since knowing
And being are one ­- the right to know
Is equal to the right to be.
The great Omnium descends on me,
Like an absolute out of this eloquence."

The sharp sail of Ulysses seemed,
In the breathings of that soliloquy,
Alive with an enigma's flittering,
And bodying, and being there,
As he moved, straightly, on and on
Through clumped stars dangling all the way.

These 24 lines were salvaged from an unhappy commission - to write and recite a poem for the Phi Beta Kappa exercises on the occasion of Columbia's 200th Commencement. Dissatisfied with that work, Stevens took what he deemed worthwhile in it and reworked it into Presence of an External Master of Knowledge. Writing it, Stevens must surely have had in mind Tennyson's Ulysses - always worth rereading - whose ageing hero resolves to 'follow knowledge like a sinking star, Beyond the utmost bound of human thought'. Stevens's own explorations beyond those bounds were soon to culminate in his last, or last but one, poem, Of Mere Being -

The palm at the end of the mind,

Beyond the last thought, rises

In the bronze decor,

A gold-feathered bird

Sings in the palm, without human meaning,

Without human feeling, a foreign song.

You know then that it is not the reason 

That makes us happy or unhappy. 

The bird sings. Its feathers shine.

The palm stands on the edge of space. 

The wind moves slowly in the branches. 

The bird's fire-fangled feathers dangle down.

Then he revisited an earlier poem, First Warmth, to craft his farewell, As You Leave the Room -

You speak. You say: Today's character is not
A skeleton out of its cabinet. Nor am I.

That poem about the pineapple, the one
About the mind as never satisfied,

The one about the credible hero, the one
About summer, are not what skeletons think about.

I wonder, have I lived a skeleton's life,
As a disbeliever in reality,

A countryman of all the bones in the world?
Now, here, the snow I had forgotten becomes

Part of a major reality, part of
An appreciation of a reality

And thus an elevation, as if I left
With something I could touch, touch every way.

And yet nothing has been changed except what is
Unreal, as if nothing had been changed at all.

Wallace Stevens died in 1955, a year after his TLS appearance.

Say What?

At the top of the BBC's 10 o'Clock News coverage of the Inauguration, their man in Washington, the lugubrious Jon Sopel, pronounced it 'a scenario few thought scarcely possible'.
 Presumably he meant 'a scenario most thought scarcely possible' or 'a scenario few thought possible'. Seems the BBC is still so dazed and confused by the way the world is going at the moment that it's having trouble making sense - or the sense intended anyway.
 There were reports too that part of the live coverage was subtitled with captions from the children's drama series The Dumping Ground (with curious results).
 Ah well, this was never going to be the BBC's finest hour, and it is not to the BBC that sensible people turn at times like these. Me, I can't help it - I'm strangely addicted to the dreadful News at Ten, come what may.