'A florid grim music broken by grunts and shrieks'

 On the day in 1396 was born William de la Pole, 1st Duke of Suffolk, statesman and military commander. A favourite of the ineffectual king Henry VI, he features in literature as a character in Shakespeare's Henry VI, parts 1 and 2 – and as one of the three subjects of Geoffrey Hill's  extraordinary sonnet sequence 'Funeral Music':

    William de la Pole, Duke of Suffolk: beheaded 1450
    John Tiptoft, earl of Worcester: beheaded 1470
    Anthony Woodville, Earl Rivers: beheaded 1483

Actually, as Hill makes clear in the short essay he wrote to illuminate 'Funeral Music', William de al Pole was 'butchered across the gunwale of a skiff' by an angry mob, rather than judicially beheaded. Tiptoft was a nobleman and scholar who, as Lord High Constable, presided over executions (of Lancastrians) of such gratuitous brutality that he became known as 'the Butcher of England'. At his own beheading, he asked the executioner to strike three times 'in honour of the Trinity'. Woodville was also a scholar, whose translation from the French of the Dictes and Sayings of the Philosophers was one of the very first books printed in England (by William Caxton). He fell foul of Richard, Duke of Gloucester, and was beheaded at Pontefract (Pomfret) castle. 
   In 'Funeral Music', Hill writes, 'I was attempting a florid grim music broken by grunts and shrieks' – an appropriate enough soundtrack for the Wars of the Roses. The battle of Towton, mentioned in the second sonnet, was probably the largest and bloodiest ever fought in England. The grim, relentless slaughter was enacted in a snowstorm, and when the caked snow thawed after the battle, the furrows and ditches ran red with blood for two or three miles around.
'Funeral Music' is a pretty shattering poem – brace yourself...

1

Processionals in the exemplary cave,

Benediction of shadows. Pomfret. London.

The voice fragrant with mannered humility,

With an equable contempt for this world,

‘In honorem Trinitatis’. Crash. The head

Struck down into a meaty conduit of blood.

So these dispose themselves to receive each

Pentecostal blow from axe or seraph,

Spattering block-straw with mortal residue.

Psalteries whine through the empyrean. Fire

Flares in the pit, ghosting upon stone

Creatures of such rampant state, vacuous

Ceremony of possession, restless

Habitation, no man’s dwelling-place.

2

For whom do we scrape our tribute of pain—

For none but the ritual king? We meditate

A rueful mystery; we are dying

To satisfy fat Caritas, those

Wiped jaws of stone. (Suppose all reconciled

By silent music; imagine the future

Flashed back at us, like steel against sun,

Ultimate recompense.) Recall the cold

Of Towton on Palm Sunday before dawn,

Wakefield, Tewkesbury: fastidious trumpets

Shrilling into the ruck; some trampled

Acres, parched, sodden or blanched by sleet,

Stuck with strange-postured dead. Recall the wind’s

Flurrying, darkness over the human mire.

3

They bespoke doomsday and they meant it by

God, their curved metal rimming the low ridge.

But few appearances are like this. Once

Every five hundred years a comet’s

Over-riding stillness might reveal men

In such array, livid and featureless,

With England crouched beastwise beneath it all.

‘Oh, that old northern business …’ A field

After battle utters its own sound

Which is like nothing on earth, but is earth.

Blindly the questing snail, vulnerable

Mole emerge, blindly we lie down, blindly

Among carnage the most delicate souls

Tup in their marriage-blood, gasping ‘Jesus’.

4

Let mind be more precious than soul; it will not

Endure. Soul grasps its price, begs its own peace,

Settles with tears and sweat, is possibly

Indestructible. That I can believe.

Though I would scorn the mere instinct of faith,

Expediency of assent, if I dared,

What I dare not is a waste history

Or void rule. Averroes, old heathen,

If only you had been right, if Intellect

Itself were absolute law, sufficient grace,

Our lives could be a myth of captivity

Which we might enter: an unpeopled region

Of ever new-fallen snow, a palace blazing

With perpetual silence as with torches.

5

As with torches we go, at wild Christmas,

When we revel in our atonement

Through thirty feasts of unction and slaughter,

What is that but the soul’s winter sleep?

So many things rest under consummate

Justice as though trumpets purified law,

Spikenard were the real essence of remorse.

The sky gathers up darkness. When we chant

‘Ora, ora pro nobis’ it is not

Seraphs who descend to pity but ourselves.

Those righteously-accused those vengeful

Racked on articulate looms indulge us

With lingering shows of pain, a flagrant

Tenderness of the damned for their own flesh:

6

My little son, when you could command marvels

Without mercy, outstare the wearisome

Dragon of sleep, I rejoiced above all—

A stranger well-received in your kingdom.

On those pristine fields I saw humankind

As it was named by the Father; fabulous

Beasts rearing in stillness to be blessed.

The world’s real cries reached there, turbulence

From remote storms, rumour of solitudes,

A composed mystery. And so it ends.

Some parch for what they were; others are made

Blind to all but one vision, their necessity

To be reconciled. I believe in my

Abandonment, since it is what I have.

7

‘Prowess, vanity, mutual regard,

It seemed I stared at them, they at me.

That was the gorgon’s true and mortal gaze:

Averted conscience turned against itself.’

A hawk and a hawk-shadow. ‘At noon,

As the armies met, each mirrored the other;

Neither was outshone. So they flashed and vanished

And all that survived them was the stark ground

Of this pain. I made no sound, but once

I stiffened as though a remote cry

Had heralded my name. It was nothing …’

Reddish ice tinged the reeds; dislodged, a few

Feathers drifted across; carrion birds

Strutted upon the armour of the dead.

8

Not as we are but as we must appear,

Contractual ghosts of pity; not as we

Desire life but as they would have us live,

Set apart in timeless colloquy.

So it is required; so we bear witness,

Despite ourselves, to what is beyond us,

Each distant sphere of harmony forever

Poised, unanswerable. If it is without

Consequence when we vaunt and suffer, or

If it is not, all echoes are the same

In such eternity. Then tell me, love,

How that should comfort us—or anyone

Dragged half-unnerved out of this worldly place,

Crying to the end ‘I have not finished’.

'A kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh'

 The first essay in Kay Ryan's recently published Synthesizing Gravity: Selected Prose begins with the arresting sentence, 'I have always felt that much of the best poetry was funny.' She's not talking about comic verse; indeed the first example she gives is Hopkins's far from funny 'The Windhover': 'Who can read [it] and not feel welling up inside a kind of giddiness indistinguishable from the impulse to laugh?'
   Well, I'm glad it's not just me. I often feel exactly this impulse in the face of poetry, paintings, or indeed anything in art or nature that is conspicuously beautiful. Ryan likens the reaction to 'one of those involuntary ha!s that jump out when you've witnessed a wonderful magic trick', and I am much given to those ha!s when reading really good poetry, looking at great paintings (as at the National Gallery the other day) or witnessing some fine instance of nature's 'useless beauty' (my butterfly watching is punctuated by many a ha!). 'Maybe that ha!,' Ryan suggests, 'is the body's natural response to perfection: a perfect trick (one has been utterly deceived) or a perfect poem (one has been utterly deceived).'
   She goes on to examine a short, perfect poem by Robert Frost, 'Nothing Gold Can Stay' – 

Nature’s first green is gold,

Her hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down to day.

Nothing gold can stay.

– and to quote a passage from T.S. Eliot's The Sacred Wood on poetry as 'a superior amusement'. 'I love two things about Eliot's definition,' she says. 'First, the bedrock, indefensible truth of it: that poetry is a superior amusement. Second, Eliot's mess of an attempt to explain what he means. I am heartened in my own efforts when I see his bluster. I am reminded by him that though we cannot be exactly precise or complete, there is no reason not to make gigantic statements, for there is great enjoyment in gigantic statements.'
  And I am clearly going to find great enjoyment in this wonderfully straight-talking collection. 

The Joy of Paint

 This morning I took my place in the queue outside the National Gallery and shuffled towards the entrance and my appointment (pre-booked, of course) with Titian: Love, Desire, Death – Titian's seven Ovid-inspired Poesie ('poetries') together in one place for the first time in more than 400 years. I had heard that the National is not a place to go maskless and unchallenged, so for once I masked up: if Paris was worth a mass, Titian is surely worth a mask. 
   It was so good, so deeply cheering to be back in the National. Approaching through the galleries leading to the exhibition room, it was hard not to stop and linger, and as I passed through a grin of aesthetic joy was already spreading over my face. It stayed firmly in place as I relished the spectacle of Titian's great masterpieces – 'the most beautiful paintings in the world' in Lucian Freud's view (and I wouldn't argue) – all gathered together. Three were already familiar, being in the National's collection (or shared with the National Gallery of Scotland) and two are resident elsewhere in London (the Wallace Collection and Apsley House), but The Rape of Europa had come all the way from Boston, and Venus and Adonis from the Prado. Though they were painted across two decades and show Titian's development of an ever more daringly 'loose' style, all display almost superhuman technical virtuosity, and all are intensely sensual and immensely 'painterly'. Indeed they are some of the most painterly paintings ever executed – lush, juicy, sensuous – and to see them is to revel in the sheer joy of paint. If ever there was an exhibition that has to be seen in the flesh – and the word couldn't be more appropriate – it is this one. These are pictures that have to be seen full scale, examined closely and from a distance; reproductions give little or no idea of their stunning impact. Wearing a mask was a small price to pay for this experience, and, it has to be said, the crowd management measures in force mean that the room where the Poesie are reunited is not overcrowded. It is easy to stand undisturbed, and look and look, and give these astonishing pictures their due.  
  Staggering from the gallery in an aesthetic daze  – this had been my first exhibition since February – I went and had a spot of lunch before making my way to my next appointment with art: Robert Dukes's new exhibition at Browse & Darby. Here too was a 'painterly' painter, and here too was the sheer joy of paint. His glorious little still-lifes of fruit – lemons, oranges, quinces, an artichoke in flower – sing like nobody else's, and make me wish intensely that I could afford to have one hanging on my wall. In this exhibition Dukes also continues his exploration of other painters' works, with compositions 'after' Veronese, Caravaggio, Morandi, Rembrandt, and a particularly striking set  painted 'after Balthus' (and a 'homage to' Michael Andrews). As with the Titians, reproduction is wholly inadequate, but here are some oranges and quinces...

Robert Dukes's exhibition is on until the 6th of November (see the Browse & Darby website for details), and Titian: Love, Desire, Death until the 17th of January. 

'Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer...'

 On this day in 1872, Ralph Vaughan Williams – the greatest English composer since Purcell (in my book anyway) – was born at Down Ampney in Gloucestershire, where his father was Vicar. When Ralph was only two, his father died, and his mother, one of the gifted Wedgwood-Darwin clan, took him and his siblings to live at her family home, Leith Hill Place in Surrey. While there, the young RVW started playing piano – and composing – at the age of five, and, at eight, took a correspondence course in music with Edinburgh University and passed the exams. 
  Ralph's mother was a niece of Charles Darwin, and the latter's theories expounded in The Origin of Species perplexed the young RVW, who asked his mother how they could be reconciled with Scripture. 'Well,' she explained, 'the Bible says God made the world in six days. Great Uncle Charles thinks it took longer – but we need not worry about it, for it is equally wonderful either way.' Which is true enough, if not the most penetrating reading of Darwin's theory. 
  Vaughan Williams grew up to become the most Christian of Christian agnostics, and to write some of our finest hymns – including this one, a perfect blending of words and music, to which he gave the name of his natal village: Down Ampney... 

Then and Now

 A piece in Apollo magazine recalls the great unbroken series of wartime concerts given in the Barry Rooms of the National Gallery, and advertises four videos of recent concerts in the same venue by musicians from the London Philharmonic Orchestra. Unlike the performances given by Myra Hess and others every day, regardless of all the perils of war – including falling and unexploded bombs – the LPO's recitals were played to an empty room. What the Blitz couldn't do, Covid has achieved.   
Here is Dame Myra playing her wonderful arrangement of Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring – and a fine bit of Scarlatti...

Further Technical Note

 Despite my introducing word recognition, the pest with the tiny penis got through again. If anyone's got more suggestions for stopping this kind of thing, I'd be glad to hear from them...

Monty Don and Henry Vaughan

 For a while last night, misled by a deceptive headline, I thought Monty Don was about to quite Gardeners' World. As this would be, for me, about on a par with the sky falling or the Queen dying (God save her), I was alarmed, and lost no time in establishing that, happily, Monty was not about to leave Gardeners' World. Despite all that's going on in this mad world, so long as Monty's in situ it feels as if things can't be all that bad... 
In the course of my Monty researches, I came across a perhaps surprising fact: when he was on Desert Island Discs, he chose as his book (in addition to the Bible and Shakespeare) the Collected Poems of Henry Vaughan. This shows excellent taste: Vaughan is one of our finest devotional poets, and his works are replete with beautiful lines and images – 

'I saw Eternity the other night,
Like a great ring of pure and endless light,
All calm, as it was bright…'

'There is in God, some say,
A deep but dazzling darkness…'

'They are all gone into the world of light, 
And I alone sit ling'ring here…'

'Happy those early days when I
Shined in my Angel-infancy…'

'The Sun doth shake light from his locks, and all the way
Breathing perfumes, does spice the day…'

And a poem like this one – 'Retirement' – would surely find an echo in Monty's heart –

Fresh fields and woods! the Earth's fair face,
God's foot-stool, and man's dwelling-place.
I ask not why the first Believer
Did love to be a country liver?
Who to secure pious content
Did pitch by groves and wells his tent;
Where he might view the boundless sky,
And all those glorious lights on high;
With flying meteors, mists and show'rs,
Subjected hills, trees, meads and flow'rs;
And ev'ry minute bless the King
And wise Creator of each thing.
I ask not why he did remove
To happy Mamre's holy grove,
Leaving the cities of the plain
To Lot and his successless train?
All various lusts in cities still
Are found; they are the thrones of ill;
The dismal sinks, where blood is spill'd,
Cages with much uncleanness fill'd.
But rural shades are the sweet fense
Of piety and innocence.
They are the Meek's calm region, where
Angels descend and rule the sphere,
Where heaven lies leaguer, and the dove
Duly as dew, comes from above.
If Eden be on Earth at all,
'Tis that, which we the country call.