'Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light'

 Johannes Vermeer's date of birth is, like so much else about him, unknown, but it was on this day in 1632, at the Reformed Church in Delft, that he was baptised, so All Hallows Eve is regarded as his anniversary. This poem by the American poet Howard Nemerov, simply titled 'Vermeer', catches, I think, something of the essence of his unique art... 

Taking what is, and seeing it as it is,
Pretending to no heroic stances or gestures,
Keeping it simple; being in love with light
And the marvellous things that light is able to do,
How beautiful! a modesty which is
Seductive extremely, the care for daily things.

At one for once with sunlight falling through
A leaded window, the holy mathematic
Plays out the cat’s cradle of relation
Endlessly; even the inexorable
Domesticates itself and becomes charm.

If I could say to you, and make it stick,
A girl in a red hat, a woman in blue
Reading a letter, a lady weighing gold…
If I could say this to you so you saw,
And knew, and agreed that this was how it was
In a lost city across the sea of years,
I think we should be for one moment happy
In the great reckoning of those little rooms
Where the weight of life has been lifted and made light,
Or standing invisible on the shore opposed,
Watching the water in the foreground dream
Reflectively, taking a view of Delft
As it was, under a wide and darkening sky.

Fungi and Larkins

Yesterday afternoon I decided to join a 'Fungus Foray' in St Michael's churchyard. I think my interest was piqued by recently finding a very fine Fly Agaric growing up against the wall of the church hall (not St Michael's) around the corner. It was doing very nicely and the top was opening and spreading when someone came along and kicked it to pieces, as is the British way with fungi (in other countries they're more likely to fetch a basket and start gathering, though probably not the Fly Agaric). In the churchyard some thirty or forty people had gathered, many of them armed with field guides, and, after a short talk by the mycologist in charge (a woman, so presumably spared the 'fun guy' gags – though 'fun gal' has possibilities...), the group set off in a body to see what they could find. After twenty minutes they were still gathered around a nearby tree stump admiring some Sulphur Caps, while I hovered on the periphery, already beginning to think this was all too serious for an inveterate dabbler like me. Just then I noticed a Speckled Wood flying off along one of the woodland paths (this churchyard, said to be the largest in England, is also a semi-wild nature reserve) and I followed it, leaving the mycophiles to their fungal fun.
  I was lucky, not only in spotting the Speckled Wood – a late flyer, probably my last of the year – but in happening upon a clump of Larkin family gravestones in among the trees and shrubbery. I've found them before, but ever since they have proved strangely elusive, and despite many wanderings in the churchyard I have never again, since I first saw it, found the headstone of the poet's ancestral namesake – the one that gave the young Larkin such a turn – or the decidedly plain grave of his parents. Next time perhaps...

'Slowly, silently...'

 Talking of Radio 3, one of its pleasing regular features is the Sunday poem, requested by a listener and read, in commendably straightforward style, by the presenter, Martin Handley. Often I miss it (it's aired some time before 8), but this morning I caught it, and it was one I hadn't heard (or read) since my boyhood, when it was in every children's anthology. I wonder if it still is, or is that strange archaism 'shoon' too much for today's kids? It's 'Silver' by Walter de la Mare, which I now see is a sonnet in length but not in shape, written in rhyming couplets and with no turn. A purely descriptive, entirely visual poem, it yet has something eerie and mysterious about it, as so often with De La Mare, and it is really very good. I love 'Couched in his kennel, like a log, With paws of silver sleeps the dog'. 

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon;

This way, and that, she peers, and sees

Silver fruit upon silver trees;

One by one the casements catch

Her beams beneath the silvery thatch;

Couched in his kennel, like a log,

With paws of silver sleeps the dog;

From their shadowy cote the white breasts peep

Of doves in a silver-feathered sleep;

A harvest mouse goes scampering by,

With silver claws and a silver eye;

And moveless fish in the water gleam,

By silver reeds in a silver stream.

Radio: 4 Loses, 3 Gains

 I was not surprised to read that yet more listeners are deserting Radio 4, especially its unlistenable Today Programme. Why anyone should inflict Today on themselves when they could be listening to good music on Radio 3 has been a mystery to me for some while – probably since I defected from 4 to 3 myself. Radio 3 has its tiresome aspects – self-conscious popularisation, endless repetitive trails, odd traces of wokery – but by and large it is surely good for the soul, whereas 4 offers only vexation of spirit, and a dreary North London semi-woke mindset that now embraces almost all its output. Back in the day, when I was a radio critic, Radio 4 was studded with well made, imaginative programmes that were worth listening to, and at worst it was a pleasant, painless backdrop to the day.  No longer. 
What the Guardian piece (linked above) doesn't mention is that, while Radio 4 haemorrhages listeners, Radio 3 has had a surge in listening, much of it no doubt at 4's expense. It would be good to think that the BBC might learn something from this, but on past form that seems highly unlikely. 

From The Da Vinci Code to 1984

 One of the books most frequently dumped on charity shops in recent years was Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code (though it was surely outdumped for a while by Fifty Shades of Grey). At one point the Da Vinci glut reached such a pitch that an Oxfam shop in Swansea displayed a pile of the unwanted title in its window with a notice pleading with donors to please donate something, anything else, preferable vinyl. That was back in 2017, and things have changed since then – now the most dumped books, at least in Swansea, are Richard Osman's cosy murder mysteries – but one David Shrigley, described as an artist, has belatedly done his bit to clear the Da Vinci Code mountain. Having searched out and bought some six thousand dumped copies  – mostly from a vast Oxfordshire warehouse where the most comprehensively unwanted books go to die – he has spent 'a six-figure sum' pulping them and republishing them as an eye-wateringly expensive limited edition of a very different book, George Orwell's 1984, some of the proceeds of which will go to Oxfam. 'It's not literary criticism, ' he declares accurately, though he does regard 1984 as 'a really important book for people to read'.  So, if you've got £495 burning a hole in your pocket, head for that Swansea Oxfam and pick up one of Shrigley's 1984s. Tragically, it might even be a sound investment, the 'art' market being what it is these days – and at least you'd end up with a book to read. 
The BBC News website covers this story in its usual exhaustive manner. It's good to learn that Shrigley has not actually read The Da Vinci Code (perhaps he's a man of taste and discernment after all) and that, when approached for a quote, Dan Brown was 'in transit'. 

A Lincolnshire Man

 This Cultural Life is a Radio 4 programme in which various 'creative' luminaries talk about the cultural influences that have shaped them. Yesterday, by chance, I happened on the edition in which the massively successful lyricist Bernie Taupin was interviewed. He is not a man in whom I have much interest, but my ears pricked up when he started talking about his childhood. Taupin is a Lincolnshire man, born in what he described as 'the middle of nowhere' – in fact an isolated farmhouse somewhere near Sleaford, in la Lincolnshire profonde – from where the family moved to the grander surroundings of Rowston Manor, where they lived rent free, Bernie's father being the farm manager. His mother and his maternal grandfather were both poetry lovers, and his grandfather particularly enjoyed reciting Victorian narrative verse, so the young Taupin – like me! – grew up with the likes of 'Young Lochinvar', 'The Highwayman' and Macaulay's 'Horatius' ('Lars Porsena of Clusium By the nine gods he swore...') ringing in his ears. I don't know what effect this had on his songwriting; it certainly didn't turn me into a millionaire lyricist, but there you go...
From Rowston Manor, the Taupins moved to a run-down farmhouse in the gloriously named village of Owmby-by-Spital. The sound of this name reminded me of another narrative poem – John Betjeman's 'A Lincolnshire Tale'. I wonder if Bernie knows it...

                                                            Kirkby with Muckby-cum-Sparrowby-cum-Spinx 

                                                                   Is down a long lane in the county of Lincs.
                                                             And often on Wednesdays, well-harnessed and spruce,
                                                                   I would drive into Wiss over Winderby Sluice.

 

A whacking great sunset bathed level and drain

From Kirkby with Muckby to Beckby-on-Bain,

And I saw, as I journeyed, my marketing done,

Old Caisterby tower take the last of the sun.

 

The night air grew nippy.  An autumn mist roll’d

(In a scent of dead cabbages) down from the wold,

In the ocean of silence that flooded me round

The crunch of the wheels was a comforting sound.

 

The lane lengthened narrowly into the night

With the Bain on its left bank, the drain on its right,

And feebly the carriage-lamps glimmered ahead

When all of a sudden the pony fell dead.

 

The remoteness was awful, the stillness intense,

Of invisible fenland, around and immense;

And out on the dark, with a roar and a swell,

Swung, hollowly thundering, Speckleby bell.

 

Though myself the Archdeacon for many a year,

I had not summoned courage for visiting here;

Our incumbents were mostly eccentric or sad

But – the Speckleby Rector was said to be mad.

 

Oh cold was the ev’ning and tall was the tower

And strangely compelling the tenor bell’s power!

As loud on the reed-beds and strong through the dark

It toll’ from the church in the tenantless park.

 

The mansion was ruined, the empty demesne

Was slowly reverting to marshland again –

Marsh where the village was, grass in the Hall,

And the church and the rectory waiting to fall.

 

And even in springtime with kingcups about

And stumps of old oak-trees attempting to sprout,

‘Twas a sinister place, neither fenland nor wold,

And doubly forbidding in darkness and cold.

 

As down swung the tenor, a beacon of sound,

Over listening acres of waterlogged ground

I stood by the tombs to see pass and repass

The gleam of a taper, through clear leaded glass.

 

And such lighting of lights in the thunderous roar

The heart summoning courage to hand at the door;

I grated it open on scents I knew well,

The dry smell of damp rot, the hassocky smell.

 

What a forest of woodwork in ochres and grains

Unevenly doubled in diamonded panes,

And over the plaster, so textured with time,

Sweet discolouration of umber and lime!

 

The candles ensconced on each high panelled pew

Brought the caverns of brass-studded baize into view,

But the roof and its rafters were lost to the sight

As they soared to the dark of the Lincolnshire night:

 

And high from the chancel arch paused to look down

A sign-painter’s beasts in their fight for the Crown,

While massive, impressive, and still as the grave

A three-decker pulpit frowned over the nave.

 

Shall I ever forget what a stillness was there

When the bell ceased its tolling and thinned on the air?

Then an opening door showed a long pair of hands

And the Rector himself in his gown and his bands.

. . . . . . . . . .

Such a fell Visitation I shall not forget,

Such a rush through the dark, that I rush through it yet,

And I pray, as the bells ring o’er fenland and hill,

That the Speckleby acres be tenantless still.

(Apologies for the weird spacing at the start, which I couldn't fix.)

Centenary

 A musical centenary today – the American composer Ned Rorem, who very nearly lived to see it himself (he died, aged 99, last November). A prolific composer who favoured a neoromantic rather than a modernist style, he was described by Virgil Thomson as 'an American Poulenc', which is good enough for me. He wrote several hundred 'art songs', and here, to mark the centenary, is one of them, the charming 'Early in the Morning'...