To this earth-bound St. Francis, this earth-covered incomplete saint, comforting those who are not irradiated, with the words ‘The glory of God is always in the East, but cannot be seen for the Cloud of the Crucifixion’, ‘all things have become light, never again to set, and the setting has believed in the rising. This is the new Creation.’1 All things were light come from above: ‘For water is not of solid constituents, but is dissolved from precious stones above’; — though the Crucifixion was his, amid the deathly cold of Bedlam, his madness was not a darkness but a light. His body knew the lack of bread, and had known the sin of drunkenness, but yet to the end of his life, his soul, his apprehension of the world, were those of Thomas Traherne’s child:
Certainly Adam in Paradise had not more sweet and curious apprehensions of the world than I, when I was a child.
• • • • • •
All appeared new, and strange at first, inexpressibly rare and delightful and beautiful…. My knowledge was Divine, I knew by intuition those things which since my Apostasy, I collected, again by the highest reason. My very ignorance was advantageous. I seemed as one brought into the Estate of Innocence. All things were spotless and pure and glorious: yea, and infinitely mine, and joyful and precious. I knew not that there were any sins or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of poverties, contentions, or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Everything was at rest, free and immortal. I knew nothing of sins and death or rents or exaction, either for tribute or bread. In the absence of these I was entertained like an Angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory, I saw all in the peace of Eden: Heaven and earth did sing my Creator’s praises, and could not make more melody to Adam, than to me. All Time was Eternity, and a perpetual Sabbath….
The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The dust and stones were as precious as gold: the gates were at first the end of the world. The green trees when I saw them first through one of the gates transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things. The men! O what venerable and reverend creatures did the aged seem! Immortal Cherubims! And young men glittering and sparkling Angels, and maids strange seraphic pieces of life and beauty! Boys and girls tumbling in the street, and playing, were moving jewels. I knew not that they were born or should die; But all things abided eternally as they were in their proper places. Eternity was manifest in the Light of the Day, and something infinite behind everything appeared: which talked with my expectation and moved my desire. The city seemed to stand in Eden, or to be built in Heaven. The streets were mine, the temple was mine, the gold and silver were mine, as much as their sparkling eyes, fair skins and ruddy faces. The skies were mine, and so were the sun and moon and stars, and all the world was mine; and I the only spectator and enjoyer of it. I knew no churlish proprieties, nor lands, nor divisions; but all proprieties and divisions were mine: all treasures and the possession of them.
In that great poem, ‘A Hymn to David’, descending like an angel to the madman of genius, the saint of love, in his earthly prison, all things of clay, all objects of our daily life, were changed into beings formed from the light that is in Heaven. The colours, the light, are deeper, are richer, like
The topaz blazing like a lamp
Among the mines beneath
The saint in him pierced down to the essence of all things seen — and that essence was light, with all its variations of warmth, richness, piercingness, glow. It is impossible to know how he produces that quintessence of light. But if, for instance, we take Verse LXV:
For Adoration, beyond match,
The scholar bulfinch aims to catch
The soft flute’s ivory touch;
And, careless on the hazle spray,
The daring redbreast keeps at bay
The damsel’s greedy clutch.
we shall see how in the lovely softening from the fl of ‘flutes’ to the i of ‘ivory’, the change from the fullness of the one-syllabled word ‘flutes’ to the long warm i of ‘ivory’ with the quavering two syllables that follow, in that word, — the transposition of the ulf of ‘bulfinch’ to the flu of ‘flutes’, — the actual sound seems to echo the warmth, the very glow, of the scholar bulfinch’s and the daring redbreast’s sweet bosoms.
In Verse LII
For Adoration seasons change,
And order, truth, and beauty range,
Adjust, attract, and fill:
The grass the polyanthus cheques:
And polish’d porphyry reflects
By the descending rill.
Rich almonds colour to the prime
For Adoration; tendrils climb;
And fruit-trees pledge their gems;
And Ivis with her gorgeous vest
Builds for her eggs her cunning nest,
And bell-flowers bow their stems.
The colour is so rich as not to be of this world.
And yet, the flowers plucked by Smart are flowers of this earth, though they are known by the angels, ‘worshipping Christ with the People of the Rose, which is a nation of living sweetness’.
Blake’s lily of the vale was the white and ineffably sweet soul of the lily. Blake’s marigold was a flower known to Persephone:
‘Art thou a flower? Art thou a nymph? I see thee now a flower, Now a nymph! I dare not pluck thee from thy dewy bed.’
The Golden Nymph replied, ‘Pluck thou my flower, Oothoon the mild!
Another flower shall spring, because the soul of sweet delight
Can never pass away.’ She ceas’d, and clos’d her golden shrine.
Then Oothoon pluck’d the flower, saying: ‘I pluck thee from thy bed,
Sweet flower, and put thee here to glow between my breasts;
And thus I turn my face to where my whole soul seeks.’
Over the waves she went in wing’d exulting swift delight.
• • • • • •
A beautiful though perhaps less great poet than Smart, Gerard Manley Hopkins, (less great because he was not visited directly by angels of the heavenly fire and light), had, in an almost equal degree, this acute and strange visual sense, piercing, as I said above, to the essence of the thing seen. Hopkins, unlike Smart, heightened the truth, the essence, by endowing them with attributes which at first seem alien, with colours that are sharper, clearer, more piercing than those that are seen by the common eye.
This acute and piercing visual apprehension, this sharpening, and concentration into essence by the means of which I have spoken, may be found in these lovely lines from ‘The May Magnificat’:
Ask of her, the mighty mother:
Her reply puts this other
Question: What is Spring?
Growth in everything —
Flesh and fleece, fur and feather,
Grass and greenworld all together.
Star-eyed strawberry-breasted
Throstle above her nested
Cluster of bugle blue eggs thin
Forms and warms the life within;
And bird and blossom swell
In sod or sheath or shell.
• • • • • •
When drop-of-blood-and-foam-dapple
Bloom lights the orchard-apple
And thicket and thorp are merry
With silver surfèd cherry
And azuring-over greybell makes
Wood banks and brakes wash wet like lakes
Caps, clears, and clinches all.
This ecstasy all through mothering earth
Tells Mary her mirth till Christ’s birth
To remember and exultation
In God who was her salvation.
In the sharply-seen image of the star-eyed strawberry-breasted thrush, Hopkins says ‘strawberry-breasted’ because of the freckles on her breast. In the enhanced and deepened colour of the bugle-blue eggs, the sharp u of ‘bugle’ melting into the softer u of ‘blue’ gives the reflection of one in the other, the sisterhood of the deep blue heaven, the flower, and the egg, their colours changing and shifting in the clear light.
The same piercing truth-finding vision produced for us the fair hair of the country youth in this lovely fragment:
The furl of fresh-leaved dog-rose down
His cheeks the forth-and-flaunting sun
Had swarthed about with lion-brown
Before the Spring was done.
His locks like all a ravel-rope’s-end
With hempen strands in spray —
Fallow, foam-fallow, hanks — fall’n off their ranks
Swung down at a disarray.
Or like a juicy and jostling shock
Of bluebells sheaved in May
Or wind-long fleeces on the flock
A day off shearing-day.
Then over his turnèd temples — here —
Was a rose, or, failing that,
Rough-Robin or five-lipped campion clear
For a beauty-bow to his hat,
And the sunlight sidled, like dewdrops,
like dandled diamonds,
Through the sieve of the straw of his hat.
In this lovely fragment, the comparison of the youth’s fair hair with a sheaf of bluebells gives, to me, the fairness of the hair, and shows the straightness of it, the way in which it flaps, — for, of all flowers, only a sheaf of bluebells has this particular limpness.
Here we have a youth, in the midst of his walk, suddenly leaping into the air and dancing for a step or two, because of the fun of being alive on this lovely morning of the late spring. The innocent and sweet movement of this very beautiful fragment is due, partly, to the skilful interposition of an extra syllable from time to time, and an occasional rare extra rhyme; and the clearness and poignant colours of the morning are conveyed by the sounds of ‘juicy’, ‘bluebells’, and ‘sheaved’, with their varying degrees of deep and piercing colour.
We find the same heightening and concentration again, in these beautiful lines about the skies on a May night:
For how to the heart’s cheering
The down-dugged ground-hugged grey
Hovers off, the jay-blue heavens appearing
Of pied and peeled May!
Blue-beating and hoary glow-height; or night, still higher,
With belled fire and the moth-soft Milky Way,
What by your measure is the heaven of desire,
The treasure never eyesight got, nor was ever guessed what for the hearing?
A lovely movement, a sense that all is well, that all Creation is part of a controlled and gigantic design, is given by the internal rhymes and assonances, — the movement being like that of a bird flying through the bright air, swooping downward to its nest, then up again through the holy and peaceful light.