'It is far easier to be sensible in cities than in many country places I could tell you of,' observes Yeats in The Celtic Twilight. 'When one walks on those grey roads at evening by the scented elder-bushes of the white cottages, watching the faint mountains gathering the clouds upon their heads, one all too readily discovers, beyond the thin cobweb veil of the senses, those creatures, the goblins, hurrying from the white square stone door to the north, or from the Heart Lake in the south.'
I spent the Easter weekend in the south-west of England, moving between Somerset, Devon and Dorset. To be honest, Hardy's tales lend themselves easily to any corner of rural England, but it was particularly thrilling to imagine them unfold here in his native West Country. You imagine Jude labouring at his Latin on his cart, Tess working in the fields with her sickly baby, a lovesick Boldwood gazing across to Bathsheba's farm. Most of all, I was delighted to come across a sign for "Winterborne," and learn that Giles takes his surname from two rivers which course through Dorset. (I experienced a similar thrill when younger and gadding around south-west London, discovering a host of Oscar Wilde characters).
Branscombe, Dorset
When I was in Somerset I visited Wells Cathedral, a masterpiece of Early English Gothic, famed for its sprawling and beautiful west side.
Here are two of the towering scissor arches inside. As with Ely Cathedral's rainbowed lantern tower, the construction of these miracles was occasioned by the collapse of the central tower in 1248.
And here is the astronomical clock, sometimes claimed to be one of the world's oldest working clocks:
The beautiful Lady Chapel:
Speaking of cathedral architecture, I've been watching Keith Critchlow's excellent explanation of the significance of Chartres Cathedral's dimensions. Critchlow being a renowned scholar of sacred geometry in general, the documentary includes some striking comparisons of the cathedral's structure with Hindu concepts. The whole series of videos about sacred geometry is well worth a watch.
Recording of the week has to be Czerny-Stefańska's beautifully patient performance of 15 Chopin mazurkas.
As someone very fond of both classical music and folk-songs, one of my favourite Tamil movies is Sindhu Bhairavi. The plot is sown when a concert of the protagonist, a Tamil classical singer, is interrupted by a strange woman. She is a fan of the highbrow songs he sings in Kannada and Sanskrit, but surely, from time to time, singing folk songs in the audience's native language would help them relate to the music more? Our protagonist is scornful, and the crowd call for her to leave the hall. But she persists:
‘What’s so terrible about folk songs? What's so ridiculous? Do they lack feeling or opinion? [..] Is there not love, laughter, devotion, sadness? Patriotism, community, sympathy, separation, friendship, lullabying- what do they not have, sir?’
(my translation of the Tamil, with my mother's guidance)
I was leafing through my Penguin Book of English Song this week and came across one of my favourite Andrew Marvell poems, with one of those marvellous punchlines typical to metaphysical poetry.
The Mower to the Glow-Worms
Ye living lamps, by whose dear light
The nightingale does sit so late,
And studying all the summer night,
Her matchless songs does meditate;
Ye country comets, that portend
No war nor prince’s funeral,
Shining unto no higher end
Than to presage the grass’s fall;
Ye glow-worms, whose officious flame
To wand’ring mowers shows the way,
That in the night have lost their aim,
And after foolish fires do stray;
Your courteous lights in vain you waste,
Since Juliana here is come,
For she my mind hath so displac’d
That I shall never find my home.'
Marvell's appreciation of the little world down below in the second stanza, the shifting scales of meaning, is particularly lovely. It reminds me of the Seamus Heaney poem which first got me to love glow-worms, A Hazel Stick for Catherine Ann:
'[...] you saw your first glow-worm –
all of us stood round in silence, even you
gigantic enough to darken the sky
for a glow-worm.
And when I poked open the grass
a tiny brightening den lit the eyeÂ
in the blunt pared end of your stick.'
And also of these lines from Edward Thomas's FIfty Faggots:
'A blackbird or robin will nest there, /Accustomed to them, thinking they will remain/ Whatever is for ever to a bird: [..]'