Honor Clerk

Pure and endless light

Ann Wroe enlists naturalists, poets and painters — especially her abiding Sussex genius Eric Ravilious — in some engaging meditations on the effects of light

There has been extraordinarily little bright sunlight in the far northwest corner of Britain over the past year. Damp, drizzling summer, an endless sequence of howling autumnal gales and downpours, a muddy dismal winter. Then at the beginning of February, by some accounts traditionally a season for good weather in northern Scotland, a series of brilliant sparkling days arrived unannounced. While the rest of the country shivered and dripped, the sun in the north bounced off the sea, the hills were brilliant with deep snow, the night sky was clear and starry, northern lights pulsing on the horizon and the moon bright enough to read by.

Enough to turn anyone’s fancy to Gerard Manley Hopkins. And this is what happens to Ann Wroe. Walking on the Sussex Downs, she observes the effects of light on the world around her, contemplates its source, its nature, its qualities and ponders how others have analysed it, observed and recorded it in words, on paper and canvas, even translated it into music. Taking a notebook out of her rucksack she records, Hopkins-style, particular moments that strike her most forcibly and sometimes she makes a whole poem of them.

This book gathers up these and other meditations, drawing on her own experience and on the great observers of nature — John Clare, Coleridge and Wordsworth, Gilbert White, Walt Whitman, Henry David Thoreau, W.H. Hudson, the now little-known Victorian Richard Jeffries and, above all, Hopkins. To these, and many others, she adds the most luminous of native painters — Samuel Palmer, William Blake, Turner and her abiding Sussex genius, Eric Ravilious. She calls in Empedocles, Hermes Trismegistus, the Muslim polymath Al-Kindi, Newton, Galileo, Einstein, Clerk Maxwell, Goethe and Messaien, and weaving together their theories, observations and calculations into six ‘facets’, corrals this huge subject more or less into a coherent shape.

From the white chalk paths in a Ravilious watercolour illuminated by the absence of paint on paper to the numinous angels in San Marco; the ‘blissful sight’ to Chaucer of the light-sensitive daisy which ‘softneth all my sorwe’ to Hopkins’s ‘dapple-dawn-drawn falcon’; from Newton’s prisms to Goethe’s colour theory, from Genesis to the inner light, the ‘invisible Sun within us’, this is an assortment of bits and pieces collected and written about with an intensely personal fervour.

Already a subscriber? Log in

Keep reading with a free trial

Subscribe and get your first month of online and app access for free. After that it’s just £1 a week.

There’s no commitment, you can cancel any time.

Or

Unlock more articles

REGISTER

Comments

Don't miss out

Join the conversation with other Spectator readers. Subscribe to leave a comment.

Already a subscriber? Log in