Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer

The Malvern Hills seen from fields east of Whittington, Worcestershire, in late August 2021.

Does it come about now, the cusp between summer and autumn?  Or has it already passed?  Or is it still to arrive?  The change hides deep in the veins and roots of things, like the turning of a tide, or the recognition of a truth.  Elizabeth Jennings smelled it before she could see it:

Now watch this autumn that arrives

In smells.  All looks like summer still;

Colours are quite unchanged, the air

On green and white serenely thrives.

Heavy the trees with growth and full

The fields.  Flowers flourish everywhere.    [1]

Those lines are a perfect description of days such as Monday was in south-eastern England, though in suburban London there was no hint of smoke of the kind that awoke autumn for Elizabeth Jennings.  Summer still, then — but then Tuesday, with a lessening of the haze or a change in its quality, throwing down a more golden light from a bluer sky, maturing the palette into that of an illuminated manuscript, brought about an anagnorisis of sorts.  On the Common the crickets still sizzle in the parchment-yellow grasses, and there are startling splashes of colour from the thistles and gorse, though the cow-parsley is going over.  The trees are, yes, ‘heavy with growth’, and dark with it, too, as dark as they are green; some already bear rashes and outbreaks of rust, but, less brazenly, even where all seems green at first glance, there is a dustiness, a mauveness, a wine-darkness in the shadows.  It is the purple of finished splendour, of growth itself grown old: the summer is an empire whose conquests are complete.

But the seasons always turn to linger a few times before they are quite gone, and I rather suppose that even these incongruous days of the high twenties are not quite the end.  ‘Ambiguity’ is Jennings’ word for it — 

Summer still raging while a thin 

Column of smoke stirs from the land 

Proving that autumn gropes for us.

I have been trying to work out which should come first: the poem from which these lines are taken, Song at the Beginning of Autumn, or Ruth Pitter’s free-verse Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer.  Perhaps Pitter follows Jennings, even though she is describing weather like today’s.  ‘We had thought summer dead,’ she says —

But now hot camomile in headlands grows,

Strong-smelling as from toil of reaping: bees

Their delicate harvest in the rusty rows

Of scarlet bean, and woodbine that still blows,

Though flower with berry, gather and do not cease;

No mushroom yet, for dryness of the leas;

No leaf too early sere, for droughty root,

Drops from the trees,

But grave broad green guards the thick purple fruit.

The pandemic has taught me much that I have needed to learn about the passage of the seasons, and not only of the seasons, but of the details of the seasons.  Still more has it taught me that they cannot be pinned down by the observer or the poet.  ‘When I said autumn, autumn broke,’ says Jennings, but she is speaking of the memories and associations that autumn, or its herald, releases into her mind.  All the same, there is undoubtedly a counterpoint between the turns of the seasons and the moods of the mind.  For days like these, days of mingled moods, signposting the seasons — and even for those lacklustre, overcast days against which they stand out — I follow Ruth Pitter, and give thanks.

So for the sun

That all men love and understand,

Lo here is one

In gratitude lifts either hand:

O dearest land!

Heaven give harvests without end,

Heaven mend our quarrels, cure our ills,

And the whole peace of heaven descend

On all the English plains and hills!

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[1]    Emma Mason (ed.), Elizabeth Jennings: The Collected Poems (Manchester: Carcanet, 2012), p. 

[2]    Along with two other poems, Thanksgiving for a Fair Summer can be found on p. 279 of The New English Weekly, 7 July, 1932 (vol. I, no. 12), or p. 11 of the PDF document at this link: www.modernistmagazines.com/media/pdf/294.pdf

The Common yesterday

The Burning of the Leaves

Fingers of fire make corruption clean on Mitcham Common, 18th November, 2020.

Now is the time for the burning of the leaves.
They go to the fire; the nostril pricks with smoke
Wandering slowly into a weeping mist.
Brittle and blotched, ragged and rotten sheaves!
A flame seizes the smouldering ruin and bites
On stubborn stalks that crackle as they resist.

The last hollyhock’s fallen tower is dust;
All the spices of June are a bitter reek,
All the extravagant riches spent and mean.
All burns! The reddest rose is a ghost;
Sparks whirl up, to expire in the mist: the wild
Fingers of fire are making corruption clean.

Now is the time for stripping the spirit bare,
Time for the burning of days ended and done,
Idle solace of things that have gone before:
Rootless hope and fruitless desire are there;
Let them go to the fire, with never a look behind.
The world that was ours is a world that is ours no more.

They will come again, the leaf and the flower, to arise
From squalor of rottenness into the old splendour,
And magical scents to a wondering memory bring;
The same glory, to shine upon different eyes.
Earth cares for her own ruins, naught for ours.
Nothing is certain, only the certain spring.

from ‘The Burning of the Leaves’ by Laurence Binyon (1869–1943)

Season of Mists

        It is a time of year that’s to my taste,
        Full of spiced rumours, sharp and velutinous flavours,
        Dim with the mist that softens the cruel surfaces,
        Makes mirrors vague.  It is the mist that I most favour. 

from ‘Autumn’ by Vernon Scannell (1922–2007)

 

Autumn Report

Kimbolton church and the Shropshire Hills, seen from near Hamnish Clifford.

My findings in Herefordshire the other week were these: red apples, blue hills, and all colours in between; oaks, August-laden still but tinged with first rust, and gold leaf in ardent proliferation at sunset.  In short, mid-October England illuminated like a manuscript.

The mysteries of the variations in flavour between the different shires and stretches of Britain, their particular characters by which each part is kept not quite like anywhere else, and their elusive boundaries that stubbornly veil where one part ends and another begins, will never be exhausted by the artist’s brush, the writer’s pen or walkers’ conversation.  They are as intangible, as fine, as endlessly surprising and as defiant of definition as the changing of the seasons.  What is it makes this part of the world so poetic, these English counties nearest Wales?  How is their character made?  Perhaps I will never work it out!  It has the tenderness of arable lowland England, but, lent a Welsh inflection, is hiraeth-tinged, by those ranges of high hills, beacons into the distance beckoning.  England and Wales mingle and shimmer against and with each other, like two misty, chromatic chords.  This is bittersweet borderland, neither quite one nor the other.  Those mythical lands, the distance and the past (the land of lost content, the blue remembered hills) are brought enticingly near.  They are almost within reach…

I am sure this is not just fancy.  Others have seen the same.  A list I once compiled of favourite composers and writers from these counties ran to two dozen.  And look at the land itself: to the north are the Shropshire hills, which are Malcolm Saville and Housman country; to the south is Gloucestershire, the land of Herbert Howells, F. W. Harvey and Ivor Gurney, along with Dymock of the five poets; to the east lie the birthplaces of Masefield and Elgar, and westwards — well, out in the west is the heart of Wales, where all speech is song.

If I had come to Leominster in search of a retreat, I was not the first: St Edfrith found it a suitable place for a priory in the year 660 A.D.  It was at the priory church — at least its second incarnation, having been suppressed not long after the Norman Conquest and refounded in the twelfth century —  that I found this anonymous poem waiting to greet me in the porch, mounted on the inside door:

  Pause — ere thou enter, traveller — and bethink thee,

  How holy, yet how homelike is this place:

  Time that thou spendest humbly here shall link thee

  With men unknown who once were of thy race.

  This is thy Father’s House: to Him address thee

  Whom here His children worship face to face.

  He at thy coming in with Peace shall bless thee,

  Thy going out make joyful with His Grace.

Peace and prosperity to all towns whose church doors are adorned with poetry, especially if the words wear their careful craftsmanship as lightly as these!

Holy and homelike indeed was the church, large as it was (the north aisle was once the Norman nave, which gives an indication of the enlargement it underwent in the Middle Ages).  I had been there for a quarter of an hour when the organist, in suit and tie, came out for practice.  It was practice which he did not really need: I found myself eavesdropping on some fine music, a serene prelude by Gordon Slater, some full-throated Bach, and some other pieces.  Some people had been around at the beginning but they had disappeared.  The music played and the sunlight streamed generously through the south windows.

Across the nave and north aisle of the priory church of St. Peter and Paul, Leominster.

Many things are good and right about the town of Leominster: its size, its nearby railway station and the easy reach of unruined countryside from the middle of town.  I fell into conversation with a few townspeople, who were very friendly.  On the other side of Eaton Hill, eastwards along the Herefordshire Trail, lies a definitive escape from the growl of the A44 and A49, land rising and falling, and boughs laden with summer-sweetened apples, for this is cider country.  And this homeliness is always ringed by the ‘blue high blade’ of hills: Titterstone Clee Hill and Shropshire are particularly visible to the north.  And no noise, apart from a hidden tractor, and one or two pheasants exploding ludicrously out of hedgerows.  On my way back westwards I came through an orchard at just the moment that the setting sun was aligned with the rows of the trees, and the rays shone straight down the aisles of apples.

Gold leaf in proliferation.

Even apart from this, it would have been worth going all the way there just to make the journey back to London.  Not via Newport, Bristol Parkway and Swindon, but by “the pretty way”, as a fellow visitor called it, from Leominster to Hereford, and then by direct train from there to London.  It took an hour longer than the Newport route, but what does an hour matter?  The start of the journey was all in mist, but a few miles east of Hereford we burst out of it into sunlit clarity, where we remained for the rest of the journey (Ledbury, Colwall and Campden tunnels excepted).  This was not only the ‘pretty way’ but the poetic way: past apple-orchards towards Ledbury, the home town of John Masefield, then tunnelling directly under the Malvern Hills, onwards through Worcestershire, within a few miles of Edward Elgar’s birthplace at Broadheath, dramatically high over the river Severn into Worcester and then, turning along Brunel’s line, past Evesham, Honeybourne, Morton-in-Marsh, over the north Cotswolds and actually through the old Adlestrop station of Edward Thomas’s famous poem, down to Oxford, thence shadowing the Thames via Reading and the high-rise-block-choked route to London.  

Great Malvern and the North Hill of the Malverns.

I have the honour, then, to report that in the manuscript of England many old things linger and are still to be seen.  What St. Edfrith, many poets and ordinary folk sought and almost found is still there for the almost-finding: something like the mythical realm of Deep England, something like the Land of Lost Content, something like home.  It might have been just over the next hill.

The river Avon near Evesham (Worcs.).