Achilles
— R. F. Langley
One is seldom directed by way of
an indigo gate. A life is plunged in
colours, saturations, shades, tints, hues. One
screws one’s eyes up. A mediaeval list
of inks confuses fuscum pulverum
with azure from the Mines of Solomon.
Who knows what perse is? Days lose themselves in
pandia omnia and dip away
between the pinks and blues. But then there is
alizarin which sometimes jumps from the
old leaves. And turquoise is a stone dropped near
the gamboge fence. Who did not notice those?
And shapes. The tree. It shows what one could call
constraint. It bursts through rocks in calluses
that clog into a lump with several
branches lunging out of it, one knot-hole
and a stump. The thing has corners to it,
pockets, ledges, wedges, all chocked in with
lichen on them, found out by the sun that
stabs down from the right, detecting olive
green.
In sixteen-thirty-three, when she was
twenty-five, on a creamy marble slab
in the south aisle, they drew Elizabeth
Havers. Did she have time to walk out past
a red house? Choose a brush? Paint a picket
white? Step on by? Turn round, look back, and shout
that she could see what it might mean? That that
was the place where she had been? She is a
whisper. Smoke and cream. What had she really
seen? She rolls her eyes and wears her shroud so
that it does not cover her lace cuff.
The
kylix has been cracked. The mend in it spoils
his cheek-piece and his mouth, but there is still
his eye, under the helmet’s rim, as he
stabs her from the right. She reaches up to
touch his chin. BC. Four-sixty. Killing
Penthesileia. It is his last and
only chance to stare at her. He does so
and he falls in love. Or is it lust or
scorn? Furious concentration? Don’t call
it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo.
She is engraved on her stone slab. The aisle
window moves its print onto her face. It
stresses her lips, almost rubbed out, and the
scoring of her thick curls. Her tear-ducts. The
look she is giving to her left, which might
be sad because she is remembering
what? Ten minutes of after-glow, when white
campion seemed distilled against grey grass,
the poppy in the crop, alight, red for
itself, and she stood stupefied by that,
hoping the hero had not seen her yet.
If she had lived she would be sixty-five.
Sir Isaac Newton, in a dark room, pins
his paper, sets his prism twenty-two
feet off, and asks a friend, who has not
thought about the harmony of tones in sounds
and colours, if he will mark each hue at
its most brisk and full. If he can, also,
postulate, along the insensible
gradation, the edges of the seven.
Where blue ends. Where the violet begins.
The pencil in hand. The hand and pencil
are suddenly intensely indigo.
The gate is indigo, but when they give
directions people call it blue. To lose
the way is to remember something of
the stump. But can anyone be ready
for the moment when the dusk ignites the
poppy? Or accept that the spectral hand
is his? That it’s he must keep the pencil
steady? Maybe everyone is dazzled
here by simultaneous death and love?
This morning in
the pool at
Lime Kiln Sluice
a heron wades and
his deliberations are
proposing ripples
which reflect on
him, run silver
collars up his
neck, chuckle his
chin, then thin to
sting the silence
where he points
his beak.
His round
and rigid eye.
Perhaps he knows
he is caressed.
As a general comment, I at least, when confronting a piece like this with a bunch of unfamiliar references, tend to give it a few reads without doing any looking-up. So before delving into what Google gave me, let’s start with some first impressions.
The first couple of stanzas lead us in with some slow reflections. We lead off with a line that gives the vibes of “Often I am permitted to return to a meadow.” The indigo gate might literally be a gate (more on that later), but even early on it feels very symbolically loaded. From the gate, we enter a confusion over colours and in particular over how we think and speak about colours. Colours here are hugely important (a life is plunged in them), but they’re something murky. The imagery of these stanzas feels likes its coming from an impressionist painting, where we’re focusing on the fickleness and changeability of color as the effect of light. There’s a tradition in philosophy of thinking of colour as a secondary, less-real quality of objects, but it’s also possible to think of colour as being more primary.
By the third stanza, we have our first clear character, Elizabeth Haver. The use of time here is initially odd; we’ve had a few suggested temporal locations, the mediaeval period, ancient / mythical Greece (from the titular Achilles) and the vague contemporary period of the present tense. We’re suddenly at the funeral of a dead young woman in the 17th century, thinking about what she did right before she died. The questions here involve colour, but more fundamentally we have a loss. She might indeed have done something, see something, but whatever that was is covered up by death. Or it was inexpressible in the first place.
In another temporal leap, we are back in ancient times. But since we get the “she” before we get “Penthesileia,” it feels like Elizabeth Havers is, somehow, involved in this narrative, that she is dead because Achilles killed her. This killing is another mystery, we’re not given a sense of why Achilles is killing her and explicitly left in a cloud of questions about how he’s feeling. This deep uncertainty about feeling is linked back to the uncertainty about colours.
We’re back to the present in the fifth stanza, kind of. But we’re looking at what seems like a statue of Elizabeth Haver, but one which we’re thinking of as being the person again. We’re back to what happened before her death, but this seems even more of a composite death, the one in 1633 and in 46 BC.
Stanza six here is literally clear. We’re recounting an experiment Newton did in 1673 (from the math of Haver’s age). We have the famous image of Newton splitting light through a prism into a rainbow of colours and he is asking a friend, an optical naïf, to mark the distinguishing points between colours. (Although we’ve already decided that there are seven.) We return to indigo, which I think we’re focusing as the most liminal of the ROYGBIV. Indigo is apparently a separate shade between blue and violet, but, to me and presumably to the poem, it doesn’t feel like indigo really merits being a rainbow colour, blue seems to blend pretty seamlessly into violet. To insist that there is a point that is intensely indigo is then to insist on the reality of a liminal state.
The seventh stanza (a nice trick that we have a main stanza for each colour of the rainbow) loops back around to the first. We’re thrust back into a confusion, a room of questions, but to me at least it’s a more profound, we’ll call it mystical bewilderment.
We end with an odd coda, a series of nine short couplets that is both formally and in subject matter quite a break from what has come before, so that it feels like just a separate poem. We’re in a new location looking carefully at this heron wading through a reservoir. There are echoes of the earlier impressionism, the bedazzlement of colours in the reflection of the water, but we do not spend much time really on questioning. It’s clear what we’re looking at, but not clear at all why.
Now that we’ve given this piece an initial attempt, let’s do some looking up to see if we can dig more out of it. Let’s start with the indigo gate.
One is seldom directed by way of
an indigo gate. A life is plunged in
colours, saturations, shades, tints, hues. One
screws one’s eyes up. A mediaeval list
of inks confuses fuscum pulverum
with azure from the Mines of Solomon.
Who knows what perse is? Days lose themselves in
pandia omnia and dip away
between the pinks and blues. But then there is
alizarin which sometimes jumps from the
old leaves. And turquoise is a stone dropped near
the gamboge fence. Who did not notice those?
First the gate itself. After some Googling, we can discover that there is indeed an Elizabeth Haver who died in 1633 who has an engraved tomb in the Church of St. Peter in Stockerston. From Google’s street view, there is a gate outside of this church before a tree-lined road which looks indeed to be indigo. So we seem to be starting in a real place.
“Indigo” is actually an ambiguous word. Originally, “indigo” referred to an ultramarine (i. e. blue) dye that comes from the indigo plant. (Which was grown in India, “indigo” comes from the Latin “indicum” meaning “India”. I’ll note that Latin has another meaning for “indicum,” namely “index” (from “indico,” to point out). This feels appropriate given all the pointing that happens in this piece.) Originally, “indigo” referred to this deep blue colour, and when Newton fixed on indigo as a colour in the rainbow he actually had this blue in mind.
A careful reading of Newton’s work indicates that the color he called indigo, we would normally call blue; his blue is then what we would name blue-green or cyan. (McLaren, K. (March 2007). “Newton’s indigo”. Color Research & Application.)
It’s extremely appropriate then that we’re focusing on a colour-name over which there’s much historical confusion about what colour it referred to. The points then where the speaker is insisting on distinguishing indigo and blue feel sly (“Don’t call it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo.”) Such assertions feel like claims or perhaps pretense to a deep knowledge (the hoi polloi call the gate blue, but I know it’s purple). I think there’s a sense of irony here, given these conclusions, it’s not clear what this deep insight might be.
Langley’s mediaeval list of inks seems to come from this manuscript, which conjoins fuscum pulverum (“dark pigment”) with an azure “invented by Solomon”. The specification of the “Mines of Solomon,” puts us in mind of the immense value and importance that colours have had. Blues and purples (and, yes, indigo), have had immense value as very rare colours. Casting this as a “confusion” gives us a sense of decay, as if knowledge of colours were some mystical truth always in the process of being lost. “Who knows what perse is?” hits a similar theme. Perse, incidentally is “of a dark grayish blue resembling indigo.” From Colour and Meaning we learn that the word “perse” has been applied to a wide range of colours. We’re left in a state where it’s not clear that there is even a knowledge itself. Colours and colour names blur together. Pandia in Latin referred both to a range of precious stones and a range of pigments and colours made from those stones.
Pandia omnia is an almost magical pigment that, as the omnia suggests, could have a huge range of colours. The line then “Days lose themselves in / pandia omnia and dip away / between the pinks and blues,” I read as pointing both to the passage of time in which all of these confusions unfold (pandia omnia is also a clear pun on “pandemonium”) and the role of the world in perpetrating this confusion. We can speak loosely of the sky being pink in sunrise and sunset and blue in the day, but the sky as any object is of an everchanging mix of colours. Trying to fix our colour names by reference to objects (which is the only option we have) is bound to lead to confusions as people see different aspects of objects, see objects at different times, or indeed see objects differently.
In the last three sentences, we return more to some sort of present scene. Alizarin is pigment from the roots of the madder plant ranging from orange to deep red; it’s a more accessible pigment given that madder is fairly common across much of Europe (though not, as far as I can tell, in England). Given that the pigment comes to the roots, we’re here I think not literally talking about the pigments being on the leaves, but rather the leaves having the colour of the pigment. So we’re talking autumn leaves, we’re thinking of the turning of the season. And since we’re so focused on colours and the production of colour that we are turning back and thinking of the colours of the natural world in terms of the manufacturing of those colours.
Gamboge is a yellow pigment from an Asian tree. So similar theme, although it’s possible we’re thinking of the fence as being painted with this pigment (rather than merely having a similar colour). In any case, both alizarin and gamboge have been used in painting, which will come back into play. Turquoise is one more play on this fluidity between colours, colour names, and the things which are used to produce colouring agents. So, yes, “turquoise is a stone,” but it’s also a colour, and it’s not just any stone but a precious stone, one often granted magical properties. And like all of these colouring agents it’s not one native to England, where this poem is clearly set, but something imported.
“Who did not notice those?” Here I’m assuming “those” refers to alizarin, turquoise, gamboge. We’re thinking of colours as having a kind of power, the ability to fascinate, to get people to spend vast amounts of time and resources to import the materials needed to create these colours for themselves, to figure out how to produce these agents and to do so. It’s worth calling attention to the fact that these efforts were not always nice or just, that we’re talking about centuries, millenia even, not only of trade but also of conquest. England and Newton acquired indigo through the East India Company, an almost cartoonishly evil agent of imperialism. The communion with colours we’re going through in this piece, a communion that ranges from the cerebral to the mystical, is one that the piece itself seems to point out is not without significant moral complexities.
And shapes. The tree. It shows what one could call
constraint. It bursts through rocks in calluses
that clog into a lump with several
branches lunging out of it, one knot-hole
and a stump. The thing has corners to it,
pockets, ledges, wedges, all chocked in with
lichen on them, found out by the sun that
stabs down from the right, detecting olive
green.
In an exchange in Plato’s Meno, Socrates, in trying to extract a definition of virtue from Meno, warms him up, gives an example of the kind of definition he is looking for, by forwarding a definition of shape. He says “shape is the only thing which always follows colours,” i.e. where one has colour there one has shapes, as a shape is no more and no less than patch of colour. We can see something along these lines here, as we transition from thinking about colours to thinking about shapes. Though it presented here abruptly, the dangling fragment “And shapes” occurring after a stanza break and in response to a rhetorical question, this thought has been building through the first stanza. There we moved more from thinking about colours and pigments in themselves to their occurrence in bounded forms in a present scene.
The two fragments “And shapes. The tree.” have the curious effect of lurching us out of and then back into the same scene. Although the grammatical continuity with the prior stanza is broken, we can presume the tree is an object by the indigo gate. What exactly is the relationship between “shapes” and “the tree”? It will soon become obvious that the tree is not one shape but an assemblage of a massive variety of shapes. Given the equation of shape and colour we’re working with, that suggests we’re also recognizing that the tree is not one colour but a huge variety of colours, though we will not engage this thought explicitly until the end of the stanza.
In what way does “it” (the tree as an abundance of shapes) show constraint? If shape is a bounding of colour, then it necessarily comes with constraints (its perimeter). In a down-to-earth reading, the tree itself is constrained: this is a gnarled tree growing among rocks. It is working with what it has and that isn’t very much. We might also note that the presentation of this tree in the poem is quite constrained. It is stuffed into the shortest main stanza (not counting the couplets in the codea) and is presented, though not in a received form, but with an intensity of internal rhymes and consideration of rhythm as to evoke the constraints of rhyme and meter. Likewise we’re in a much more imagistic mode here. We have left the complex rhetoric of the first stanza for the difficulties of sculpture or painting.
We should think not only of the constraints applying to the tree, but to those of the speaker and the reader. The confusion over colours of the first stanza comes in part from the confused transmission of colour expressions from speaker to audience (“confused transmission” both in the sense of a confusion itself being transmitted, as in the mistaken mediaeval list, and failures of transmission itself, as in the loss of perse.) Then there are the confusions of perception itself. Even though the tree is a static object, there is sudden and confused motions in its perception. It “bursts through rocks,” its branches lunge “out of it.” If it weren’t for its constraints, the rocks, the clog of callouses, the chocks (an object used to hold something in place) of lichen, the tree might become infinite in extent, but instead it has become this tangled, sharp thing, all corners.
It is clear that the poem will not and cannot provide an exact representation of the tree. We are not given the precise number of branches, nor the angles with which they lunge out of the stump. There is a gap between the tree the speaker has seen and the tree as described by the speaker and a gap there between the description as given and the description as understood. More deeply, there is a gap between the tree as perceived and the tree itself. In the least, this is a result of the partiality, the constraints of any perception of the tree: from a particular standpoint, at a particular time. There is a deeper ambiguity here about the nature of the tree itself, which the poem plays at with the sun that “stabs down from the right detecting olive / green.” Here the sun’s light is a violent, perceiving fire. (One thinks of Plato’s theory of vision in the Timaeus as a kind of divine fire emitted from the eyes.) And yet how seriously can we take “detecting” olive green? As if the tree could, in itself, be olive green apart from its being seen as olive green.
It is worth briefly noting here a comparison between the difficulties of poetic representation and that of sculptural and painterly representation that will return more explicitly as concerns of the poem. Here we can quote from Wassily Kandinsky’s Concerning the Spiritual In Art.
A material object cannot be absolutely reproduced. For good or evil, the artist has eyes and hands, which are perhaps more artistic than his intentions and refuse to aim at photography alone. Many genuine artists, who cannot be content with a mere inventory of material objects, seek to express the objects by what was once called “idealization.”
All representation, in language, in painting, in sculpture, in thought, is gestural, is a performance bounded in time and space. In writing, this becomes most obvious in phantom movements, movements which belong not to the perceived but to the perceiver, the lunging of the branches, for instance. In painting and sculpture, this gestural element is direct and literal: the visible path of a paint brush, the texture it leaves against the textured canvas, or the clear imprint of the sculptor’s thumb.
A realist artist might be tempted to mute, to hide, to erase those gestures, to work and rework the surface into an anonymous sheen. However clean the cover-up, we are left with a second-hand copy, an object, to prosecute a broadly Platonic argument, whose apparent fidelity and intelligence is more a stylistic effect than a genuine achievement. Leave reality to the scientist, to Isaac Newton. Granting this problem of representation, Kandinsky and the abstract artist retreat from reality into an inner, spiritual need. Langley, by contrast, recognizes the problem and pushes it farther. As we’ll see: Newton faces the poet’s dilemma.
In sixteen-thirty-three, when she was
twenty-five, on a creamy marble slab
in the south aisle, they drew Elizabeth
Havers. Did she have time to walk out past
a red house? Choose a brush? Paint a picket
white? Step on by? Turn round, look back, and shout
that she could see what it might mean? That that
was the place where she had been? She is a
whisper. Smoke and cream. What had she really
seen? She rolls her eyes and wears her shroud so
that it does not cover her lace cuff.
My brief archival dig ends with placing Elizabeth Haver as a woman who indeed died and was buried at twenty-five years old in 1633 in the Stockerston Church of St. Peter. Throughout this stanza we have a deliberate equivocation between Havers, her corpse, and the sculpture of her that is atop a slab in the church. Her life and death here are shrouded in mystery. In the text of the poem we have no indication of why we’re suddenly turning to this woman who died nearly four centuries ago. We are given snippets of her life just before her death, but these are framed as questions and the action itself is highly oblique. Nor is this a puzzle or an exercise in research; at least near as I can tell, there is nothing to uncover. Instead, we are left more profoundly with a mystery forever sealed, closed off by death.
Despite the funereal subject matter, there is a marked uptick in vim and fun in the stanza. The sentences get faster, the language more colloquial, the sonic play richer, the mood almost manic until the sudden deceleration of the last sentence, with its coy, polite silence. The action that hits us pell-mell in the rush of sentences picks up all the concerns of the first two stanzas — perception, communication, art — and the experience is of something of importance, something that is at the core of the poem, being lost, being suddenly take away. “She is a / whisper. Smoke and cream.” Heartbreaking stuff.
In these middle stanzas, the poem eases up. Although the narrative here is deliberately obscured, we can loosely follow it. How we’re getting here from the tree and the gate is somewhat obscure, so it might take a minute to get our bearing. The possibility that we’re walking through the gate and into the church to be confronted by Havers’ funerary statue at least offers to give us a reasonable frame narrative to hang the pieces together. But how is this movement developing our central topic?
We are here getting a new application of the problem of the constrained understanding in the moral and social realm. The statue of Elizabeth Havers on the surface poses a similar representational challenge as the tree, but deeper the personhood of Elizabeth Havers opens another layer. In understanding a person we are also seeking to understand the process and phenomenon of their understanding. This means that all of the epistemic difficulties we were having before exist not just between ourselves and our object, but within the object itself and between the object and the world. Here our questions concern not just what’s going on with Elizabeth, but what she thought or knew or realized. And there is always a danger here that the gaze will be returned, and then we’ll really be in trouble.
The
kylix has been cracked. The mend in it spoils
his cheek-piece and his mouth, but there is still
his eye, under the helmet’s rim, as he
stabs her from the right. She reaches up to
touch his chin. BC. Four-sixty. Killing
Penthesileia. It is his last and
only chance to stare at her. He does so
and he falls in love. Or is it lust or
scorn? Furious concentration? Don’t call
it blue. Not blue. The gate is indigo.
At this point, we can hear Hans Zimmer’s horn from Inception blaring as we go deeper into layers of fiction and representation. A kylix is an ancient Greek cup with a shallow bowl. You would have mythological scenes painted around the outside of the bowl and also inside the bowl. There apparently have been bits of Roman pottery found in Stockerton, so it’s possible that we are talking about a real kylix in the church or at least the vicinity. The basic story depicted runs like this. We’re in the middle of the Trojan war. Penthesileia is an Amazon warrior gone to fight on the side of the Trojans. She’s good at it, killing many Greeks, but not quite good enough. Achilles kills here. Depending on the telling, he either does fall or is claimed to have fallen in love with her.
In the broader scheme of the poem, this kylix is another object with a story lost to time. Part of it is physically lost to damage, and part of it is interpretively lost: we can’t quite tell what Achilles is thinking. (These are connected: given that it is the face that’s damaged, the crucial expression is obscured.) And our reading of the kylix is not self-contained, but is connected to the various tellings and iterations of the Penthesileia myth that might have inspired the kylix. The sudden interjection of the date of the cup’s construction draws extra attention to this construction. There is a painter’s mark on the cup, an intention behind it, but as with Elizabeth Havers that artistic thought is lost.
Note the recurrence of stabbing from the right. In the second stanza we had the sun’s light stabbing the tree from the right. So we have a clear linking of the sun and Achilles and the tree and Penthesileia. We can tentatively extend this link to include a link between Penthesileia and Elizabeth Havers—I’ll return to that next stanza—and also between the poet/speaker and Achilles. After all, it’s the looking here that’s violent and violating and the speaker (and, in fact, we the readers) have been doing little but looking.
In this context, the lack of Penthesileia’s perspective marks a conspicuous absence. We are primed to note this absence by the last stanza, where we spent all this time looking for Havers’ perspective on her death. Here we’re stuck in Achilles’ perspective and it’s quite a discomfiting one. Even if we take seriously the possibility that Achilles fell in love with this woman he has just killed, nowadays that is more likely to strike us as gross and ludicrous than romantic or heroic. And of course if we are in some metaphorical sense Achilles, then our confusion over these feelings is a confusion over our own feeling. The feeling itself is difficult, ambiguous, overdetermined.
We are recalled from the scene by “Don’t call / it blue,” which is a slick poetic trick. So far the “it” has been the feeling Achilles has towards Penthesileia, so we naturally read the “blue” as “indecent” or maybe “melancholic.” Read on its own, we can read it as a bit more of that polite coyness. With the rest of the sentences, it instead becomes the poem tapping us on a shoulder, saying “Wasn’t this poem supposed to be about a gate?” And it is, yes, but we do not pop all the way back to the gate, but instead return one layer up back to Elizabeth Haver.
She is engraved on her stone slab. The aisle
window moves its print onto her face. It
stresses her lips, almost rubbed out, and the
scoring of her thick curls. Her tear-ducts. The
look she is giving to her left, which might
be sad because she is remembering
what? Ten minutes of after-glow, when white
campion seemed distilled against grey grass,
the poppy in the crop, alight, red for
itself, and she stood stupefied by that,
hoping the hero had not seen her yet.
It is quite an interesting choice that we’re given a clear view of the statue of Elizabeth Havers here, only after we spent a stanza with it. The poem is pacing out its more descriptive, imagistic passages. This is also an appropriate place for it as, given the identification of Penthesileia and Havers, we’re moving from Achilles’ looking to what he was looking at. What description we’ve already had of the stone slab paints it gentle and indistinct: “smoke and cream.” That haziness, almost sfumato, continues here as we have the moving effect of light from a window, and with the “scoring of her thick curls” and “almost rubbed out” lips, we are again focused in on the material reality of the artworks and the gap between the physical representation and what is represented.
This is a gap we are very happy to take an imaginative leap over. In the poem, we do not make a clear distinction between the engraving, the statue, and Havers herself. And in this imaginative movement we’re running together these various layers of fiction. We’ve had Achilles stabbing to his right and now we have Havers giving a look to the left, as if meeting his (i. e. our) gaze. Our perspective though is nimble and we leap into her imagined memories. Here we are suddenly, after a time of muted colours, in Technicolor with white campion and, especially, red poppies.
We’re again in quite an ambiguous narrative situation. We’re in an after-glow. Something has happened, maybe sex given the word. But we’re also awaiting something else, dreading it. The hero has not seen her, hopefully, but he will, and then what? The stabbing, perhaps. We can loosely connect this vision to the hints of narrative in the third stanza. There Havers had a vision: “What had she really / seen?” We are here getting to see a bit of what she had seen, but neither of us really know what we are looking at. We stand stupefied.
We can delineate then two basic moments in this poem that we go back and forth between. There is a mystery, a spark. We are getting it here in its rawest form with the poppies, but we’ve been dealing with mysteries all the way through. And then there are two modes of reacting: there’s a dwelling in that bewilderment, being stupefied. And then there’s the the attempt to control and discipline the mystery, to sort things out. We’ve had the speaker trying to sort out the colour of the gate, the sun trying to sort out the colour of the tree, trying to sort out what happened with Havers, Achilles sorting out his own feelings.
The audience is thrown between these reactions, is discomfited by them. On the one hand, we’re readers, we have a right to know what’s going on. We can call the manager, i.e. we can stop reading at any time. And yet here satisfying that curiosity is made out to be so violent. Even if we wanted to drop out, to be satisfied in mystery, we are being led along by the speaker, as his accomplice. This trick of the poem only works because it is not really a trick at all. Life just is this way: you have to know. Never mind the consequences. Even if there is not anything to know at all, or no possibility of knowing it.
If she had lived she would be sixty-five.
Sir Isaac Newton, in a dark room, pins
his paper, sets his prism twenty-two
feet off, and asks a friend, who has not
thought about the harmony of tones in sounds
and colours, if he will mark each hue at
its most brisk and full. If he can, also,
postulate, along the insensible
gradation, the edges of the seven.
Where blue ends. Where the violet begins.
The pencil in hand. The hand and pencil
are suddenly intensely indigo.
If there is nothing to know, then we have to make something up. It is not some great revelation that the division of the spectrum of colours into seven or any number of colours is arbitrary, not obviously meaningful. Yet the presentation of that task here, in the bright language of Newton, manages to inject that task with a mythic significance. The ghost of Elizabeth Havers adds to this supernatural shine: we have had her vision of the red poppies, and now we are getting the colours themselves, shorn of shape.
The mystery of colour is this: that there is no visible world without colors — as we have seen, colour and shape are coeval — and yet colour is not some stable property of objects, but a shifting phenomenon of the light and the eye. We cannot sort out exactly what we want to say: philosophers are puzzling out colour to this day. And so we find ourselves, cannot help ourselves, speaking in ways that are confused. If we have an “insensible / gradation,” then there is no line between blue and indigo, indigo and violet. And yet language pulls us to “postulate” and then to seek out such a line. Likewise, do we really want to say that “The hand and pencil / are suddenly intensely indigo,” when it’s not like they’ve been dyed indigo, but merely bathed in indigo light. In such moments, we call things as we see them, knowing neither what we are seeing nor what we are saying. There is no clear line, perhaps no line at all, between observing and inventing.
The gate is indigo, but when they give
directions people call it blue. To lose
the way is to remember something of
the stump. But can anyone be ready
for the moment when the dusk ignites the
poppy? Or accept that the spectral hand
is his? That it’s he must keep the pencil
steady? Maybe everyone is dazzled
here by simultaneous death and love?
All of these troubles are not necessarily practical troubles in carrying out daily affairs. These confusions and mysteries are not the same thing as total imbecility: one can encounter them and dwell with them and still find one’s way to the gate. “Blue” is good enough. Yet this is not to discount these questions.
If we are to take the frame narrative in itself, we have someone following directions, presumably directions to the church. Along the way, perhaps a bit lost, they encounter and consider a runt of a tree, and on entering the church encounter a couple of pieces of art that sends them on an imaginative odyssey. Here we’re coming out of the reverie. What is crucial here is that that reverie was not a hallucination, not, I think, a supernatural encounter, but simply a poetically heightened extension of ordinary experience. The questions here concern ordinary experience. The dusk could ignite the poppies at any time and the responsibility of keeping the pencil steady, of detecting if not inventing distinctions, the boundaries between shapes, is the work of every moment.
Lime Kiln Sluice
a heron wades and
his deliberations are
proposing ripples
which reflect on
him, run silver
collars up his
neck, chuckle his
chin, then thin to
sting the silence
where he points
his beak.
His round
and rigid eye.
Perhaps he knows
he is caressed.
In a poem of bold choices, the boldest is not to end the poem here, but rather to extend the poem with a coda that could easily be an entirely separate poem. To puzzle at briefly what it is doing here, we can note it returns us even more intensely to the imagistic mode we’ve dipped into in the second stanza, replete with intense phantom motion.
We might say here that we are recapitulating all the moments of observation that have run throughout this poem. Certainly, the lyricism of the image at least equals the dusk igniting poppies. And like with our encounters with Havers and Penthesilea, this object looks back. And here there is no suggestion of violence to our looking, but a gentleness, a caress rather than a stabbing, an ease to the pencil which is not an answer to our questions but a living with them.