Pictures and Poems : Volume 9
In the British Museum by Thomas Hardy
Ozymandias by Percy Bysshe Shelley
When we were at junior school we had history books that asked us to pretend to be time travellers. We were invisible and unable to interact with the travelled-to-world. It worked well. I enjoyed making the imaginary leap. I’ve just been listening to Brian Cox explaining how forward time travel is possible (and once we’ve built rockets that can get close to the speed of light we can really start motoring). It would be one way so no coming back to cash in on what we learnt. I think I’d pass. I’ve spent most of my life travelling through time using books and buildings as my vehicles of choice. They work remarkably well. Unlike HG Wells’ Time Traveller or Marty McFly, I can be in several different zones simultaneously without much danger of committing an act that makes my existence impossible and causing a vortex in the space time continuum.
Old churches do it for me, from the humblest chapels to the mighty minsters. I like to sit and smell the wood and ancient stones and contemplate and sometimes pray, and often I can feel either the sense or presence of those who also sat and thought of time and the apostle Paul a century or two before. Not ghosts. Nothing physical or supernatural. Just ideas. But real. Real at least in idea form, and that’s a sort of reality.
I get it in galleries. I’m standing – me, yes me! – in the self same spot that Turner stood with brush in hand. Those are the marks he made. He’s present as much as I am. More so in some ways. In books the writer is with me, in the self-same room. I hear their voice. And the characters, the locations. Hardy doesn’t describe Egdon Heath to me, or Mellstock Church, he takes me there. I hear Clym Yeobright preaching or the hymns sung by the choir.
I don’t care to travel beyond my own country. I thought I would when time and funds were there but I don’t. Modern transport doesn’t appeal and I find plenty to interest me within an hour or two of home. And when I take the train to London I don’t get far from St Pancras where my two favourite buildings are: the British Library and the British Museum. The library an endless source of inspiration and reference but the museum sends me travelling like a temporal astronaut.
I lose all sense of time in there. I feel connected to everything both now and then. I’m in Bloomsbury in 2017 and Athens in 483 BC. I move along though Babylon, Egypt, Rome. I’m there (to a greater or lesser extent with each object) and the masons/carvers/sculptors are here. They are present in their work. ‘Look on my works ye tourists and say, “Wow! This is amazing!”‘
What time is it Dr Wolf? What time is it among the Elgin Marbles? Is it 5th century BC and the world that carved them and placed them on Parthanon pediments? Is it the early years of the nineteenth century as they are removed from the temple and shipped to Britain? Is it 1817 and they are on display? Is it now, the very present moment as I stand and gaze in troubled awe? Is it even earlier in time or legend when Lapiths fought Centaurs? And it is all of these, and more.
Poets have been drawn to this national treasure house. They’ve shared the feelings of wonder and doubts that question the presence of artefacts from other cultures, countries and civilisations sitting (beautifully safe, conserved and respected) in a country much further to the north. And they time travel too.
I’ve chosen just two; Thomas Hardy and Percy Bysshe Shelley. Between them they cover a range of thought and time but share a sense of awe and wonder.
In his poem Hardy creates (and partly adopts the persona of) a rustic some decades before his (Hardy’s) own time and places him in front of sculptures taken from Areopagus and sees only ‘ashen blankness’; a time stained stone from the base of a pillar. There’s a dialogue going on in the poem. Is there someone else in the museum with our rustic labourer? Maybe? Or maybe the dialogue is between an imaginary labourer around 1817 and the poet many years later. So we have a dislocation in time. At least two time zones. Add in ourself, in the present as we read, and we have three – all simultaneous. At which point the antiquity of the stone comes into focus. Not just from Ancient Greece but from Areopagus; a mighty rock in ancient Athens. And the rustic knows of the teachings of the apostle Paul; that he gave a sermon from the Areopagus and he knows it well. So well that it has a great significance for him. We can now add the time zone of Paul; a very specific time when he said that God does not live in objects made by man. Where has the rustic labourer learnt of Paul? The likely answer is either church or school. Or both. Many characters in Hardy’s works take church going and the lessons from the bible seriously which provides support for the church theory. Thus we have our labourer on a Wessex pew listening to the scriptures and transferring this knowledge to an ancient object before him in the museum and bringing them both alive. 
In a few lines of simple and apparently rational verse Hardy has got us travelling through time like a ball bearing in a pinball machine. And yet the poem seemingly follows a straightforward beginning, middle, end, straight line.
There are many reasons for loving the poem. Many perhaps more important than this. But existing in different moments simultaneously is an idea that appeals to me almost as much as Hardy’s revolutionary idea, in 1893, of having a working man enter the glorious portals of the British Museum to have a look. And significantly, to respect his thoughts.
In the British Museum
But as if you heard,
Parting your lips, and treading softly
As mouse or bird.‘It is only the base of a pillar, they’ll tell you,
That came to us
From a far old hill men used to name
Areopagus.’I know no art, and I only view
A stone from a wall,
But I am thinking that stone has echoed
The voice of Paul,‘Paul as he stood and preached beside it
Facing the crowd,
A small gaunt figure with wasted features,
Calling out loud‘Words that in all their intimate accents
Pattered upon
That marble front, and were far reflected,
And then were gone.
‘I’m a labouring man, and know but little,
Or nothing at all;
But I can’t help thinking that stone once echoed
The voice of Paul.’
by Thomas Hardy
My second British Museum poem is one of the most requested on Radio 4’s Poetry Please. Ozymandias is widely studied and loved by students and non students alike.
If anything the time zones and scales in this poem are even more complex. Here is a poem written about an object in the museum that was still on board ship bound for England when the poem was written. Thus the poem already (without making it obvious) extended into an unknown future as it left the poet’s pen. The past includes the following separate periods of time (and the list is by no means complete) : the discovery of the broken statue (widely believed to be The Younger Memnon statue of Ramesses II)* as a historic fact, the poet’s version of the discovery (including a fictional traveller from an antique land), the thousands of years that it remained undiscovered, the parts of the statue that remain lost in real life, the vast and trunkless legs of stone from the poem, the period of time when the statue was originally on public view, the carving of the statue, the reign of the semi-fictional king, Ozymandias and the reign of the actual king, Ramesses. Oh then there is the modern reader reading the poem in the present, the modern reader contemplating the poem later on over a cup of coffee and even the modern visitor to the British Museum doing what I did and standing before the very statue and reading the poem (which is conveniently included in the information plaque to one side). And I did say “Wow!” …several times.
Ozymandias
I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert… near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
‘My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!’
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away
Percy Bysshe Shelley
- * My photograph is not of the Young Memnon statue. I was so taken by suddenly being confronted by Ozymandias that I forgot to take the picture and I didn’t want to break from my rule of only using my own photographs in these posts.
The gardens are a different prospect altogether. By no means perfect but it’s easy to turn a blind eye to the attempts to turn the glorious herbal bed at Hall’s Croft into a “Four Humours plot”. The four humours being those identified by Hippocrates in the fifth century BC and largely of metaphorical reference by Shakespeare’s time: black bile, blood, phlegm and yellow bile. They’re supposed to relate to the 4 elements (Elizabethan science was well ahead of this) of earth, air, fire and water, and the over-riding dominant emotions (temperaments) of sanguine, choleric, phlegmatic and melancholic. There’s a powerful and persuasive argument that Shakespeare’s four great tragedies encapsulate each an element, a humour and a temperament. I wouldn’t mind if this idea was somehow developed instead of digging up a superb section of herbal garden and replacing it with a disappointing section of over-worked, cordoned off, neatly in its place and labelled, dullness. My four reactions are sanguine – it’ll get better if it’s allowed to grow, phlegmatic – well I suppose it could be worse, melancholic – this sadly seems to be the way things are done these days, and choleric – why the hell have they destroyed something wild and free for this contained little project of some history Johnny who can’t tell his goose quill from a ball-point? But ignoring that, and the twenty-first century habit of putting up dreadful willow sculptures, the gardens are truly wonderful.
For decades the gardens have been a blaze of colours; all of them variations on the traditional English cottage garden. And long may this continue. Like the plays and the poems you get more than you can possibly take in while presenting a glorious unity at the same time. Masses of juxtaposed colours, shapes, scents and textures sweep in and out of each other. At Anne Hathaway’s cottage this is taken further with the inclusion of fruits and vegetables: runner beans and peas and currant bushes. All that is lacking is a pig or two in the orchard and some bee hives. Instead of these we get the coaches depositing their hungry-for-culture crews who whisk around the gardens, take their selfies through the willow sculptures and line up for the series of mini-lectures that comprise a visit around the houses (none of which is as it was in Shakespeare’s day).
But step a turn away from the well-trodden path and you enter orchards that are even more glorious than the colourful beds. Here the glory is in neglect (they’re not neglected but rather allowed to be as they should be) and wildness. Only about 1 in a hundred visitors venture here and birdsong and butterflies delight the ear and the eye. The trees are knotty and twisted with age, some gloriously ruffed with mistletoe and hanging with fruits of former times: pears, apples, plums, greengages, damsons, sloes, quince all prosper and grow. No mower has been close, the grass left to grow into the hay that pigs would love. I’m lucky with the weather, vast acres of blue sky with the sort of cloud shapes that make you wish you’d brought your watercolours. The sun warms the grass and leaves fuelling the butterflies and bees and drifting the drowsy scent from blade, bough and ripening fruit.
Somewhere far away the sound of a primary schoolyard at play – games we played; tig, hopscotch and closer but separate the shuffle of tourists doing the round of garden, house, shop and tearoom. I wasn’t expecting this hidden place, this very Eden just fifty yards from the honeypot. I love Shakespeare. No matter what they do to him in packaging, production, commercialism or historical accuracy the love remains. It’s in the words and you can carry those around with you, hold them in your hand or your head; speak them through your own mouth which must, and does, make them your own. He says it better than we can and seems to have something for every thing we’ve done or felt.
There are more glories beyond the orchards, so many superb places for students and lovers of the plays to rehearse and perform sections, scenes, whole acts, entire plays. Someone (quite pointlessly in my view) has stuck some little quotations on bench and tree and minor sculptors have been licensed to lessen the view. Less is more you curators. Give us flowering borders and rugged orchards and houses we can look round and see for ourselves. We don’t all see Shakespeare the same way nor wish to visit him on the same terms.
We know very little about Shakespeare. Much of what goes for fact is supposition and there is continued doubt (not shared by me) as to whether he actually wrote the works for which he is famed. Despite this a multi billion dollar world wide industry has grown up around him. We know plenty (perhaps too much for some) about George Gordon. He lived his life in the full blaze of publicity, enjoyed his notoriety, caused scandal with an ease many a modern bad boy would envy. To put their contemporary fame in perspective. Shakespeare was about as well known in his time as film maker Ken Loach is today. Widely respected, admired even, but quite able to walk down the street without being pestered. Byron’s fame on the other hand would put him on a par with Lady Diana. His every utterance published, every move remarked upon and never out of the public eye.
He was labelled by his lover, Lady Caroline Lamb (imagine a cross between a young Liz Hurley and JK Rowling) as “mad, bad and dangerous to know”. He was quite the boyo!
In this simple verse dedicated to his dog we see so many of the qualities we would like to find in anyone we would call friend. When I go to Newstead, which is often, I take time to read the verse anew. It’s a lovely place and a first class day out but there isn’t a great deal to tell you about who the poet was; particularly when the buildings are closed. The simple grave and the simple verse (and dedication) give an insight into the man and provide some answers to why he was so incredibly popular.
Like W.B. Yeats she had written about the place where she would come to rest. Her poetry is at its best once she found the voice that gave expression to the mental torment. Her end seemed, as Germaine Greer has said, inevitable. I didn’t shed a tear as I read November Graveyard, with no-one around it seemed a decent thing to do, but I’m almost crying as I type these words the morning after.
I’ve never wandered too closely to the man himself. From what I know I think I’d find him troublesome. He was demanding, divorced from reality and never washed. He had a band of loyal friends who let him be what he was and what he was was difficult ( and not a little smelly). My admiration is huge but its mostly for what he did rather than for who he was. I’d gladly invite Keats or Stevie Smith or Thomas Grey to my imaginary dinner party of poets. I think I’d pass on Tennyson. But he was a wild and captivating man to look at. The hanging locks, the grizzled beard, the face like a thousand crags and huge Ulster coats and a hat you could seek on the top of a crumpetty tree.
Here we have in miniature Ireland’s response to Thereau’s Walden. The desire to leave behind the urban sprawl (pavements grey), industrialisation and technological phenomenon of the modern world and to live in a hut. To provide for oneself through nature’s bounty supplemented by careful husbandry. The call of the pure is similar to that felt by the English Romantic poets a century before. That truth and beauty can be discovered through a return to nature. But what truth? What beauty?
Whether Yeats would find peace and truth among vast crowds tuning in and dropping out is a moot point; but there is a political link. Here is a country which for centuries has been under the oppressive yoke of Great Britain finding an appetite to resist, to assert its independence and its sense of its own identity. Ireland had been looked down upon by its supposed colonial masters. The west of Ireland was a land of poverty, famine and despair. And yet it is to here that the poet wishes to escape to find fulfilment and to discover who he really is. The poet asserts that far from its portrayal, Sligo and the West is a place from which to build a nation. The poem is political. The first three words are the language of revolution and Yeats wants nothing less. “I will arise”. Here is what we are fighting for and where I go I’d like you to follow. Yeats is creating a new vision of Ireland wrought out of its rich tradition of story and song.
A simple post.
Each garden left behind as move by move
One way of doing it is to put yourself in the footprints of the poet and go to the place that inspired the verse and see if something rubs off. Some are famous; Lulworth Cove for John Keats’ Bright Star, Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, St Giles Church (and of course churchyard), Stoke Poges for Gray’s Elegy, Westminster Bridge as captured by Wordsworth in September 1802. I’d like to visit some or all or those but am keen to add a few lesser known spots. Ted Hughes is well enough known and his poem ‘Pike’ is still an occasional visitor to English classrooms. Until I listened to poet Steve Ely and read Ian MacMillan’s book where Ely takes him to the very place, I’d always presumed it was set somewhere in the Calder Valley. Hughes was always described as coming from Mytholmroyd (pronounced my-them-royd). It took Ely to point out that his formative years were spent among the pits and engine sheds of South Yorkshire. The clues are in the verses. It says the pool is 50 yards across and next to a monastery. Not many of either up Calderdale.
I want to find Laughton Pond. The dapper hipster in the abbey shop has never heard of it and there’s no-one else around so I make my own way. Get to within (what I later discover to be) 10 yards of the pond, take a wrong turning and head off entirely in the wrong direction. There is a pleasure in getting lost, in going wrong, that often leads to discoveries, but I’m keen to reach my goal so I ask a man who seems the part. Camouflage pants, heavy boots, olive green tee shirt and a fine arm of the tattooist’s art. He’s even got a dog with him. South Yorkshire mining towns are a mix of (once) industrial urban, and the surrounding fields. The grim and the glorious. Many who spent their working lives hundreds of feet below ground loved to spend as much of the rest as they could in the open air. The pits have long gone but the tradition continues. No sweet, liberal-minded conservationists here. They’d often have a gun, a jack russell or a couple of lurchers and a set of nets and snare wire. They knew the countryside through hunting in it. They know their way around. But they might not want to share the knowledge with one who started out that way but has grown a little bit Greenpeace, a little bit academic, a little bit like the sort of nonce who wanders around looking for the exact spot where a poet sat and fished seventy or more years ago. He sends me altogether the wrong way. But not out of spite or some secret pleasure in wasting my time. He knows another pond and thinks this is what I’m looking for. The other pond turns out to be two miles away. If only I’d thought to add a map to my packed lunch.
I find it, the other pond that is. It takes an hour or so because I get distracted; make a few detours, find myself among more butterflies than I’ve seen since my childhood, a trespass into private woodland, some further advice from a wobbly cyclist with a spliff to guarantee the wrong direction, the avoidance of a bull and the every now and then presence of buzzards soaring, mewing and screaming. By the time I get back to the abbey I’m fair tuckered. The hipster has now been joined by a more grounded mate.
Almost glassy still at first and then blubbed with rising bubbles, the scatter of flies dancing on the surface, some ducks and perfect peace. Just the sound of the waterfall that marks the outflow, a slow swish of breeze in the trees and intermittent birdsong.
