AUTUMN

epigraph: Samuel Palmer, letter to John Linnell, from Life and Letters of Samuel Palmer, by A.H. Palmer.

'The clouds. . . pastures': Isaac Barrow, Sermons on the Creed.

'vegetable gold': "The wall-flowers . . . rise in vegetable gold" . . . John Langhorne, The Fables of Flora.

'Thoughts on RISING . . . Shoreham': Samuel Palmer, a letter quoted in A.H. Palmer's Life and Letters. . .

'Excess more abundantly excessive': Also a letter quoted from above.

'from a leaf . . . planet': A.H. Palmer, himself, from the Life and Letters . . .

'cherub-turtles': Christopher Smart, Hymns.

'Shining Ones': "For in this land the Shining Ones commonly Walked" - John Bunyon, The Pilgrim's Progress.

'Most Glittering, Most Rich, Most Strange': I remember this being quoted from Gustave Moreau in Time magazine, but have been unable to trace the quotation.

'The white Owls': I must thank Miss Barbara Jones for taking me to this grottoesque folly. It is also fully described in her book Follies & Grottoes.

'Pope's grotto': This description of Pope's grotto is arranged, as apparently was, in a style which could only be termed Formal Willy-Nilly, and comes from Pope's gardener, J. Serle—A Plan of Mr. Pope's Garden.

[colors]: These optical phenomena are explained fully in M. Minnaert's Light and Color in the Open Air, a book more useful for poets than painters these days.

'The ancient trees': These trees grow in George Macdonald's Phantasies.

'Hercynian': Pliny - "In the Hercynian forests of Germany we have heard there are strange birds whose feathers shine like fire in the night."

'vine said to entangle': Hutchinson's Popular Botany, by A.E. Knight and Edward Step, has a section devoted to phosphorescence and luminescence in plants. Among other things they mention "Cipo, a South American Vine, said to be so highly luminous, that, when injured, it seems to bleed streams of living fire. Large animals have been noticed standing among its crushed and broken tendrils, dripping with the gleaming fluid, and surrounded by a seeming network of fire."

'Of Certaine White Nights. . .': In a letter to John Linnell quoted by A.H. Palmer in Life and Letters . . . Samuel Palmer, in speaking of "the Night of Michelangelo," writes "If the Night could get up and walk . . . "

'did marvellously supple the ground': Samuel Purchas, Purchas his Pilgrimage.

'We also came upon one tree . . .': "So we went through the aspens at the base of the Cliffs, their round leaves reflecting the lingering twilight on the one side, the waxing moonlight on the other." Thoreau, Journals.

[section 4, first blocks]: William Stukeley's description of his Stonehenge "Ortchard" comes from a letter written by him to Samuel Gale quoted in Family Memoirs of the Rev. William Stukeley.

[section 4, second blocks]: Anecdotes, by the Rev. Joseph Spence.

[section 4, third blocks]: Alexander Pope, Guardian, No. 173, 1713.

'Unless the eye . . . of the sun': "Unless the eye contained the substance of the sun how could we ever look on the light?" Goethe, Zahme Xenein.

'The Apple-Tree . . . ': Euripides, Hippolytus (tr. Gilbert Murray).

Paradisi in Sole . . . : This is the punning title of a book by Thomas Parkinson (Park-in-sun).

'Paradys Erthely': Chaucer, The Romaunt of the Rose.

[section 6, beginning]: This is adapted from M. Minnaert's Light and Color in the Open Air.

THE WHITE CLOUD: The title of a picture by Samuel Palmer - its capitalization is an imitation of the way he wrote titles to paintings in his letters.

Tortula ruralis: Geoffrey Grigson's An English Farmhouse and its Neighborhood describes these bright clumps of moss that Palmer painted so exquisitely.

'a country where there is no night': see epigraph to the Autumn section.

~~

"The Green Man" of the title is not a poetic metaphor, merely, but is still to be seen in England. It is not uncommon for pubs or inns to be called by his name, a hold-over from times when he was a current legend and was deeply associated with Robin Hood, and the Green Knight in Gawain and the Green Knight. But he is most often to be found, today, as the face with sad, heavy-lidded eyes occupying the corbel of an arch in churches. There, he has branches growing out of either side of the mouth, or is bearded in leaves with more foliage springing from the forehead, or is garlanded.

As King of the May, or Jack-in-the-Green, he has a persistent history that can be traced back to May Day celebrations throughout Northern and Central Europe. Geoffrey Grigson writes that traditionally "on May Day in the village plays and ceremonies he was sacrificed dying for all the death of the plants in winter." In former times he was also marched in the London Lord Mayor's Day Parade enclosed in a wooden framework on which leaves were clustered and from which came explosions of fireworks. Chimney sweeps paraded beneath the same pyramidal frameworks on May Day until the nineteenth century. One imagines them coming like small boxwood topiary, crackling and sparkling through the streets.

Lewis Spence adds a less typical, later variant: "I have seen him at South Queensferry, on the southern shores of the Firth of Forth, where he is know as the 'Burry Man', a boy on whose clothes large numbers of burrs or seed-cases have been so closely sewn that he presents the appearance of a moving mass of vegetation."

He is also seen, of course, in the guise of Arcimboldo's "portraits" of the seasons or as the fanciful Seventeenth Century Gardener pictured in herbals and gardening books in a finery of flowers and of vegetables. Or, the reverse side of a coin, as the Mandrake - a plant forming itself in the shape of man. The hand that seems to sprout leaves at its wrist and is used in this book is a pseudo-mandrake - actually a radish. Its nineteenth century engraver, copying a seventeenth century painting of this miraculous radish, was, perhaps, both over-credulous and over- exuberant. Not only are there illusionistic finger joints, but a thumb-nail as well. The World of Wonders, No. 3, also mentions "another radish, exactly resembling a human hand, in the possession of Mr. Bisset, secretary to the museum at Birmingham, in 1802. He declared in his letter that the fingers were quite perfect, and that a large sum had been offered for it and refused."