His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands

"The Oak," observes Mr. Gilpin, "is confessedly the most picturesque tree in itself, and the most accommodating in composition. It refuses no subject, either in natural, or in artificial landscape. It is suited to the grandest, and may with propriety be introduced into the most pastoral. It adds new dignity to the ruined tower, and Gothic arch; it throws its arms with propriety over the mantling pool, and may be happily introduced even in the lowest scene."

From Sylvan sketches; or, A companion to the parks and the shrobbery: with illustrations from the works of the poets (1825) by Elizabeth Kent

This quote about landscape by William Gilpin, influential eighteenth century writer on the Picturesque, is an excuse to mention two books by Elizabeth Kent. This one, Sylvan Sketches, is a guide to trees and it was her follow-up to Flora domestica, or, The portable flower-garden: with directions for the treatment of plants in pots and illustrations from the works of the poets (1823). I've always loved the idea of plant dictionaries based on quotes from poetry and years ago tried to compile one myself, in a vain attempt to lodge in my brain botanical knowledge that would enliven family walks and impress my wife when we visited garden centres. Sadly it failed, as I was always more interested in the poets than the plants. You would be hard pressed to beat Kent's two books though - they are delightful. And what makes them especially interesting is that she was part of the Cockney School, fully conversant with contemporary poets like Keats, Shelley and John Clare, whose work she quotes extensively. Kent was the sister-in-law of Leigh Hunt and worked very closely with him, leading to some contemporary gossip (see Daisy Hay's Young Romantics).      

Sir Philip Sidney's Oak, Patrick Nasmyth, c. 1820s (V&A) 

There is of course plenty to say about the oak tree, for example

• She refers to the way poets celebrated an oak planted at Penshurst on the day of Sir Philip Sidney's birth. 'That taller tree which of a nut was set, / At his great birth where all the muses met' (Ben Jonson). Kent says that the Sidney oak 'has since been felled, it is said by mistake : would it be impossible to make a similar mistake with regard to the mistaker?' In fact the oak was older than Sidney and was still going strong when Kent was writing her book. Thomas Packenham included it in his enjoyable survey Meetings with Remarkable Trees (1996), but it died twenty years later. Also on the subject of Sidney and trees, see Rebecca Solnit's negative take which I discussed in a post back in 2011. 

• Another thing I once discussed on this blog, was the references to trees, including oaks, in Virgil's Eclogues. Elizabeth Kent quotes his other poems, The Aeneid and The Georgics, in Sylvan sketches. 'Stretching his brawny arms, and leafy hands; / His shade protects the plains, his head the hills commands' (John Dryden's translation).

• She also includes some lovely lines from 'The Floure and the Leafe', then thought to be by Chaucer: 'And to a pleasant grove I gan passe, Long er the bright sunne uprisen was : / In which were okes great, streight as a line, / Under the which the grasse so freshe of hew, / Was newly sprong, and an eight foot or nine / Every tree well fro his fellow grew, / With branches brode, laden with leves new, / That sprongen out agen the sunne-shene, / Some very red, and some a glad light green.

You can read the text of Sylvan Sketches (an 1831 edition) on the Internet Archive).

The Fountain of Arethusa

 There is sweet music in that pine tree's whisper...

- Theocritus, Idyll 1, trans. Anthony Verity

Last week I was in Syracuse, the home of Theocritus and, by extension, pastoral poetry. The first of his Idylls begins with two comparisons of nature and music. The words above are spoken in the poem's opening line by Thyrsis, praising the music of a goatherd's pan pipes. The goatherd replies 'shepherd, your song sounds sweeter than the water tumbling / over there from the high rock.' Thyrsis is persuaded to sing The Sufferings of Daphnis, the lament of a dying Sicilian cowherd (the reasons for his death are left mysterious). I have described here before Virgil's references to Daphnis in his Eclogues, and also the ancient novel Daphnis and Chloe, although in that story Daphnis tends goats on Lesbos. Re-reading Theocritus after visiting Sicily reminded me that many of his poems are set in the wider Greek world, although Idyll 16, is addressed to the tyrant of Syracuse, Hieron II. Both Idyll 16 and Idyll 1 refer to Arethusa, a spring that you can still visit on the island of Ortygia (the old centre of Syracuse). It is just be the sea and walled in to create a pond inhabited by fish and ducks.  

 

In Greek mythology, Arethusa was a nymph who fled from her home in Arcadia, emerging eventually as a fresh water fountain on Ortygia. The predatory male in this story was Alpheus, a river god, who pursued her until she prayed to be transformed into a cloud. But Alpheus wouldn't let up and, perspiring with fear, she turned into a stream and flowed through the sea until she reached safety in Syracuse. Ovid called her Alpheius - the name of a Greek river (it is said that a wooden cup thrown into the Alfeiós will eventually turn up in the Spring of Arethusa). Virgil alludes to this story when Aeneas reaches Sicily: 'an island lies over against wave-washed Plemyrium, / stretched across a Sicilian bay: named Ortygia by men of old. / The story goes that Alpheus, a river of Elis, forced /a hidden path here under the sea, and merges / with the Sicilian waters of your fountain Arethusa.' Virgil addresses his tenth Eclogue to Arethusa and refers to the story of Daphnis told by Theocritus, relocating the setting from Sicily to (an imaginary) Arcadia.

John Martin, Alpheus and Arethusa, 1832

 

Unsurprisingly Arethusa gets frequently mentioned in later pastoral poetry, right up to Wordsworth, who wonders in The Prelude whether 'that fountain be in truth no more'. Milton had referred to it in his elegy Lycidas, along with Mincius, a river in Italy that features in Virgil's Eclogue 7. 'O fountain Arethuse, and thou honour'd flood, / Smooth-sliding Mincius, crown'd with vocal reeds, / That strain I heard was of a higher mood.' But Samuel Johnson was not impressed with poetry of this kind. 'It is not to be considered as the effusion of real passion; for passion runs not after remote allusions and obscure opinions. Passion plucks no berries from the myrtle and ivy, nor calls upon Arethuse and Mincius, nor tells of rough satyrs and fauns with cloven heel. Where there is leisure for fiction there is little grief.'

Under the trees, where the light air stirs the shadows

I once wrote for myself a guide to the trees and plants in Virgil's Eclogues, drawing on the Clarendon Press commentary by Wendell Clausen.  I won't bore you with the whole thing, but will give here a brief summary to indicate how these details help create a landscape for the ten pastoral poems. Virgil's Arcadia is more artificial than the Sicily in which Theocritus set his Idylls, but I think this makes it all the more rewarding to try to picture the details of his settings.  In the course of the poems Virgil refers to both Greek and Italian places; it could be said that the Eclogues are partly set in the North Italian countryside near Mantua, where the poet grew up, and partly, overlaid on this, in an ideal, pastoral Greece of the mind. 

Tityrus and Meliboeus in the 5th century Vergilius Romanus

Eclogue One

The first Eclogue begins under the cool shade of a beech tree.  Meliboeus, exiled from his farm after the land confiscations that followed the Battle of Philippi, encounters Tityrus, playing his reed pipe and teaching the woods to repeat his song 'Fair Amaryllis'.  I have described this scene before, in a post that goes on to talk about the reappearance of Tityrus in Paul Valéry’s ‘Dialogue of the Tree’ (1943).  Virgil's beech woods would not have been dense, since the hills would need to have allowed grazing to take place.  Meliboeus has been driving goats through the hazel thickets and cannot let them remain to graze on the bitter willow and clover.  He pictures Tityrus, recently freed, happy on his farm, with bees in the willow boundary hedge and wood pigeons and turtle doves in the tops of the elms.  Tityrus takes pity on Meliboeus and invites him to stay the night for a meal of apple, cheese and chestnuts.  The poem ends with the sun setting and the mountains casting lengthening shadows.

Eclogue Two

It is the heat of the day and the sun is driving cattle into the shade and lizards into thorn thickets.  The shepherd Corydon seeks the shade of a beech plantation to contemplate his thwarted passion for the handsome boy Alexis.  The harvesters enjoy a refreshing pottage but Corydon trails after Alexis in the heat, his hoarse voice accompanied by the cicadas.  He imagines a life together with Alexis, herding kids with switches of green mallow.  He offers him gifts: a reed pipe made of hemlock stalks, two roe deer, a garland created by the nymphs, a simpler offering of his own: quinces, chestnuts, plums and branches of laurel and myrtle.  The sun goes down and Corydon thinks of his own half-pruned vines.  He decides that if Alexis rejects him, he can always find another love.

Eclogue Three

The setting for this singing match is an old beech plantation.  The judge, Palaeomon, remarks on the beauty of the wider landscape: crops growing, orchards full of fruit and woodlands in leaf.  The two shepherds sing of various imaginary loves.  In the course of their songs, Menalcus likens his feelings for Amyntus to the way crops love the rain, goats love the arbitus tree and breeding herds love the willow; Damoetus describes a love-sick bull who is pining away even though he is surrounded by vetch to eat.  The contest is declared a draw and Palaeoman asks them to stop their songs, because the meadows have had their fill.

Eclogue Four

This fourth poem is not set in a landscape, its subject is politics - probably the Pact of Brundisium between Anthony and Octavian.  Virgil excuses himself for leaving his pastoral theme, saying that not everyone likes the 'tamarisk' and that he will now sing a 'forest'.  He evokes a Golden Age that will come with the birth of a child (possibly the future child of Antony and Octavia), when grapes will hang from thorn trees and honey will be secreted by the oak trees.  Soil will need no harrowing, vines will need no pruning and - a detail that sounds rather less appealing - sheep will grow their wool in various bright colours.

Eclogue Five

Menalcus, the older of the singing shepherds in Eclogue Three, meets Mopsus and suggests that they sit down in a grove of hazel and elm.  But Mopsus has an alternative to sitting 'under the trees, where the light air stirs the shadows,' and proposes a cave, its entrance hanging with wild vines.  He wants to share a song that he had inscribed onto a beech trunk (it has been pointed out that the song is rather long to have been written out in full on a tree...)  He sings of the death of Daphnis, mourned by Nature so that where once there were fields of barley there now grew only darnel and wild oats, whilst violets and narcissi were succeded by thistle and thorn.  Menalcus then sings his own elegy for Daphnis, saying that he will be praised as long as boars love the heights, fish love streams, cicadas drink dew and bees suck thyme.

Eclogue Six

In this poem the god Silenus sings to two shepherd boys so beautifully that the oak trees bow their heads.  Among the myths he recounts is that of Pasiphaë, wandering in search of the bull who rests under the ilex among soft hyacinths.  The bull is described as pale, pallentis, a word that may represent the greenish yellow of summer grass.  Silenus tells of Phaeton's sisters, transformed into tall alders after lamenting his death on the banks of the Eridanus.  He sings all the songs that Apollo once composed and made the laurels along the river Eurotus learn.  It was at Eurotus that Apollo mourned the loss of Hyacinthus.  Finally evening comes and the young shepherds leave for home to count their sheep.

Eclogue Seven

The narrator is Meliboeus, from Eclogue One, who remembers being approached one day by Daphnis when he was busy protecting his myrtles from frost damage.  Daphnis persuaded him to go down to the river, fringed with reeds and the sacred oak, a-drone with bees.  There they witnessed a singing contest between Corydon and Thyrsis.  Corydon longed for a nymph sweeter than thyme and fairer than pale ivy.  He sang of the beautiful pastoral landscape: springs, soft grass, arbitus trees, vines, chestnuts and juniper bushes.  He concluded by listing plants associated with the gods and heroes but saying that above these is the hazel, loved by Phyllis; Thyrsis in turn said that if only his lover Lycidas were with him more often, the ash and pine would mean nothing to him.

Eclogue Eight  

This is another singing match in which the shepherd Damon laments his lost love while leaning against the trunk of an olive tree (or possibly on an olive-wood staff, like the one owned by Polyphemus in the Odyssey).  He sings of a world gone awry, of alders that bear sweet narcissus and tamarisks that shed tears of amber.

Eclogue Nine

The landscape here is that of the first Eclogue, and the conversation is between Lycidas and Moeris, a dispossessed landowner who is suffering the indignity of looking after the new owner's goats.  Lycidas thought that the land, which stretches down to a river where beeches grow, had been saved by the poetry of Moeris's friend.  But poetry wasn't sufficient to spare this countryside; the beeches by the river have their tops broken off.  The two men recall various poems, including one addressed to Galatea, which I have referred to here before.  Seamus Heaney translated this and in his version the grotto of Cyclops is an undermined riverbank with swaying poplars and vines in thickets 'meshing shade with light.'  Lycidas wants to hear more but Moeris is in no mood to continue.

Eclogue Ten

In this last poem Virgil himself appears in Arcadia, surrounded by his goats.  He sings of his friend Gallus, who was lying love sick under a crag, while the laurels and tamarisks wept for him, when Pan, stained with the juice of elderberries, arrived with Sylvanus, wearing a coronet of fennel and Madonna lilies.  Pan told Gallus not to weep over his love, but Gallus, inconsolable, vowed to live alone in the forest or by wandering in the mountains.  Virgil says that he hopes this song will not displease Gallus, for whom he expresses a love that is growing hourly, like alders shooting up in the spring.  He notices a chill in the air, under the shade of a juniper tree, so he gathers together his goats and heads for home.   

From pastoral ruin to pastoral ruin

The amphitheatre, Caerleon, August 2014

In Wales last summer we visited the remains of Caerleon, the City of the Legions.  Charlotte Higgins stopped there too in her journey round Roman Britain, Under Another Sky, and describes it in a wonderful chapter on 'Wales and the West' that she structures around the life of archaeologist Mortimer Wheeler.  His illustrious career began at Wroxeter, working in the summers before the First World War on the old Roman town of Uriconium.  Wilfred Owen, who wrote 'Uriconium: An Ode' in 1913, was fascinated by these ruins and probably saw Wheeler digging there.  Higgins wonders if the poet might have done something related to archaeology himself if he had survived the war.  Owen missed out on UCL where he would have been an undergraduate contemporary of Tessa Verney, who married Wheeler in 1912 and became a prominent archaeologist in her own right.  It was she who led the excavation of the impressive amphitheatre at Caerleon.  Ten years later, in 1936, the Wheelers were at Maiden Castle (which is where, years ago, I took the photograph of a line in the grass that I has served as a background for this blog).  Mortimer Wheeler left temporarily for a trip to the Levant and on his way back, flicking through a paper in Paris, came upon his wife's obituary.  The shock of her sudden death is described out of sequence in Wheeler's memoirs, alongside an account of his traumatic experiences at Passchendaele.  Of the five student archaeologists at Uriconium, Wheeler had been the only one to make it home from the war.  Back at Maiden Castle he resumed work and uncovered a collection of graves.  It seemed to him that he had found an ancient war cemetery.  Surely, he wrote, 'no poor relic in the soil of Britain was ever more eloquent of high tragedy.'

This chapter of Under Another Sky traces other connections between war and poetry and ruins: through A. E. Housman for example, Wheeler's classics tutor at UCL, whose book A Shropshire Lad was popular with soldiers in the trenches.  In his poem 'On Wenlock Edge' the wind blows over the land, indifferent to history, while the Romans who once stood there 'are ashes under Uricon.'  The Romans themselves saw that time would eventually leave nothing behind but shattered walls.  Charlotte Higgins quotes Book 8 of The Aeneid in which Aeneas and his companions, survivors of the Trojan War, encounter a king who shows them the ruins of ancient buildings and the wooded hills on which Rome will one day rise.  In these lines, 'Virgil is giving the topography of Augustan Rome a numinous aetiology, suffusing its everyday modernity with the mythical.'  The king leads Aeneas through what will be, in Virgil's time, the centre of the city. ''Everywhere they saw herds of cattle lowing in the Roman forum and the smart Carinae'. Virgil lets time collapse here, such that for a moment his contemporary readers would have been given the head-spinning image of cattle roaming the streets of their own busy city - a kind of double exposure, past and present in the same frame.  Reading these lines in the twenty-first century, there is a different frisson again: the oleander- and cypress-fringed Forum of our day is once more empty but for tourists and old stones ... Time has come full circle: from pastoral ruin to pastoral ruin.'

The Forum, Rome, April 2014

Like a crystal flood

The story of Acis and Galatea is rooted in the landscape of Sicily.  When the sea-nymph sees her lover killed by a great rock, thrown by the jealous Cyclops Polyphemus, she transforms his blood into the river Acis. Polyphemus tries to lure Galatea away from the sea with descriptions of life on the island.  'Here there are bays, and here slender cypresses, / Here is sombre ivy, and here the vine's sweet fruit / Here there is ice-cold water which dense-wooded Etna / Sends from its snows - a drink fit for the gods.'  These lines are given him by Theocritus in Idyll 11 (trans Anthony Verity), whilst in Virgil's ninth Eclogue the Cyclops tells her 'Coloured spring is here.  The river banks are spangled / with flowers of many hues.  Above my grotto a silvery / Poplar sways, and vines cast a shifting lace of shadow.' (trans. C. Day Lewis).

Nicholas Poussin, Landscape with Polyphemus, 1648

Landscape imagery is used in a different way in Ovid's Metamorphoses, where Polyphemus climbs to the apex of a hill on a spur jutting out into the sea and sings in praise of Galatea, listing her qualities in terms of the beauties of nature.  She is

whiter than the snowy columbine

a sweeter flower than any in the meadows 

taller and more stately than alder

more radiant than crystal

friskier than a tender kid

smoother than shells polished by the sea

more welcome than sun in winter or summer shade

more choice than apples

lovelier to see than the tall plane trees

more sparkling than ice

sweeter than ripe grapes

softer than swansdown or creamy cheese

fairer than a watered garden

But also

wilder than an untamed heifer

harder than an ancient oak

more treacherous than the sea

tougher than willow-twigs or white vine branches

as immovable as the rocks

more turbulent than a river

vainer than the much-praised peacock

fiercer than fire

harsher than harrows

more truculent than a pregnant bear

deafer than the waters

crueler than a trodden snake

What Polyphemus most regrets however, is her ability to outrun him, for she is 'swifter than the deer, driven by loud barking, swifter even than the winds, and the passing breeze'.

Claude Lorrain, Landscape with Acis and Galatea, 1657

As you can see above, Claude and Poussin both based beautiful paintings on the myth, one a view looking out to sea, the other looking back into the island's rocky interior.  Acis and Galatea are small figures in the foreground and Polyphemus is barely distinguishable from the landscape.  In Poussin's painting his back merges into the rocks where he sits, turned away from the lovers, playing his flute.  In Claude's, the Cyclops is barely visible - you can just glimpse him (right) sadly watching from the wooded slope, his view of the lovers obscured by the sheet they have put up to afford them some privacy.  Of course not all artists put emphasis on the landscape and Poussin himself did a version with additional cherubs and embracing lovers in which Polyphemus looks on like the sad guy at a particularly riotous party.

It was at a hunting party that Jean-Baptiste Lully's opera Acis et Galatée saw its first performance in 1686.  Elaborate artificial sets of the kind he had previously specialised in were no longer an option now that he was out of favour with Louis XIV (who had become increasingly religious and less tolerant of Lully's openly homosexual lifestyle).  It is tempting to imagine this being successfully performed with very little scenery, perhaps even outside amid 'natural' scenery.  After Lully there are a few more steps in the operatic story before we get to Handel's Acis and Galatea.  There was an English version by John Eccles and P.A. Motteux in 1701, which depressingly included 'a subplot concerned with the quarrel of rustic couple Roger and Joan, introduced to “make the piece the more dramatical.”'  Then came Giovanni Bononcini's Polyfemo (1702) and an Italian version by the young Handel himself, Aci, Galatea e Polifemo (1708).  Ten years later Handel had moved to England and was employed by James Brydges, 9th Baron Chandos, the 'Apollo of the Arts', and it was for him that Acis and Galatea, was composed, with a libretto by John Gay (aided by two more poets, John Hughes and Alexander Pope).

Acis and Galatea was first performed on a summer's day at Cannons, the house Brydges was then still building at vast expense (and which would be razed to the ground in 1747 when the family fortune gave out).   Pleasingly this does seem to have taken place in the open air, although The Grove Book of Operas is a bit sniffy about this 'local tradition', remarking that the discovery of piping to supply an old fountain "might fancifully be invoked as support".  If true, the audience would have been within earshot of the water features designed by John Theophilus Deaguliers, another remarkable individual patronised by Brydges, who combined the roles of local priest and hydraulic engineer.  Perhaps the sound of water would have been a constant reminder of Galatea, the sea nymph loved by both Acis and Polyphemus. At the end of the opera, as you can hear in the clip embedded below, when Galatea transforms Acis into a river, she sings

Heart, the seat of soft delight,
Be thou now a fountain bright!
Purple be no more thy blood,
Glide thou like a crystal flood.
Rock, thy hollow womb disclose!
The bubbling fountain, lo! it flows;
Through the plains he joys to rove,
Murm'ring still his gentle love.

The Garden Room at Prima Porta

Detail of the south wall, 'Garden Room', Prima Porta

Source: Wikimedia Commons

In my recent post about Roman landscape painting I mentioned the 'Garden Room' at Prima Porta, near Rome. In their 2001 OUP survey of classical art, Mary Beard and John Henderson describe this space as 'an impossibly utopian mixture of bright flowers beside laden fruit trees, tidy shrubs before a receding woodland vista, planned garden display within a surround of Italian trees, as if in their natural habitat.'  It is 'an exercise in blue and green. And a celebration of naturalistic technique ... But this is not nature reproduced; instead, a world specially made for us - yet made to do without us. Beyond the balustrade, as no wild birds ever could, these pay not the slightest attention to anyone in the room, impossibly ignoring our proximity. Emblematized by the songbird in its golden cage, art here creates nature, beyond anything you could find in the real world.'

Detail of a pine tree, 'Garden Room', Prima Porta

Source: Wikimedia Commons

An interesting June 1994 Art Bulletin article by Barbara A. Kellum, 'The Construction of Landscape in Ancient Rome: The Garden Room at the Villa ad Gallinus' describes this painting in the wider context of Augustan Rome, where 'the emperor was quick to establish an arboreal mythology' and the city was punctuated with plants and trees that 'were as protean and mulitvalent in their structures and meanings as the contemporary poetry of Virgil, Horace and Ovid.'  The article's title refers to the villa's ancient name, ad Gallinus; the chicken in question was one which an eagle dropped into Livia's lap, holding a laurel branch in its beak.  This was seen as a good omen for Livia and her new husband Augustus, and they planted the branch, which grew into a laurel grove.  According to Pliny the Elder, subsequent emperors continued the tradition of planting trees in the grove and just before the death of each emperor it was observed that the tree they planted had begun to whither.  Laurel features prominently in the Garden Room, both as trees and low shrubs.

Detail of a spruce tree, 'Garden Room', Prima Porta

Source: Wikimedia Commons

The room is structured around regularly placed oak, pine and spruce trees, but with a profusion of wild plants in between, order and disorder complimenting each other in a way reminiscent of Virgil's Georgics. According to Kellum, this mixture represents on the one hand the fertility and prosperity of the Augustan state, and on the other 'the underlying order that was an essential part of it ... harmonizing the beneficent world of nature and that of the state under a common rule of organic order.'  The individual plants and trees could all of course be associated with symbolic meaning, not to mention the birds.  For example, laurel, pine and cypress trees, nightingales, partridges and magpies all appear in Ovid's Metamorphoses, and the process of metamorphosis itself was, as Ovid knew, central to the mythology of Augustus.  Thus the design of this garden room can be read in terms of the wider symbolic landscape of Augustan Rome.

Under a beech tree

Virgil’s first Eclogue opens with the farmer Meiliboeus addressing Tityrus, who is reclining under a sheltering beech tree, playing his reed pipe. Meliboeus is envious of Tityrus, who has the leisure to sit in the shade and teach the woods to repeat his song ‘Fair Amaryllis’ and is amazed that Tityrus can be so relaxed when the countryside is full of troubles (the land confiscations following the Battle of Philippi). But Tityrus has recently been granted his freedom by Augustus and can afford to sing of love and celebrate the pastoral scene. Tityrus takes pity on Meliboeus and invites him to stay the night for a meal of apple, cheese and chestnuts.

Tityrus reappears in Paul Valéry’s ‘Dialogue of the Tree’ (1943), this time in conversation with the philosopher-poet Lucretius, author of On the Nature of the Universe. Valéry contrasts the desire of Tityrus to celebrate a simple unreflective idea of nature, with Lucretius’s search for a more profound underlying truth. Lucretius finds Tityrus gazing at the beech tree, drawn upward to the ‘leaf-woven air’ and inspired to give this beautiful moment a musical form. Tityrus only wants to know the tree in its ‘happy moments’ and fuse its fleeting nature and the voices of leaves, birds and animals into a single form. Lucretius by contrast seeks the Nature of Things and has a more profound understanding of the tree. He feels that Tityrus only loves his own song, not the true beech tree that is its source. Lucretius sees through fleeting appearance to the hard wood of a thirsty plant, gripping its rock and drawing sustenance from the earth. In meditating on the natural order, Lucretius goes so far as to liken himself to the tree it in its structured growth and natural rhythms. Tityrus sings of the tree, but for Lucretius the tree itself is a song. They feel the cool of evening approaching and part with Lucretius lost in radiant rapture.

Lucretius might be seen in this guise as reflecting some of the attitudes of modern post-pastoral poetry. And yet at the end of the dialogue there is something almost too serious and profound in his words, and the reader feels like leaving Lucretius under the tree to follow the modest shepherd Tityrus, as he goes to gather his flock.

Incidentally, the beech tree that Tityrus sits under in both dialogues was native to north Italy, where Virgil was born. It was not known in Greece and therefore it had no established poetic resonances when Virgil was writing: beech trees were mentioned by Catullus but do not appear in Greek poetry like Virgil’s model, the Idylls of Theocritus. It would seem that Virgil drew it from his own landscape experience. After the Eclogues the beech tree would often be associated with the artificial landscape of pastoral poetry. As in Valéry’s dialogue, the beech tree can seem real or poetic, depending on the poet.

Early morning

Samuel Palmer, Early Morning, 1825

There is still time to see the British Museum’s Samuel Palmer exhibition before it transfers to the Met in New York. One of the highlights is the ‘Oxford sepia series’ of 1825: early monochromes in gum and sepia ink, showing idealised rural scenes and mysterious atmospheric light effects. Most of them are accompanied by a poetic inscription:

A Rustic Scene: lines from Virgil’s Georgics evoking the autumnal equinox

Libra die somnique pares ubi fecerit horas
et medium luci atque umbris iam dividit orbem,
exercete, viri, tauros, serite hordea campis
usque sub extremum brumae intractabilis imbrem;

The Valley with a Bright Cloud: lines from Shakespeare’s As You Like It:

This is our life, exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees, books in ye running brooks,
Sermons in stones, and good in everything.

Early Morning: lines from the poem A Complaint of the Black Knight thought by Palmer to be by Chaucer but now believed to have been written by John Lydgate:

I rose anone and thought I would be gone
Into the wode, to hear the birdes sing,
When that misty vapour was agone
And cleare and fair was the morning.

 
Late Twilight: a line from Macbeth, oddly misattributed to Milton

The west yet glimmers with some streaks of day

The Skirts of Wood: no quotation is given

The Valley Thick with Corn: a quotation from Psalm 65:

Though crownest the year with Thy goodness: and Thy clouds drop fatness. They shall drop upon the dwellings of the wilderness; and the little hills shall rejoice on every side. Thy folds shall be full of sheep, the valleys also shall stand so thick with corn that they shall laugh and sing.

Even without the images these quotations evoke the mood of Palmer’s work. The lines for Early Morning by Lydgate were new to me and have a timeless simple beauty. As William Vaughan explains in the exhibition catalogue, these quotations became associated with the pictures sometime during Palmer’s life, possibly well after they were painted. However, the practice of exhibiting landscapes with accompanying poems was common in England at the time.

It is interesting to compare the effect of these paintings with that of Chinese landscapes currently on display at the Royal Academy where poetry also accompanies the image, for example the twelve Scenes Described in Poems of Du Fu by Wang Shimin (1592-1680) or the Eight Scenes of Yangzhou by Gao Xiang (1688-1754) that are accompanied by quatrains by different authors.