Anyone is welcome to attend this free poetry reading, or to submit a poem to read! It’s being organised by some of our great students in the School of English at Birmingham City University – Olivia Hodgson, Rick Hughes and Jack Warren – and it should be a really good evening!
At the weekend, I went for a rather wet walk in the Malvern Hills with my small son. To him, this was an adventure, because we can see the Malverns from the top of our house, on a clear day, so to walk in them was exciting. I didn’t realise, however, what a literary history the Malverns had. I knew that Piers Plowman, William Langland’s fourteenth-century tale of the visions and spiritual quest of an Everyman, was set in the Malvern Hills – it is here that Piers had his dream.
Ac on a May morwenynge
On Malverne hilles
Me bifel a ferly,
Of fairye me thoghte.
I was wery forwandred
And wente me to reste
Under a brood bank
By a bournes syde;
And as I lay and lenede,
And loked on the watres,
I slombred into a slepyng,
It sweyed so murye.
This constitutes the earliest literary reference to the Malverns, and
it is speculated that the mysterious Langland was educated at Malvern Priory, writing
as he does in a local dialect. And the rolling hills seem to me quite conducive to such exalted
visions (though there are too many walkers these days to dream undisturbed!) It’s thrilling to think one might walk the same way as Langland did, over 700 years ago.
These are also A E Housman’s ‘blue remembered hills’, recalled from his Shropshire childhood, overshadowing his life as the ‘land of lost content’. Less famously, perhaps, W H Auden, 
who taught for a while in nearby Colwall, wrote The Malverns, a long poem which also features a dreamer, though a rather different dream; but one which sketches in the views and atmosphere of the hills. C S Lewis also spent time in Malvern, being a pupil at Malvern College, and later visiting a friend; apparently local legend is that he was inspired by the local gaslamps to include one in Narnia. He als
o brought his friend, J R R Tolkien, to visit. The BBC website tells me that
The story goes that, after drinking in a Malvern pub one winter evening, they were walking home when it started to snow.
They saw a lamp post shining out through the snow, and Lewis turned to his friends and said ‘that would make a very nice opening line to a book’.
We began our day with cake at St Ann’s Well Cafe. This is a fascinating 
place which, luckily, also serves great cake. The building is early 19th century, though the well itself has a history dating back much further. The well was associated with the fashion for the Victorian water cure, from which Florence Nightingale, among others, benefited (or not, as the case may be), as did Charles Darwin, whose daughter died whilst staying in Malvern. It seems probable to me that the cafe at the well was also the inspiration for Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story ‘Malvern Hills’ in Nocturnes; it fits the location which Ishiguro carefully describes in the book, and, though smaller than the story suggests, has something of the same atmosphere. Nocturnes is literature which explores music; no doubt Ishiguro had the musical history of the Malverns in mind, including Elgar, who walked and cycled endlessly around Malvern and its hills, and whose statue now appears above the high street – looking away from the hills behind him, sadly.
We have much more exploring to do – years of it! – but I think we made a start this weekend.
I haven’t heard Kate Tempest perform her poetry live (though there is a great video of her reading ‘Hold Your Own’ at Glastonbury) but I’ve just booked to go and hear her in Birmingham in April.
Tempest is very much known as a performance poet, to the extent that she has been known as reluctant to put words on the page in the conventional way. Watching the video from Glastonbury, you can see why; she’s a great performer, and not all poets are. Her meaning comes across best, you sense, when she tells you her poem, herself, directly; the video makes you feel she’s addressing everyone in the crowd. Now I am someone who mostly reads poetry by long-dead poets, and I quite empathise with whichever critic it was that said that TS Eliot’s punctuation could move him to tears. So you might think that performance poetry, by a poet who is also a rapper, is unlikely to appeal to me. Actually, I liked Hold Your Own, her collection of poems edited by Don Paterson, much more than I expected to. Even on the page, this is clearly performance poetry; perhaps that’s because it is so conversational, so direct. The first and longest poem in the collection, ‘Tiresias’, 
concludes:
While we assemble selves online
And stare into our phones,
You are bright and terrifying,
Breath and flesh and bone.
In these few lines we are moved at high speed from the mundane to the terrifyingly ecstatic. The fear of being something sublime, beyond understanding, is conveyed here memorably. Tempest’s poems are in simple forms, on the whole; she doesn’t seem to be a poet who would play with form in the conventional sense, churning out villanelles or terza rima, but she plays with ideas, and with language, in a way which is meaningful as well as immediately accessible. Language in particular seems to be her drug; when she writes ‘Language lives when you speak it. Let it be heard’ she really means it, and her work is peppered with assonance, misrhymes and echoes which work well both in performance and on the page. Steady beats are suddenly interrupted, making the reader (or listener) pay closer attention. These prosodic attributes can, occasionally, become predictable, but Tempest manages this well, on the whole.
The line above is taken from ‘These things I know’. The book is threaded through with the 
myths of Tiresias, blind prophet of ancient myth, who was both man and woman during his lifetime (inspiring Virginia Woolf’s Orlando). Tiresias, known for his aphorisms in Greek plays and his wisdom in all situations, speaks in this poem through pithy sayings, such as ‘Poetry trembles alone, only picked up to be taken apart’ as well as other more universal comments. The character of Tiresias reflects, along with a number of other voices in the poems (including, one suspects, Tempest’s own), the complexities and confusions of gender, sexuality, identity, love – but he is more than just a vehicle for reflecting on gender fluidity; he brings the ideas and poems together.
Tempest’s interest in the classics is manifest in Brand New Ancients, her previous book locating the ancient gods in families in London, for which she won the Ted Hughes poetry prize. The universality of these ancient stories is paramount in her work, and in this – a more conventional volume than her previous work – she nicely treads the line between ancient and modern. Tiresias is painted as a living, breathing figure, from a grubby boyhood to an unexpected womanhood, through lovers, prostitution, and old age. But this Tiresias has the wisdom of the age in which he is written: he is predicting not the downfall of ancient cities, but the tragedy of the modern world, godless, obsessed with image:
Before
you were damned for the things that you did,
or if you didn’t live how the villagers lived.Now
You’re handed the mould and told – fit in to this.
And maybe one day you could be really big.
In many ways, Tiresias/Tempest’s condemnation of a shallow life reminds me of Peter Shaffer’s play Equus, in which the psychiatrist, Dysart, says:
The Normal is the good smile in a child’s eyes:-alright. It is also the dead stare in a million adults. It both sustains and kills-like a god. It is the Ordinary made beautiful: it is also the Average made lethal. The Normal is the indispensable, murderous God of Health, and I am his priest.
Tempest uses the figure of Tiresias, along with other nameless voices, to indicate that a difficult, complex, painful, fragmented life, which makes no sense, can still have a beauty, a structure, and is still a life capable of holding joy, love and intensity. This isn’t a perfect book, by any means, and some of it begins to tire one’s patience a little, and the final section is both right (in a moral sense) and a bit too tub-thumping. But overall, it’s good; I want to read it again.
There’s a great, nuanced review of the book by Dave Coates here – do read it if you’re interested in Tempest’s work.
Bridget Macdonald’s work seems strangely, immediately familiar, even if you haven’t seen it before. This, I realised after spending time in Worcester City Art Gallery, is because she is painting in a clearly-defined tradition of landscape painting (and, perhaps, because some of her Worcestershire and Herefordshire scenes are local). ‘This Green Earth‘, the exhibition’s title taken from Wordsworth’s ‘Tintern Abbey‘,explicitly links Macdonald’s work with Claude Lorrain, Samuel Palmer and Peter Paul Rubens, as creators of a tradition consciously inherited by Macdonald. The effect of this is to indicate not only the significance of this tradition of depicting and celebrating landscape, which is perhaps more vital than ever at a time when we need to be focusing on how to preserve our precious green spaces, but also to demonstrate that landscape painting is not a parochial art: its significance is not limited to its locale. All the paintings in this exhibition tell us eternal truths, about humanity’s relationship to the land, about the changing environment, about the emotional and physical need we have for open spaces, and about the universal appeal of natural beauty.
‘Snowy Woods’ (2012)
The works on display cover five centuries of painting, but there are clear connections, and Macdonald has clearly drawn intentionally on these. Though she lives in Malvern, and describes this as an ‘Arcadian idyll’, she doesn’t ignore modernity: her work incorporates cars and pylons, and a political dimension too, and her work offers ‘a feeling of landscape’ rather than ‘exact representation’. This isn’t about a photographic approach, then: it’s about exploring emotion and thought as well as painterly skill – as all the best art does.
‘Ewes’ (2012)
Many of her paintings return to her childhood home on the Isle of Wight, drawing on memory to layer the representation in a different way. Macdonald’s residency at the Barber Institute, University of Birmingham in the 1990s began her interest in exploring landscape art, as she worked directly from landscapes by Claude in particular, transforming them into works with personal meaning for her; some of these are on display here.
The choice of quotation for the exhibition’s title can hardly be coincidence; Macdonald is interested in the interplay between literature and art, notably having produced drawings inspired by Sylvia Plath’s beekeeping poems. ‘Tintern Abbey’ intertwines the self with the landscape, suggesting the communion between the two as a panacea for the ills of the world, and as a way of reconnecting oneself to the world and, ultimately, each other.
‘September Flood’, 2015
The works are oils and charcoals (some of the largest charcoals I’ve seen), ranging from landscapes in snow (in charcoal) to huge bulls, as well as a wonderful pair of scenes from train windows, complete with raindrops. The beauty and immediacy of all the works here really struck me, and the inclusion of Claude, Palmer and Rubens (chosen by the artist from the Ashmolean and the Manchester Art Gallery) is illuminating. The exhibition is inspiring and refreshing, as landscape painting should be, and it’s free, too – go and see it!
‘Farm’ (2005)
Samuel Palmer, ‘The White Cloud’ (1831-2)
Night with her Train of Stars
I mentioned in my previous post on the ‘Enchanted Dreams’ exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery that Edward Hughes was inspired by a number of poems. I’m really interested in the interactions between art and literature, and how poetry and painting are often entwined. For the Pre-Raphaelites, many of whom were known to Hughes, poetry and painting were ‘sister arts’, mutually inspirational, and their painting is often very literary – sometimes narrative, usually symbolic, often very detailed so that it can be ‘read’. Many of their paintings were directly inspired by poetry, and of course several Pre-Raphaelites wrote poetry too, most notably Dante Gabriel Rossetti, whose poems and paintings go hand in hand.
It’s no surprise, then, that Hughes was inspired by contemporary poets in his work. He tends, however, to take a much less narrative approach than many of the Pre-Raphaelite-affiliated painters, and instead produces something which captures a feeling or a mood, inspired by an image from the painting, perhaps. He is, however, still interested in symbolism, in drawing on a wider web of intertextual references, whilst offering an image that is also very concerned with aesthetics. I find this fascinating: when we read, we ‘see’ in our mind’s eye. When a painting is inspired by a poem, are we seeing the artist’s mind’s eye? How does this affect our reading of the literary work – do we then ‘see’ it differently?
Oh what’s that in the Hollow…?
Although I’m very familiar with Christina Rossetti’s work, the ways in which I ‘see’ her poem ‘Amor Mundi’ is very influenced by Hughes’s Oh What’s that in the Hollow…? ‘Amor Mundi’ is inspired by the traditional Rossettian theme that life is a struggle but we should embrace that struggle or risk damnation. The poem is written in a rapidly moving irregular metre, describing a couple following a downhill path which, metaphorically, leads to Hell. Signs appear along the way to warn them – ‘a meteor … dumb, portentous’, ‘a scaled and hooded worm’, and, finally, ‘in the hollow’, ‘a thin dead body which waits the eternal term.’ It is this last omen which Hughes paints; the painting was unpopular when first exhibited, considered macabre and lacking in explanation, but read in conjunction with Rossetti’s poem it is literally a symbol of the fate which awaits us – a memento mori. The couple see the signs, but determinedly ignore them to the last, even when one of them realises the destination of the path. Hughes’s depiction of the body, pale and emaciated, the eyes half closed in death, surrounded by thorny briar roses which ironically echo Burne-Jones’s Sleeping Beauty, is an imaginative recreation of Rossetti’s image, adding a vicious-looking raven to add to the discomfiting picture. Yet the image also suggests that the body is reclaimed by nature, seeming almost to sink into the earth as the leaves grow over it. The painting is very much in keeping with the poem, which is rich in visual description despite its metaphorical nature.
One of Hughes’s most famous paintings, Night with her Train of Stars, above right, is influenced by a much less famous poem, William Ernest Henley’s ‘Margaritae Sorori‘ (To my Sister Margaret). Henley is now mostly remembered as the poet of ‘Invictus’, but was a prolific and influential writer, critic and editor in his time. Once again this is a visually rich poem, glowing with colours ‘luminous and serene’. It is descriptive of a time and place, opening with birdsong watching the sun fade: the poem begins by drawing on the senses to appreciate the scene, but it becomes clear by the end of the poem that the senses are fading: this is a poem about death, and the narrator’s desire for a peaceful end which is reminiscent of Tennyson’s ‘Crossing the Bar’. The painting, so often reproduced that it can be seen as sentimental or chocolate-box (unfairly, in my view), depicts ‘Night with her train of stars/And her great gift of sleep’ – this is, in essence, the Angel of Death, gently folding an infant in her arms, her finger to her lips as she hushes the cherubim who throng round her. The colours of the painting are as beautiful as those of the poem, indicating a monochromatic scale of blues with the pinpoints of light which Hughes painted so beautifully, and capturing the essence of a peaceful night. Night scatters poppies, symbolising sleep, and it is eternal sleep which she brings.
Fra Lippo Lippi
A very different literary engagement can be found in Hughes’s remarkable portrait, ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’, inspired by Browning’s poem of the same name. Hughes’s red chalk portrait is minutely detailed, appearing photographic at first sight, which offers a pleasing parallel with the nuanced and equally descriptive poem. ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’ is one of Browning’s wonderful dramatic monologues, in which we learn a great deal about the speaker, through his garrulous explanation of himself and his actions. Brother Lippo is a reluctant monk, who took his vows through necessity rather than conviction, and remains there for a place to live. His character shines through in the poem as he describes his exploits to attempt to excuse himself after being stopped by the police outside a brothel – his amorous adventures and also his painting are explained; and his character is equally present in Hughes’s work. The combination of poem and painting here provides a great back-and-forth of ideas in art and literature. Browning’s monk says that he ‘made a string of pictures of the world/Betwixt the ins and outs of verb and noun,’ when describing his painting, indicating these twin arts of word and paint, art and poetry. He says that he must ‘Paint the soul, never mind the legs and arms!’ And it is the soul, perhaps, of a vivacious, energetic monk trying to escape the bondage of the monastery, that Hughes has painted: his Fra Lippo doesn’t look at the viewer, but just past us, as though already moving on to the next thing. Though the young man in the drawing looks in repose, there is a life to his face that suggest he may at any moment begin to regale passers-by.In the poem, he argues his case for realism, for attempting to paint people as they are, for looking closely in order to paint the very essence of life (which reflects the fast-paced realism of Browning’s verse, too), and this is just what Hughes has done, too; he has produced a portrait that the fictional Fra Lippo would have been proud of.
The new exhibition at Birmingham Museum and Art Gallery, ‘Enchanted Dreams: The Pre-Raphaelite Art of E. R. Hughes’ is the first ever exhibition entirely focused on Hughes’s work. Though some of his paintings, especially ‘Night with her Train of Stars’ (1912), are reasonably well-known, his work tends to be overlooked. BMAG own quite a few, but many more have been assembled here from far and wide, and the exhibition draws out aspects of his work which are not always obvious from the few one usually sees. Not to be confused with Arthur Hughes (his uncle), Edward Robert Hughes was also associated with the Pre-Raphaelites, having been brought up among his uncle’s Pre-Raphaelite friends, and these associations have clear implications for his work which are evident in the exhibition. There is a good effort at providing some of this Pre-Raphaelite context in some of the other works included in the exhibition, by Arthur Hughes (‘The Long Engagement’) and Simeon Solomon (‘Bacchus’), for example. Hughes is perhaps most famous for his ‘t
wilight’ paintings, of which more later, but his earliest known work, ‘Evensong’, already indicates his interest in the effect of twinkling lights in painting, and the shadows cast by light. Though this domestic scene is perhaps a little sentimental, even immature, it is still beautiful, and shows the promise of his work.
Hughes’s early career as a portrait painter is explored, demonstrating how his works are considerably more than pot-boilers: the double portraits of the Gray Hills, for example, are rich in every sense, depicting a well-fed, middle-aged wealthy couple, and yet in their debts to earlier styles of work, the richness of colour used and the evident complexity of the relationship between the couple, the painter and the viewer, these suggest a psychological intensity which a jobbing painter doesn’t usually manage. Similarly, those of children, such as ‘Dolly Francis’, are unsentimentalised, managing to both respect the conventions of Victorian portraiture of children whilst permitting the child her individuality, staring unsmiling at the viewer. Hughes’s influence on Estella Canziani is mentioned, with the portrait of a woman in mourning costume (right) on display: her portraits of figures in folk dress made on her European travels are a fascinating example of the art of an intrepid woman of the period.
Hughes’s engagement with literature also interests me. ‘Study for a Picture: Fra Lippo Lippi’ is a wonderful, red chalk portrait with a remarkable life to it, inspired by Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue ‘Fra Lippo Lippi’. The realistic style advocated in the poem is echoed in the portrait, and the idiosyncratic and dramatic character of Browning’s monk shines through the eyes of Hughes’s work. Similarly, ‘Oh What’s that in the Hollow’ (left) is based on Christina Rossetti’s poem ‘Amor Mundi’, reminding the reader/viewer of the transience of life, and that to neglect the spiritual aspects of life is to risk eternal damnation. The painting is peculiarly macabre, the figure clearly corpse-like, and overgrown with brambles and briar roses, indicating the continuation of the world in the face of human mortality.
For many the highlight of the exhibition will be the ‘Blue Room’ of late watercolours, containing not only ‘Night with her Train of Stars’ but also ‘Midsummer’s Eve’ (right). Here, the majority of the paintings are in beautiful blue tones, with Hughes’s signature spots of light giving a dreamy, twilight feel to the whole room. Mostly painted in the early days of the twentieth century, the aesthetic approach of the paintings suggests, nostalgically, a lost innocence in the years before the First World War. Though a few are ‘fairy pictures’, the exhibition as a whole indicates that Hughes is much more than a painter of sentimental fairies; his technical and emotional as well as aesthetic accomplishment is manifest in this exhibition which, finally, does him credit as an artist.
Incidentally, I attended the exhibition this week with a large number of students (I’ll blog about this another time!) who were equally drawn to Hughes’s work, in very different ways; they are writing creative responses to some of the paintings, which I’ll share on here in a few weeks’ time. There is also a fun ‘Fairy Glen’ for children visiting the exhibition!
