VISIONARY LANDSCAPES

I grew up in Kent, not far from where Samuel Palmer (1805-1881) lived for a few idyllic, carefree years in Shoreham and where he drew his dreamlike early landscapes – ‘The Walk to Church’, ‘The Magic Apple Tree’. His playful, exuberant rendering of hills and trees as joyous, living things: defying conventions of structure and scale – that I found – and(still)find - liberating.

We lived in the dull suburbs – in the creep of London’s hard-edged monochrome modernity – and yet a weekend trip out to Shoreham or Eynsford – to chase sticklebacks in the shadow of the South Downs or to gather elderfowers to make a potent alcoholic tonic - was only a few moments away. Forever summer.

The accompanying music is from Gerald Finzi’s setting of Thomas Traherne’s poem ‘Dies Natalis’.

Thomas Traherne was the most obscure of the Metaphysical Poets: living, working & dying in a remote Herefordshire parsonage and whose writings were only rescued from a bargain box outside a bookshop a couple of hundred years after his death. Much given to exuberant apostrophising they convey a near child-like wonder of the world and love of God. Visionary. Splendid:

…The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped nor was ever sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting. The green trees, when I saw them first, transported and ravished me, their sweetness and unusual beauty made my heart to leap, and almost mad with ecstasy, they were such strange and wonderful things.

…The skies in their magnificenceThe lovely, lively air,O how divine, how soft, how sweet, how fair!

…From dust I rise and out of nothing now awake,These brighter regions which salute my eyes,A gift from God I take, the earth, the seas, the light, the lofty skies,The sun and stars are mine: if these I prize.