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“It the greatest error of our Society that many of the metaphysical assumptions of wiser ages than our own are presented as jokes to amuse children. The landscapes of poetry, the landscapes of great painters are not to be found in nature at all. It is false doctrine that sees them in terms of m
aterialism. They are landscapes of the soul, and the imagery is not an end but a means-a language for discoursing upon realities of the intelligible world, not the physical world. The theme of imaginative art is not physical but metaphysical. It is in the soul that their validity lies, not in nature. It is the poet and painter’s task to perfect a language of correspondences…The poetic secret is to find in nature the images that correspond to the already and forever existing landscape of the eternal world.”
—Kathleen Raine, ‘Poetry in Relation to Traditional Wisdom.’ (March, 1958)
‘All things were pure and glorious…I knew not that there were any sins, or complaints or laws. I dreamed not of povertie, contentions or vices. All tears and quarrels were hidden from mine eyes. Every thing was at rest, free and immortal.’
‘I was entertained like an angel with the works of God in their splendour and glory. I saw all the peace of Eden. Heaven and Earth did sing…’
“Thomas Traherne once asked: ‘Is it not strange, that an infant should be heir to the whole world, and see those mysteries which the books of the learned never unfold’. And yet Traherne did not doubt this was in fact. Traherne never forgot what he himself had seen as a child:
‘The corn was orient and immortal wheat, which never should be reaped, nor ever was sown. I thought it had stood from everlasting to everlasting…Eternity was manifest in the light of day, and some thing infinite behind every thing appeared, which talked with my expectation and moved my desire.’
” The Centuries of Meditations, III.3
From ‘Landscapes of Glory’ edited by the late A.M.Allchin
II
“Cecil Collins says that there is no meaning in life or art ‘excepting that which springs from the immortal surreality of that Eternal Person’. The artist and the poet must embody ‘the eternal virginity of spirit, which in the dark winter of the world, continually proclaims the existence of a new life, gives faithful promise of the spring of an invisible Kingdom, and the coming of light’. Art seen in this way, is a channel of grace providing a link between the visible and invisible realities.” —Peter Fuller, Modern Painters magazine, Vol 2, no 2, 1989
So wrote one of the pioneers of ecological forestry and Earth healing, Richard St. Barbe Baker (1889-1982), in his foreword to Dorothy Maclean’s ‘Call of the Trees’.
“For my part, I would rather be a believer than an unbeliever. It would be conceited to be otherwise, when there is the miracle of sunrise and sunset in the Sahara, the miracle of growth from the tiny germinating seed to the forest giant. Let us accept that miracle of growth as fact and as a living symbol of the Tree of Humanity and the Oneness of Mankind and all living things.”
I will never forget the Rhododendrons in the Himalayas at Shimla in the early monsoon hours; the morning mists, the appearance of a baronial mansion at the top of the hill. The tenacious grounds of Lord Dufferin’s Viceregal Lodge.
Similar in atmosphere to the estate lodge, near Loch, in the Highlands; another pleasant garden of Rhododendrons.
Last summer in Dorset there is Clouds Hill,
a woodsman’s cottage, refitted by spartan
T.E. Lawrence
A forest of Rhododendrons:
“There are also oak trees, an ilex, birch, firs, laurels and heather. The Rhododendrons are profuse and wild in the hollow of the heath.”
(a change from benevolent palm)
“I had dropped one form and not taken the other, and was become like Mohammed’s coffin in our legend, with a resultant feeling of intense loneliness in life, and a contempt, not for other men, but for all they do. Such detachment came at times to a man exhausted by prolonged physical effort and isolation. His body plodded on mechanically, critically on him, wondering what that futile lumber did and why. Sometimes these selves would converse in the void; and then madness was very near, as I believe it would be near the man who could see things thorough the veils at once of two customs, two educations, two environments.” –T.E.Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom (1926).
Above the lintel there is a Greek inscription:
Ou Phrontis
or Hippoclides doesn’t care
“The words, carved in Greek characters, are normally transcribed Ou Phrontis. They come from Herodotus, VI, 129. In a letter to Celandine Kennington of 18.10.1932 Lawrence explained: “In Athens was a gentleman called Hippoclides who became engaged to a rich merchant’s daughter: and they arranged him a slap-up and splendid marriage. The feast preceding it was too much for his poor head, though. He stood on his head on the table and did a leg-dance, which was objectionable in Greek dress. ‘Hippocleides, Hippocleides’ protested the shocked merchant ‘You dance your marriage off.’ ‘Wyworri?’ said Hippocleides: and Herodotus tells the tale so beautifully that I put the jape [‘Why worry’] on the architrave. It means that nothing in Clouds Hill is to be a care upon its inhabitant.”
D. Garnett (ed.), Letters of T. E. Lawrence (London, Jonathan Cape, 1938
