Painted at Hendon late in the Summer of 1855. The stacking of the second crop of hay had been much delayed by rain, which heightened the green of the remaining grass, together with the brown of the hay. The consequence was an effect of unusual beauty of colour, making the hay by contrast with the green grass, positively red or pink, under the glow of twilight here represented.
-- Ford Madox Brown on The Hayfield
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How was I so
willingly defeated? I was forced to give
over when I felt the big drops piercing
the foliage overhead. The warmth of the
uncut grass. In impossible furrows. In
tufts. Near green. Dove gray. An unusual
rosy pink in the unmade hay.
-- R.F. Langley, 'The Long History of Heresy'
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Every brushstroke changes the picture. If it's crimson it intensifies all the greens and there's the new problem in how to respond to that. The poem makes a start and you read what you've written, and from this and from what you half have in mind, the next bit comes. [...] I don't write many poems, so each one has to be able to keep running faster than I can, for as long as possible. I can't do without the autobiographical experiences, whatever happens to them in the subsequent process, however they got together in the first place. The sharpening of their distinctiveness, and the sense of their being separate from each other, and from me, lift, as Wallace Stevens said, the 'loneliness of thinking'. The shocks of fear and joy that specific moments seem to carry, for me, are often what matters most. 'What is really here.' 'Nooks and ends.' A flycatcher. A nest in the hammerbeams. Ford Madox Brown in August 1855 painting in the fields at Hendon, determining to 'make a little picture of it', while the clouds alter the light and the farmer carries away the corn Brown had chosen for his subject. He decided, eventually, it was better not to 'dream of possession'. But entertaining the dream is trying for more than a 'mock-up of consciousness'. It calls for testing all available strategies. 'Not things, but seeing things'. That could involve for instance finding out again, this time, what would happen if rhyme came back in to do a lot of the running.
-- R.F. Langley, 'Note', PN Review 100 (November-December 1994)
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I turn to The Lyre for its many bracing and enlivening qualities, but not usually expecting to be moved. This time, though, I'm moved. Thank you - you've done right by the man.
ReplyDeleteYes very good to see this touching and unexpected conjunction of word and image. All the more so because I grew up in Hendon. A north London suburb which, when we moved there in the 1950s, boasted just one cow that lived in a field belonging to someone called Nellie Hinge. The field is now an aspect of the University of Middlsex. The vagaries of pastoral.... Which might have appealed to Roger?
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