Poetry Thursday - Lucifer in Starlight by George Meredith

George Meredith caricatured by Max Beerbohn, 1896 (via)

Lucifer in Starlight (by George Meredith)

On a starred night Prince Lucifer uprose.
Tired of his dark dominion swung the fiend
Above the rolling ball in cloud part screened,
Where sinners hugged their spectre of repose.
Poor prey to his hot fit of pride were those.
And now upon his western wing he leaned,
Now his huge bulk o’er Afric’s sands careened,
Now the black planet shadow’d Arctic snows.
Soaring through wider zones that pricked his scars
With memory of the old revolt from Awe,
He reach’d a middle height, and at the stars,
Which are the brain of heaven, he look’d, and sank.
Around the ancient track marched, rank on rank,
The army of unalterable law.

Written in 1883, when arguments were reaching a fever pitch between advocates of the church and advocates of rationalism, with a mechanistic view of the universe. Despite debates, the rationalists never divorced themselves entirely from the church or religious thought. The poem embodies the importance of the language, terms, and ideas of Christianity, in dramatic form, and has remained popular with readers. The fallen angel, who nursed hopes for ascension to the highest places, rises to "a middle height" and sees not heaven but natural law.

Hear it read here.

George Meredith (1828-1909) lost his mother at age 5, read law but abandoned it for poetry, and married an older woman at quite a young age. In 1856 he posed as the model for Death of Chatterton (an immensely popular Victorian painting), and his wife ran off with the painter; she died three years later. A collection of "sonnets" called Modern Love came of this experience.

Remarried in 1864, he took a job as a publisher's reader, which made him influential in the world of letters. Of his style, Oscar Wilde said "it is chaos illumined by flashes of lightning."

Meredith outlived both of his wives and one of his three children.

"Elements" evolution

Moving on from benday dots, "Elements of visual perception" benefitted from insights obtained through some research on visual perception itself, especially the structure of the eye.

Dots still appear, thanks to the discovery of some sheer fabric with ersatz sequins; used on the reverse, they add "interest" (or tension?) - well, they break the monotony! And, they reference "floaters" ...

first mock-up, stripes of colour underneath organza

The "elements" are now the squares (pixels?) of colour, harking to the cone cells, which perceive one colour each - red or blue or green. And there are about 20 times as many rod cells - light or dark - for which the overlap of squares will provide various shades of grey.

The fabric is organza, mostly silk; the edges of the squares are cut as straight as possible, but some unravelling may occur over the life of the quilt ... which fits in with natural decay, ageing, of vision.

So I'm happy with the concept, and hope the piece can be made to look ... what ... interesting, inviting, exciting?

playing around some more - flashes of colour (and fewer dots)

As for the quilt part - layers joined by stitch - that's a background, now with lines of hand quilting (red, green, blue) and guide lines of machining onto which strips of squares will be placed. Under them, in the central section (like in the eye), some strips of colour -

Another mock-up - grey round the edges and colourful in the middle, is the idea -

Seeing it in a photo, and thinking about it as I write, is so helpful. Even so, I'm not sure whether this is at the "full steam ahead" stage, or whether there's an elusive "something else" that needs to be considered.

"Chelsea" time

It's Chelsea Flower Show week. I loved this photo of a fine display of potatoes -

It came via the Guardian's daily email news offering; more pix of highlights of the show are here.

This year I have my own garden, at the front, and on the way out or in often spend a few minutes just looking at the plants, thinking of nothing.  Tiny and constrained as this oasis is, it gives me immense pleasure to see the plants settling in, growing, and flowering. The aim is to have "something nice" year round, and attract insects (beside a busy road!). 

In the first of what I hope will become an annual series of photos, here is Garden136, May 2015 -

Thyme in flower; mexican daisy looking very tiny; coralbells settling in; silene looking gorgeous;
geum trying to root; parsley, rosemary, lavender doing well

Geranium loving its new lease of life; phlox almost finished flowering; violas about to bloom;
more lavender; a purple-leaved hebe; parsley setting seed;
ornamental grass ; camomile ... and zinnia seeds coming up

Clematis montana; a tiny honeysuckle; winter-flowering jasmine, also tiny;
perennial wallflowers for next year; a pot of petunias (the other pots to be sorted);
forget-me-nots almost over, about to self-seed; violets, hidden;
camomile; more zinnia seedlings ... and the stones are to deter foxes doing more digging

Osmanthus filling in the hedge; deadnettle and cyclamen under the box hedge;
more ornamental grass

The "flame" euphorbia, planted in the corner near the ivy, arrived as the tiniest thing, maybe an inch high - it had grown to six inches, but the stem has snapped - foxes?? 

Sunday excursion

To a bookshop, via Hampstead Heath. Taking gentle exercise: up the hill and back down again.

Hampstead Heath in bloom - cow parsley and chestnut

Dappled shade and dogwalkers

More dapples, with runners this time

Into Hampstead village, with churchbells ringing peals (interminably, it seemed)

A good year for wisteria

Seen on Flask Walk

Here lived the author of the Eton Boating Song, written in 1862

Neighbours - wisteria and clematis

A touch of Arabia on the way back to the station
(and mares' tails heralding a change in the weather)

Near the station is Daunt Books - "travel, literature, and non-fiction" (they have some interesting talks to listen to, here). So many books, so little time, so many that I wanted to read immediately (but did not buy) - 

 We were prowling round in the Berlin section, with its fiction conveniently grouped -

A good half of the books were set in or dealt with WW2. I was after something more historical, or more modern, not sure which; again, I wasn't able to choose anything to buy. Maybe the desired novel will appear when we get there. Or after we come back?

Drawing on Tuesday - at the Wellcome Collection

As well as its permanent collections displaying some of the items collected by Henry Wellcome, who founded the pharmaceutical company that has been so profitable since, and another gallery with some modern art related to health and the body, the Wellcome Collection has exhibitions (currently: Forensics) and now has a Reading Room with more art on display ... more of that another time perhaps.

First a few photos from the Medicine Man exhibition "a cross-section of extraordinary objects from his collection, ranging from diagnostic dolls to Japanese sex aids, and from Napoleon's toothbrush to George III's hair" which "provides a very different perspective on some of our own obsessions with medicine and health."

African figurines showing diseases

Forceps from the 18th and 19th centuries

After some sharing of photos of interesting things

"the reveal" -

Mike found expedition medicine chests supplied by Burroughs Wellcome Co (as it was then)

Caryl was captivated by a glass model of the MRSA bacterium

Jo went beyond observation, to abstraction

Janet used "blind drawing" as a warm-up for the more detailed drawing

Mags collected hands from a display of 19th-century prosthetic limbs

My work for the day involved rather a lot of blind drawing in my A5 notebook - first as a warm-up (and a way to choose something to spend more time on) -

It extended to drawing the same object over and over, without looking at the page (except to place the next object) -

Bleeding bowl and early binaural stethoscopes

African wood carvings and several views of a trepanned skull dating to 2000 BC

Flasks and bottles

Finally, something that looks a bit more "real" -

and a drawing in the A4 sketchbook, from the lowest shelf of glass jars - I was pleased that it does look like glass -

My favourite from the day is the bleeding bowl, made with four lines in about 10 seconds. Just lucky.

Moan on Monday - the pain of the train

The Cornelia Parker exhibition at the revamped Whitworth art gallery is nearing its final days. We plan to go see it on Saturday. I looked up train fares and after grappling with the trainline site found this ...

Cheapest (admittedly it's an open return, off-peak) is £163 for the two tickets ... which shoots up to £658 if travel during rush hour is involved. And first class ... nearly £1000!

On another site, with a much easier booking system, the cheapest fare for two is £79, which makes it almost affordable. That system allowed you to specify if you have railcards, but you had to choose a train time both ways.

Book two months ahead, though, and a one-way ticket, per person, can be had for £15 - £60 return for two, if you can fit in with train availability.

Spontaneity doesn't come cheap, where rail travel is concerned. But spending 9 hours on the coach, however little it costs - though "FROM £12" could mean anything - is not an option.

Art at King's Place

Peter Randall Page,Up Flow, 2014, bronze;
Sap River II, black ink on paper

Almuth Tebbenhoff, Yellow, painted steel

Charcoal drawings by sculptor Jon Buck

Close-up

A spill-over from Pangolin sculpture gallery, part of the King's Place art complex.

Street corners of note

Here we are in Central London on a fine afternoon, keeping our eyes open.

This corner has some old lettering on the stones of St George's Hanover Square - a church that has a full time professional choir (I didn't know that till this minute!). It was built 1721-5 and the lettering looks almost as old as that.

The obelisks (there's another at the other side of the porch) are 18th century lamp standards

At the corner of Maddox Street and St George's Street, London W1

The old street names show the addition of the postal district, W - a system that was introduced in 1857. Districts were subdivided with numbers (eg, W1) in 1917 as a measure of wartime efficiency.

 A somewhat similar street corner, about 2 minutes' walk away, is occupied by Central Police Station (27 Savile Row; open 24 hours a day). Savile Row was built 1731-5; tailors first arrived in 1803 - which is appropriate as the street was built on land owned by a merchant tailor, William Maddox. The houses, originally only on the east side, were occupied by military officers and their wives, along with politicians - a fashionable address, attracting merchants and makers of luxury goods.

Fast forward to 1939, when the Metropolitan Police Station was built - only to be damaged in 1940 during a bombing raid. Since then it's had double glazing installed - and a raft of security cameras.

At the corner of Savile Row and Boyle St

Security cameras figured in one of the exhibitions we wandered into, in the area; this is a small painting by Henry Hudson, who uses plasticine for his impasto effects, "somewhere between sculpture and painting and etching, even" he said, talking to a group about his contemporary Rake's Progress series ("it took me about five minutes to map out the complete story, and then about 2-1/2 years to make the work"). See a video of how he works here.

1930s reading

Two (library) books from Persephone Press, republishing forgotten or neglected novels from the mid-20th century. 

The endpaper fabric is taken from 'Rope and Dandelion',
a blockprinted velvet designed and printed by
Margaret Calkin James for her new house, 'Hornbeams' in
Hampstead Garden Suburb, in 1936.

"The New House" by Lettice Cooper was published in 1936. Set in one day, it tells of the move from a large family home to a smaller one - a "window of opportunity" for Rhoda, who has been doing her mother's bidding for years and longs to see Life. (The author herself was yet to break free from her own mother.) It deals with the meaning of home and stability within family tradition and the clamouring of the outside world in what we now know was a prelude to WW2 and the class upheavals that followed it. The socialist undercurrents have a different slant today, and though those basic problems remain, the story is quite gripping and the characters arouse outrage at times, soon followed by sympathy. There is vivid jealousy, and poignant depiction of lost love.

Endpapers taken from 'Dahlias', a 1931 design for a dress silk by Madeleine Lawrence

"The Fortnight in September" by RC Sherriff, first published in 1931, is the story of a middle-class London family's holiday at the seaside. I'm not far along in it, not far enough to guess where it's going, but already the family is frighteningly claustrophobic. The "period details" are interesting - what are sandshoes, and were sailboats (toys) really called yachts?