Quam tenui a filo pendet
Today is Sunday and here day trippers
accumulate where Constable stood
and Willy Lott lived eighty years
to spend but four short days away.
He, like Constable, was content
with where he dwelt, roamed not
and sought no images but these.
The floating crowd disturbs the picture,
a tree stands where no tree was
behind the mill. A line of elms
has died and others sprung
since he stood by this spot.
No two days, nor two hours,
nor two leaves are alike, he said
of this or any rural scene.
Down the path new air vibrates
as I seek more open country.
Three fat boys splash by a lock,
one shakes a dead fish,
pretends it still has life.
I drift further down the stream
and the wind begins to freshen.
In the crook of a bend
the Stour accumulates scum.
These rotten banks and posts
in careless boyhood snagged his heart,
engaging hand and eye to paint
a busy working river,
the horses leaping cattle-baulks,
ferried from one towpath to another.
Here near his father’s mill
the painter watched the clouds
to estimate the wind
and with slow strokes he made all his.
He owned six miles by two,
saw and painted what he knew,
knowing that he knew much more
than wise academicians,
great men though they might be.
Labour blossomed on his canvas,
Sam Strowger for example,
the model Sussex ploughman,
knew how mills went round, –
had watched and worked and learned
the names and shapes of things.
He knew the lord was leading man
among the reapers. No academy
committee man knew about the lord.
I look about and ponder
as the scum drifts past,
spins gently, gathering way.
I retread a path he trod
through this same meadow.
Trees the painter never saw
are flecked with memory,
glint with Constable’s snow.
There is no varnish on this dew,
the lustre is not dry. No tar
or snuff of candles dries
the slime on river posts -
I love such things, he said.
The fat boys glisten in the sun
as they towel their backs and boast
while the trippers amble past.
Direct in all he wrote, he knew
his worth without display. Pride
damages vision, stales the air.
(and air which never changes
flies to liver, lights and heart).
Paint where the air is fresh
or open the church doors wide;
it drives out damp and smell of age.
Ten years before he died
a graver tone pervades his air,
Maria dwindled down the path
and a colder northern sun
scattered his human figures.
Black gulls on dazzling skies,
white gulls on sombre earth,
circle Hadleigh’s sombre keep.
What time brings, we depict.
Images merge with words I read,
a face I knew, voices never heard,
people mingle with people,
voices with leaves and clouds,
clouds and trees with the river.
The scene vibrates, accumulates,
in a bend of the mind.
©Terry Hodgson2020
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