From 'Culbone Wood – in Xanadu’

          Rainbow from Hurlstone

His All – an Empire. My Fragment: a Poem. 

What happiness it might have given me to feel confident that the cosmos I had conceived, and which lately I delivered, owned, anachronistically, some topographic situation in the Great Khan’s empire!  For, yes, it is true, I conducted those numbers, and with no little vigour with respect to their ductility, across the abysm that stretches to Xanadu from Culbone where I sat in the course of my intoxicated reverie.  But since that hope is vain and sans much purpose, I must rest with the consolation of my proper station: which is here at the dark end of that rainbow bridge which reached me back more than five hundred years to a place and a time which no longer are in being.

And my argument (if so it may be called) lies, indeed, in this contrary point of vantage: that my unpremeditated rhyming was engendered not in north China, but rather arose from this more home-spun locality. And while certainly it was in Cathay that I lingered in that dream, my Xanadu poem belonged here, from the first, in Somerset’s  Carhampton Hundred.  And it was in Culbone, most specifically, I revelled in that Asian colour which flooded my imagination as, half waking in this farmhouse parlour and dreaming on my path to China, I composed – in an environment which was at once (albeit in unequal proportion) local and exotic – my interrupted fragment.  

And why should I shog off or disparage this little parish in the far West of our county on some pretension that it was EastI had travelled (when all I knew of that horizon was no more than I had read in Purchas, who himself depended on Marco for his intelligence!)?  Because, indeed again, it is, for the most part, this most dramatic native landscape – in that it had impressed itself on my waking consciousness and drawn out my faculties into a giddying and responsive sublimation – that informed my sleeping vision and thereby imprinted itself on my – albeit partial – Oriental lucubration. 

Let me first, therefore, in affirmation of my patriotic loyalty to these particular environs, recall the district in words of more authority than I can, myself, boast which were published during much the same period as my own brief visit. First, the Somerset topography of the Rev. Collinson (no less a gentleman of this county than were Squire Allworthy and his admirable creator) in his History and Antiquities (1).  This to be followed by a somewhat later account from the county surveyors who, in their own words, delineated Somerset.

Here, then, writes Rev. Collinson of Culbone or Kitnor:

A very small parish on the sea coast, nine miles west from the town of Minehead, containing only nine houses and fifty inhabitants.  The lands consist of eighty acres of arable, and two hundred acres of pasture and furze-brake, the rest is wood.

The ancient appellation of this parish is Kytenore or Kitnore; that of Culbone having obtained in later times, from the saint to whom its church is dedicated.  The Norman survey calls it Chetemore, and thus describes it:

…in the time of king Edward it gelded for one hide, and one virgate.  The arable is two carucates.  There are two villanes, and one cottager, and one servant with one plough, and fifty acres of pasture, and one hundred acres of wood.  It is worth fifteen shillings… The present possessor is Lord King, who is also patron of the living, which is a rectory, in the deanery of Dunster. The Rev. William Clare is the present incumbent.

The church is a small Gothick building, thirty-four feet long, and twelve feet wide, consisting of a single aisle, chancel, and porch, covered with Cornish tiles.  The situation of this church is singularly romantick; it stands in a little narrow cove, about four hundred feet above the level of the water.  On each side of this cove the hills rise almost perpendicularly more than twelve hundred feet high.  That on the west side is conical, and considerably higher. 

The back of the cove is a noble amphitheatre of steep hills and rocks, which rise near six hundred feet above the church, and are covered with coppice woods to the tops.  The trees that compose these vast plantations, set by the hand of nature, are oaks, beech, mountain ash, poplars, pines and firs, mingled together in the most wanton variety.  At the back ground of this cove, through a steep narrow winding glen, a fine rivulet rushes down a narrow rocky channel overhung with wood, and passing by the church, forms a succession of cascades in its descent down the rocks into the sea.

The spot is as truly romantick as any perhaps which the kingdom can exhibit.  The magnitude, height, and grandeur of the hills, rocks, and woods, at the back and on each side of the cove; the solemnity of the surrounding scene; the sound of the rivulet roaring down its craggy channel; the steep impassable descent from the church down to the beach; the dashing of the waves on a rough and stony shore at an awful distance below; the extent of the channel, and finely varied coast and mountains of Wales beyond it; form a scene peculiarly adapted to strike the mind with pleasure and astonishment.

The parish cannot be approached on horseback without great difficulty, and even danger; the road from Porlock being only a path about two feet wide, winding in a zigzag direction along the slope of the hills, and often interrupted by large loose stones and roots of trees.  The woods abound in whortleberries, and a variety of fine polybodies, lichen, and other mosses, among which is some of the yellow rein-deer moss, very bright and scarce.  There are also some rare plants; and many wild deer, foxes, badgers, and martin cats, inhabit these woods.

During the three winter months the sun is never seen here; being entirely hid by the height of the surrounding hills.

I must advert, for the purpose of our discussion of Porlock people (which will be found later), to Collinson’s mention of the path from that parish, and the trouble and indeed danger in passing from there, either on foot or horseback, into Culbone.  This description, which was published some six years prior to my own residence, harmonises, I notice, closely, if not entirely, with the same hazards I have myself described (with no little pathos) in my Walking Journal. 

Of more literary and less circumstantial interest, however, is Collinson’s denomination of this spot as romantick.  On this point, too, I enthusiastically assent. But I will not waste too many words in comparing what I have already written in my Journal, with Collinson’s diction: viz. grandeur of the hills, rocks, and woods, his dashing of the waves on a rough and stony shore at an awful distance below (‘where fishermen appear like mice’ as Poor Tom might have added), and a scene adapted to strike the mind with pleasure and astonishment. All such commingled features contributing to the evocation of a landscape whose sublimeaspect is heightened, both in Collinson’s description, by its remote situation, its ancient history and not least the drama of its place, in a noble amphitheatre, between mountains and the ocean.  What more could a restless pilgrim, on his solitary voyage, wish for in his re-creation of some other, far flung, place of the imagination? (For I confess I am not such a person who would not strain his mind towards the transformation of one landscape, howsoever it was grand and beautiful, to an Asiatick echo that lay beyond the scope of his merely reasonable powers of a descriptive evocation!)

And, now second, in complement to Collinson, the Somerset surveyors’ Greenwood (happy title!) nice delineation:

Culbone, anciently Kitnor -  a very small parish, in the hundred of Carhampton, 3 miles W.N.W from Porlock; containing only 10 inhabited houses, and 11 families, 6 of whom are employed in agriculture.  This parish is environed on every side by mountains, which rise so high as to render the sun invisible nearly three months in the year, and for the same reason it is not possible to approach it on horseback without considerable danger. The church is a neat Gothic building, consisting of a nave, chancel, and aisle, of a size proportioned to the limited population of the place.  It is situated in a narrow cove, at an elevation of 400 feet from the sea, surrounded with hills, ascending almost perpendicular to the height of 1200 feet, and covered with trees, consisting of oaks, beech, ash, poplars, pines and firs, mingled together by the hand of nature in the most picturesque manner; a beautiful rivulet rushes through a narrow channel in the interior of this cove, and passing the church, forms a succession of cascades as it flows down the rocks into the sea… (2).

Such are the bald facts, more or less (bar poplarswhich I will not swear to). And while to Rev. Collinson this spot is romantick, Culbone for our second author is a picturesque location: than the former a degree drier and more in keeping, in its diction, with the hard actuality of what a surveyor is enjoined to.  What each agrees, however, is the paucity of sunlight, showing Culbone to be a place in the shadow of thick woods and whose mountainous coombs shut out three months-worth of sunlight.  Another description to which I will assent.  Hence my own ‘sunny spots of greenery’ and ‘sunless sea’ are extrapolated not from far landskips, but are variegated domestically, by the natural filter of light and foliage from an over-beetling high Somersetshire sheep meadow and the woodlands that divide Exmoor from the Bristol Channel.

Now this – in that I have projected the design of Culbone’s landscape onto Xanadu – is somewhat ruggedly different from what I understand to be the topographic appearance of the latter, Asiatic place, which was, albeit to us exotic, positioned on the China side of the Mongolian flatlands and constructed atop a marshy or palludrian series of water channels which out- and up-sprouted from earth’s nether region and which engineers that the Great Khan’s armies delivered to him from Arabia, civilizedinto ornamental ponds, where, at his pleasure, from the comfortable fringes of his summer palace, he hunted wild fowl that had stopped here on their seasonal migration (3).

And while it is by this transposition that a wild and remote landscape (as I have rendered it) obtains in my poem, it remains one of the small ironies of my composition that the homely little parish of Culbone should have lent the grandiosity of a Somerset coastline to a place which the imagination would fain render enormous in its romantick standing, when in fact, the Great Khan’s palace, in its elegance and tranquility, was situated in an environment which had been refined into a genial parkland!

Now that I have expounded on the discrepancy between these two situations – one of which I shall never visit – it remains to confess (after which there will be nothing at all to say) a certain tension in my own mind that both joinsand separatesour darkling, unpretentious Culbone and a Xanadu which is all splendour. 

In this connection, I should describe a phenomenon I witnessed on the road which leads from Porlock towards the Quay and then on to my farmhouse destination.

It was an afternoon in mid-October and the sun was showing itself horizontally through a veil of water drops that drifted on the air in a suffusion which was somewhere between a rain shower and a lazily meandering curtain of translucent mist particles. 

As I rounded a corner which was marked by a beech hedge (of the sort Billingsley in his panegyric on the late enclosures has recommended to the landowner who seeks grander profit ) (4) and turned my face across a meadow towards the lime kilns below me and to Hurlstone Point that rose in the distance, a rainbow came to view, one of a very strong colour, which arched from the headland and then plunged into the waves as though to replenish itself in their watery green momentum.  While the sun shone from the west, the sky to the east was filled with thick grey cloud, and the darker this became, the more intense grew the rainbow – God’s promise, so I recollected, to old Noah in his righteous boating. 

As I strode from this delightful apparition – the afternoon was waning – the more radiantly the rainbow flamed: and, of itself, seemed to walkin a species of arching movements, as if travelling into Devon, until it stood with one foot on the stones of Porlock Quay while with the other it reached into the shallows whose silver or white flashings the rainbow stained with an irridescence that the sea water now stretched around and now brought back again into the solidity of its column.

Thus the bow held its form, at once architecturally rigid and in a striding motion, and swinging its foot out, travelled parallel with my own wayfaring. And remarkable as were its colour and the animation of its reaching onward, it was its tenacity impressed itself on me.  This was no momentary or fleeting vision. As I walked hard west, and it appeared to pursue me, the bow held its posture, a good forty-five minutes, getting out of my sight only when, as finally I entered Yearnor’s woodland, I travelled beyond a view of the sky. And for all I knew – I slept deep in my parlour – it continued to hold its place that evening to irradiate the moonlight.

Delightful as it was per se, I now must deflect this rainbow to a different purpose.  And here I shall (for this relief much thanks) be brief as I can be. 

Just this.  There exists an imperative guides the imagination which owns a constitution which is, as divined from the rainbow I have adumbrated, both diaphanously intangible and so materially constructed that this leads, as did the bow, from terra firma on some near shore – which is our body in a particular locality – to a place afar off that may not so easily be defined: for this latter is as sundry and elusive as the scarcely cognized intimations that directed us to it. 

Both the going out movement and the place to which that motion is gone, are therefore at the least twofold in character.  The rainbow may thus be the grand experience ipse and an aspect of the vehicle that carries us to it: the thing in itself and – as in a wet sky, painted on it from its convergent parts, by God for old Noah – the sign that proclaims the genesis of an experience in the observer: which is the sublime object held above us and a projection which is also the expression of our own self-generating Iris.  

To pursue this conundrum, I would aver that the rainbow is endogenous to the intellection of all human beings, and that we carry this most joyous spectrum, with its multiplicity of colours, within us: and that enter, as we must, the forest of confusion and of dark discomfort, we have it in our command to discharge from our psyche its jovial, splendid and uplifting effulgence and that this will irradiate our most desolatedmoments and conjoin our being to an empyrean which will answer back to it and, as it were, substantiate and re-invigorate even its most tentative excursion from us. 

Thus my conviction.  And my poem – even were it my last, as I fear it may be – is a signal of that correspondence between what Great Creating Nature in her generosity has bestowed on the landscape over which I was travelling and the gift, which I have had implanted in me – a particle of the divine which the Quakers have described as a ‘seed of light’ – which the rainbow, both in its heaven-to-earth emergence and as a expression of my own generative capability, is a condensation.

These thoughts conduce to the following truth: for by coincidence or no, they are notions that own kinship both with the nature of my poem as it arrived – from nowhere that I could have anticipated – but which I regard as magical, and the environment of its composition, in this homely parlour.

Now reverting to the rainbow – which, given that it has become my familiar, I will denominate a Footway of Illusions and my Bridge of Dreams, or (to dignify  it with a title from the half-world we all voyage) Pons Somniorum – we may pause briefly at this ancient figure, in Homer and Virgil, of two gateways of dreaming: the one made of horn and the other of ivory:

Two gates the silent house of Sleep adorn;
Of polish'd ivory this, that of transparent horn:
True visions thro' transparent horn arise;
Thro' polish'd ivory pass deluding lies. (5)

Beautiful and mysterious as is Virgil’s representation (and there is more to it than I can survey here; nor is Dryden without fault in respect to his numbers), my own experience disallows the separation of truth from falsehood: and I would claim that imaginative experience contains a horn and ivory amalgamation, a mutuality of truth and illusion, the partition of which our forebears held necessary for the maintenance of an imaginative order which is not our concern here.

And while – in that their poetry has not been surpassed – this literature remains superior to ours, I must  nonetheless obey that integrative impulse which leads me to a sense of, and a belief in, the truth or the reality of my phantasmagoria.  This Bridge of the Dream, in other words, represented and indeed was, a locus of illusion and an actuality – both. And in that this pathway conducted me to another place from this, the fabric of that bridge partook of both worlds and in conjoining the two, was them, by virtue of that conjunction, in one.

I will step one pace further. For this bridge has to do with more than poetry and voyages of fancy.  This rainbow is nothing less than the ground on which we live.  Oh, we claim that we are here. And indeed this is what appears. Our earth is hard, or wet and raw. We travel over it in a stamping movement and for the most part it holds us.  But still, while I believe this to be, I know, or feel or believe or perceive my experience to be transitional: and that as one footstep replaces another, the first, in a retrospective immediacy becomes an element of something that exists no longer, and that I can not be certain that what replaces it is categorically distinct from what I have just left behind me.  Next, as this mingling grows closer, I can no longer allow the present to own any greater material hardness than what shadows it so nearly.

If this be my experience, I can not claim the thought to be my own entirely. For I have lately read a narrative (in Jones's Asiatick Researches) told by the Hindus which proposes, in a marvellous speculation, that human life and indeed our entire universe represents the dream of the god Vishnu, who lies sleeping at the bed of the universal ocean and from whose mind emanates a flowering lotus, whose blossom is his dream and that everything that is and was in our world is contained in that efflorescence.(6)

To conclude, less abstrusely, I would point to a two-ness which, on a cruder plain, was expressed by my dream of Kubilai’s China: and this duality is pied, or counterpointed, with these elements as follows:

My vision was of both here and elsewhere: of now and the archaic. It was built of grinding clockwork minutes while lying also beyond time in an incessant perpetuity  East and west were counterpoised and reconciled without abandoning the regions in which they had started. Thus with its muddy coombs and sunset rain, Somerset in autumn was concorded with high Chinese summer.  While sheep at Porlock fed in pasture made lush with an improvingly excavated marl, there the Great Khan’s horses swarmed across steppeland punished by the sun to a brown zavanna (the two chorused across a chancel, which on one side was an English Gothick, while the other lay in tented and domed Tartary). Here the Culbone shepherd and the plough boy whistled.  There, engineers from Central Asia and Damascus plied their mysteries.  Housed in this parlour, a threadbare poet lost his wits (and scattered a few sh—s).  There, the Great Khan deployed a sovereign freedom, executed pleasures and extended his borders from Hang-chow to Korea. 

All these were reconciled and, for the time being, were at one. And here is a conclusion (albeit inconclusive): That this rainbow, whose import I have so falteringly attempted, was, effectually, an emblem of our most integrative and yet abstruse dreaming.  For was this not, in a palpable and topographically embedded materialisation of light, a concretion, albeit beyond our reach, of what is transient and abstract?  Did I not observe through the single witness of my eyes, the very quintessence of what one may not grasp?  Still, the headland sustained it.  The Bristol Channel drank it.  The bow marched (on my jog) along the footpath way, pre-empting my hent against stile and hedgerow.(7)

Thus, we exist – as do these silly sheep between beech hedge plantings – within our mental enclosures.  But here, even on the least of our imaginative excursions, we are led forward by signs stepping from the headlands of our own bony foreheads into realms that lie beyond us, and where, indeed, we tread self-fabricated spectra, painted as these are, internally, with self-generated pigment and moving to an antiphone of what is and what may not be, which fixes us, transformed in part, to what place our bodies predicate, and removes us, with an upper walking, which – translated from the signals of its architecture and momentum – for aye, becomes the very property of our most illuminated and refined imagining.  And so when we wake and are planted in the habit of our sublunary station, we may know where – as did, unconsciously that rainbow which lunged across and down from Hurlstone – we may locate or retrieve, enjoy, express or inhabit the vision which sprang thus, engendered, both by optick predetermination and by preternatural ordination, from the most commonplace of our headlands.

Notes:

Copyright © Tom Lowenstein, 2011.