Marvellous shades of green

This blog takes its name from one of the greatest of all garden poems - Andrew Marvell's The Garden.

Marvell lived through one of the most turbulent periods of English history - the Civil War and its aftermath. He spent some of this time at Nun Appleton House in Yorkshire as a tutor to the daughter of Thomas Fairfax, commander of the Parliamentarian forces. 

Andrew Marvell
(source: Wikimedia Commons)

For Marvell, the garden at Nun Appleton was not just a haven from the murderous storms of politics, but a kind of earthly paradise and a symbol of the transformative power of the imagination:

Yet it creates, transcending these,
Far other worlds, and other seas;
Annihilating all that's made
To a green thought in a green shade.  

(The full poem is here.)

Vita Sackville-West, the poet who created the famous garden at Sissinghurst in Kent, wrote of Marvell: "All variations of light and shade were to him a perpetual delight; but of all colours it was green that enchanted him most; the world of his mind was a glaucous world, as though he lived in a coppice, stippled with sunlight and alive with moving shadows." 

In March, I ran a workshop at Trebah with Caroline Carver, my much more illustrious predecessor as poet in residence at the garden. The theme for the day was deceptively simple: 'Green'.  

It's always been a favourite colour of mine, though I'd never really given it much thought before. But what an incredibly rich web of associations it turns out to have. There's the green of growth and new life - unmissable on a showery March morning at Trebah with the trees beginning to come into leaf. But it's also the colour of jealousy, naivety, bad luck, decay and hope - and one that evoked a host of vivid memories and words from the poets who took part in the workshop.

While preparing for the day, I stumbled across a lovely translation of a poem celebrating the arrival of spring by the 14th century Persian poet Hafiz:

Heart, have you heard the news!
The Spring has come back—have you heard!
With little green shoot and little pink bud, and the little new-hatched bird...

(From The Divan of Hafiz, translated Richard Le Gallienne. Full poem here.)

Curious to find out more about Hafiz, I discovered that he is said to have received the gift of poetry from a mysterious figure known as Al Khizr - 'the Green One' - a spirit guide or divine messenger who appears in various guises in Muslim mythology and is held in special reverence by the Sufis (Gertrude Bell tells the story in the preface to her translation of Hafiz).

Al Khizr
(source: Wikimedia Commons)

In some ways, Al Khizr is strongly reminiscent of the the Green Man of north European mythology, and at Caroline's suggestion, this became the theme for the second part of the workshop - introduced by Penelope Shuttle reading from 'Verdant', a superb poem in her collection A Leaf Out of His Book.

I brought along to the workshop the catalogue for David Hockney's exhibition at the Royal Academy, A Bigger Picture. This is a show of startling greenness, and includes a breathtaking series of nearly a hundred pictures, made on an iPad, that chart the arrival of spring over a month or so at Woldgate, near Hockney's home in Yorkshire (and just a few miles from Marvell's at Nun Appleton). The freshness and vitality of these images, created by an artist in his seventies, made me think of Dylan Thomas's famous lines:

The force that through the green fuse drives the flower

Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees

Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose

My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.

(Full poem here.)