When will Spring come?
When will the nights pull back and the days start to get longer?
When will we see the sun?
When will the grey, grey days go away?
When will the wind stop?
When will we be able to walk out without layers of clothing, without thinking of the struggle to get to the post office, to the shops, to the bus?

We’ve had almost no snow. You can see it on the hills – and you can always see the hills from almost anywhere in Edinburgh, even from the city centre.

But there has been no snow. Just a flurry or two scattered through the winter months. But nothing that has settled.

Snow is an ambivalent creature. It’s all white and welcoming, but then it turns to slush. As pure as the driven slush, as the actress Tallulah Bankhead said of herself.

Of course, in some places (I am thinking of the time I spent in Finland) the air is so dry that the snow settles and remains crisp and white for months.

And apparently the snow was knee deep in Edinburgh for months, just four years ago.

But not this year. So it has been a bit of a slog to reach these lighter evenings and some sunny days. But now the crocuses and the snowdrops are out and the sun is shining.

It is so easy to see how epic poetry and drama arose in human consciousness – the struggle through the dark and the bursting into the light – it’s all there with the seasons. It’s almost all there with each day in the changeable Edinburgh weather…

Crocuses

But now it is here.
Early signs of Spring are here.
It’s a gorgeous day and the sun is here.
Longer days are here.
Crocuses are here:

A Reminder Of Snow

So what is snow like? The scene fades from the memory so quickly I can hardly recall what it looks like or feels like. I have to dig into it to remember it.

The crunch of boots and the sudden ‘give’ as the crystalline structure loses its fight against my weight and I drop, just a fraction, into the snow.

The tiny highlights as the sun (the sun??) glints off the snow.

The sheer brightness as I look up and out and over the blanket of snow. (Who first described thick snow as a ‘blanket’, I wonder?)

The snow in this photo here isn’t Edinburgh snow.

It is a scene from high on the Yorkshire moors a few winters ago. It’s one of the ecard photos from the Landscape category at Quillcards.

And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

Matthew Arnold… inspector of schools, poet, and social critic who warned of, among other things, the dangers of sensationalist journalism and supernatural religion.

The quote about dreaming spires is from his poem Thyrsis. It is a long poem – 1863 words over 240 lines and 24 stanzas.

The lines about the dreaming spires are on lines 19 and 20 at the end of the second stanza.

Arnold wrote the poem as an elegy to his friend and fellow poet, Arthur Clough, who died aged 42 from malaria he contracted in Italy.

In the poem, Arnold describes Clough as Thyrsis, an archetype shepherd-poet of Ancient Greece.

And he describes how he and Clough explored the countryside around Oxford when they were students and he reflects on what happened to their ideals after they left university.

As to what happened to Arthur Clough and his ideals… well he devoted years of his life as the unpaid secretarial assistant to Florence Nightingale so that she could pursue her work in improving hygiene in hospitals.

Here are the first two stanzas of the poem:

How changed is here each spot man makes or fills!
In the two Hinkseys nothing keeps the same;
The village street its haunted mansion lacks,
And from the sign is gone Sibylla’s name,
And from the roofs the twisted chimney-stacks–
Are ye too changed, ye hills?
See, ’tis no foot of unfamiliar men
To-night from Oxford up your pathway strays!
Here came I often, often, in old days–
Thyrsis and I; we still had Thyrsis then.

Runs it not here, the track by Childsworth Farm,
Past the high wood, to where the elm-tree crowns
The hill behind whose ridge the sunset flames?
The signal-elm, that looks on Ilsley Downs,
The Vale, the three lone weirs, the youthful Thames?–
This winter-eve is warm,
Humid the air! leafless, yet soft as spring,
The tender purple spray on copse and briers!
And that sweet city with her dreaming spires,
She needs not June for beauty’s heightening.

We took the photo of the dreaming spires on a trip to Oxford a few years ago, and you can find the photo in the Cities and Buildings section of The Constructed World theme at Quillcards.

You will also find this photo of The Radcliffe Camera there. The Radcliffe Camera is part of Oxford University and was built to house the Radcliffe Science Library. Quite something, isn’t it.

[The word ‘camera’ is Latin for ‘room’]

A Woman In Bundi

The marks of life are evident in this woman in Bundi in Rajasthan in India, and her poverty is evident in the small stall of vegetables set out by the roadside.

Were she to turn around, would her face enthral and entrance? There is a beauty in old age, isn’t there.

Never. He will not.
Age cannot wither her, nor custom stale
Her infinite variety. Other women cloy
The appetites they feed, but she makes hungry
Where most she satisfies, for vilest things
Become themselves in her, that the holy priests
Bless her when she is riggish.

This is said by the character Domitius Enobarbus in Act 2, scene 2 of Shakespeare’s Anthony and Cleopatra.

Enobarbus is speaking about Cleopatra and explaining why it is that although Anthony should leave Cleopatra, he never will.

The reason he says, is that unlike the case with many relationships, familiarity makes Cleopatra all the more desirable. And even when she is promiscuous, even the priests are so entranced that they bless her.

Weathered And Weatherbeaten

These are the doors to a building in Bundi. You will find the photo in the Windows and Doors range of images in our ecards here at Quillcards. Click the link to take a look.

Like a lot of photographers, perhaps like a lot of us, I am drawn to structures that have settled in over time.

Wood sawn to size, iron beaten into shape, clay daubed on a lattice of wooden sticks tied together with knotted rope. And then yellow paint with spatters of it on the door.

When things like this grow old we can see the marks, but they don’t destroy the authenticity of the materials. They don’t show the materials up as being fake. They show the beauty, don’t they. Or as they say… beauty is in the eye of the beholder.