85 - Harvest
Thomas Hood on Boaz and Ruth, this month's wines, Patrick Leigh-Fermor on a liberal education, and reviews of The Story of Yanagawa's Canals and Spider-Noir 1-3
85 - Harvest
She stood breast high amid the corn,
Clasped by the golden light of morn,
Like the sweetheart of the sun,
Who many a glowing kiss had won.
On her cheek an autumn flush,
Deeply ripened;—such a blush
In the midst of brown was born,
Like red poppies grown with corn.
Round her eyes her tresses fell,
Which were blackest none could tell,
But long lashes veiled a light,
That had else been all too bright.
And her hat, with shady brim,
Made her tressy forehead dim;—
Thus she stood amid the stooks,
Praising God with sweetest looks:—
Sure, I said, heaven did not mean,
Where I reap thou shouldst but glean,
Lay thy sheaf adown and come,
Share my harvest and my home.
- “Ruth” by Thomas Hood
We experience the moment that Boaz sets eyes on Ruth here. Hood does not, I think, do anything either too grand or too intricate; this is a pretty simple poem, with lyrical octosyllabic couplets and effective but quite well-trod imagery.
Ultimately, though, this simplicity and lack of surprise serves the poem well in its way. No false ambition confuses the descriptive language, and the force of the poem is wholly direct. Hood also accomplishes a few clever things with simple language choices: for instance, “On her cheek an autumn flush, // Deeply ripened – such a blush” is an inverted personification offering some delight.
What is it like to be captivated by beauty, and not simply physical beauty but something deeper? It is Ruth’s praise of God – “Praising God with sweetest looks” – that immediately precedes Boaz’s approach, and he invokes Heaven to support his offer of marriage.
Indeed, and classically, even the nature of Ruth’s physical beauty has a moral side: she stands in the morning light like “the sweetheart of the sun”, her eyes are lost impossibly bright but hidden by demure lashes, she has a healthy, “ripened” blush – images of health, of friendliness with nature, of inner strength and modesty.
There is also something unusual in the subject: how many genuinely “Biblical” subjects are there for poems? We occasionally visit the court of Herod Antipas; we have Milton fill in a caesura, and expand on the Book of Judges; Eliot inhabits the minds of the Magi; but it is rare for important poems to directly treat such subjects (no doubt you will now furnish me with a thousand even better examples…) Hood approaches the Biblical subject and retains its thoroughly human side. We could consider Ruth more focussedly as an exemplar of faith and love; we could look at Boaz and Ruth as Christ’s ancestors, and as a prime demonstration of God’s Providence; but instead we simply go with Boaz to the fields on a warm autumn’s day, and experience the frank and honourable delight he takes in a good woman. This is certainly not alien to Scripture, nor even to the Book of Ruth. We might say that it is Ruth’s vulnerability and her piety which impress Boaz in the field (Ruth 2), and her beauty on the threshing floor (Ruth 3). Piety is seen as a perfectly human quality in the Book of Ruth; no fainting Mannerist glances upward, but measurable in cloakfuls of grain, the protection of servants, and properly applying to the nearest kinsman for permission to marry.
This, too, the simplicity of the metre and rhyme helps emphasize: this is not an epic moment, not Romeo seeing Juliet across the floor, but something defined by ordinary pleasures. The poem sounds nice, if simple; the emotions presented can be taken in the same way, and no the worse for that.
Recent Wines
Hugel Classic Pinot Gris 2023 (Appellation Alsace Controlée): To say a wine is “oily” sounds like a criticism, but of course it is not; this is the oil of olive oil, of smoothness and ease of drinking; it’s the oil you cook with which bears the spices into the meat and greens. This is oily in that way, endlessly smooth, carrying the flavours of white pepper and gentle stone fruit and grapes. This is dry but full, never feeling oversharp. I buy Hugel Classic range wines in half bottles, which ais an extra convenience worth noting here. 7.5/10, 13%
The Society’s New Zealand Sauvignon Blance 2025 (Marlborough): I haven’t had a Marlborough Sauv Blanc for a long time, but this was a respectable iteration. Aerated, forward tropical fruit, some classic gooseberry and grass notes, fresh and sharp – this is summer evening wine, nothing too smart but easy-drinking and flavourful. One is reminded of some of the big fruity Brewdog beers. Nicely low alcohol. 7/10, 10.5%
Francois d’Allaines Bourgogne Cote Chalonnaise Chardonnay 2020 (Appellation Bourgogne Cote Chalonnaise Controlée): This is fresh but granular, layered. Balanced acidic white fruit up front, with developing flavours of cider, salt, and even bread. Amazing length and weight. A closed nose – “winey”, grapey – holds this back, but this is very good. 8/10, 13%
Domaine Montangeron Fleurie 2024 (Appellation Fleurie Controlée): Quiet nose, just a hint of violets, but a forward, bright palate of red and black fruits, and then a really impressive length resting on a structure of rounded, silky tannins. With a complex or even just loud nose, this would have stepped up to a very high level. Good with pork meatballs. 7.5/10, 13%
Quote of the Week – Patrick Leigh Fermor on Humanising Mentorship
“It is hard to think of anyone less didactic than my host [the Baron “Pips” von Schey]. Yet, without any effort, he exercised an emancipating and de-barbarizing influence similar to the mood that radiates from a few exceptionally gifted dons: liberators, that is, whose tact, insight, humour and originality clear the air and store it with new oxygen. He resembled a much-travelled – a friend of Voltaire and Diderot, perhaps – who, after enjoying and exhausting the intrigues and frivolities of half a dozen European courts, had retired to his books in some remote and well wooded shire.” – Patrick Leigh Fermor, A Time of Gifts
Let us summarize the qualities and the effects LeighFermor attributes to a fine mentor:
QUALITIES:
-tact
-insight
-humour
-originality
EFFECTS:
-emancipating
-de-barbarizing
-clearing the air, storing it with new oxygen
I suppose it all goes without saying that behind all this, Leigh Fermor is talking about a cultured, intelligent, experienced European aristocrat (and, what’s more, an aristocratic of Jewish banking descent – a potent mix). The qualities, therefore, are not “being polite”, “not stupid”, “funny”, “creative”, not that these are bad qualities – he means a whole number of things behind each term.
“Pips” von Schey is the sort of man you end up with if there is space for genuine leisure in a society, and if a culture values “cultivation”. The effects follow upon the qualities – they are not easily divorced, or simply transferrable to an intelligent and well-mannered person. “Emancipating” here has to do with “de-barbarizing” and “clearing the air”; this is not a moral emancipation or anything similar, but an intellectual one, the opportunity for an eighteen-year-old to see vast new vistas beyond oneself and the level of ideas one has grown into. One’s ideas may ultimately remain the same, but (God willing) at a significantly higher level of quality, and without a live relationship with other ideas. To be de-barbarized is, essentially, to be humanised – to leave the instinctive and the tribal and to find oneself in the great flow of history and of human experience, and thereby all the more present in the specific and the local. Barbarism is generic, universal, flattening; you may study Attila’s career for the evidence. Humanism absorbs and is changed by what is absorbed.
I have benefited from “a few exceptionally gifted dons” myself in this respect – I think of Robert Evans, Gillian Boughton, my doktorvater Paul Middleton, and at a junior level my old tutor Jean Young, and before even that my grandfather. At my grandparents, in a great oasis of civility and calm, listening to Hemingway being read on the radio, or pulling out old volumes of The Strand reading the original prints of Sherlock Holmes, or opening up Hazlitt and learning about the difference between hypocrisy and cant – but also lifting potatoes in the allotment, debating at table til late into the evening, light refracting from crystal sets. With Jean, having a generous ear to outline my juvenile distaste for Antony and Cleopatra, and between my rants being pressed deeper into the texts, into the people behind them, into the tradition they exist in. Robert’s open-ended questions in lectures, Paul’s catholic generosity towards an ideological foe in our office debates, wideranging and laughter-filled close readings in Gillian’s seminars. Pedagogy is equal parts drawing out and “putting in”, to use Chesterton’s images; if nothing is put in, there is no raw stuff for the mind to work upon. Nevertheless, a debarbarising pedagogy is in one sense unideological (in another sense it is profoundly “ideological”, driven by transcendent ideals which cannot be queried): it is least of all interested in the vindication of the pedagogue’s own views, because the task is to draw the student into a much wider and more exciting world and tradition.
To some degree this is also an experience one can have by reading the old writers with an open mind. I think Plato was my first taste of this. Plato is didactic, unlike Pips, but he emphasizes rigour, and sometimes somebody like a real Socrates slips through; the gentle ironies in the Euthryphro or Ion are those of a happily disillusioned old man, disillusioned of the need to be proven right; Plato, one suspects, never quite lost that insecurity, and the most strident moments of (say) the Gorgias or Republic reflect this. I think moments in Shakespeare had some of the same effect, because there is no bigger-minded writer than Shakespeare. He is a proof that poetic communication is not simply the bare idea, but the experience of the idea, the capture of the reader into the world and feeling of the poem. Indeed, this effect of his continues for me to this day: my first adult reading of The Tempest was an immersion in forgiveness and the turn away from power to cooperation, much more effective than any mere summary of the idea.
This sounds good – but how are we to cultivate tact (gentleness, openness, the gifted humility of the wiser giving space to the neophyte), insight (hard experience of life combined with the intellectual framework to process it), humour (a lack of self-seriousness, a quickness to find light in things, bearing with one an invitation to others to be joyful), and originality (again, I think, not mere inventiveness, but rather openness, the capacity to make fresh connections and to respond to one’s conversation partner without gulfing them in presumptions)?
There is a curious thing that our truly leisured classes are smaller now than once they were, but we generally have a better “mode” leisure than formerly. That, I suppose, must be part of the solution – the turning of part of whatever leisure we have towards our own de-barbarisation. I suppose there is a degree of absurdity to this, asking the blind to guide themselves out of the cave, but so might an Eastern Roman ambassador seeing the baptistry at Poitiers, that grandfather of Durham and Chartres.
The Story of Yanagawa’s Canals, d. Takahata (1987)
I don’t mean to be too cute, but I enjoy that possibly the best Studio Ghibli film isn’t animated or a cinematic film. Co-founder Takahata’s first production for the studio is a live-action documentary, running over two and a half hours, covering the “Venice of the East”, Yanagawa.
Not speaking Japanese is not really an issue here – aside from a few talking head scenes, context is apparent, and really this is a visual (and musical) experience. The camera travels down a tree-shaded side canal; a high shot above a road bridge in the city shows the passengers of a boat ducking underneath as modern life proceeds above; old women wash their laundry and pots as tourist boats go by; boys play rugby in a stubbly field beside the water; fishermen cast nets by night; fireworks fly above a Noh play performed on a prefab boat specially put together for the festival.
This is very Takahatan in that it deals with pre-modern Japan, or its remnants; it deals with environmental themes (the dredging and cleaning of the canals come up a lot); it shows a slower pace of life and an integrated approach to living with nature. In his other work, these comes through clearest in Pom Poko (Tanuki in the Tama Hills try to resist them being built over), Only Yesterday (city girl returns to her rural home to find herself), and perhaps Gauche the Cellist (struggling orchestral cellist learns how to play with soul from animals and the weather). Ultimately, though, these are the themes of Ghibli – Miyazaki consciously adopted Takahata’s moral depth and theming, and his big works (Nausicaa, Mononoke, Spirited Away, Boy and the Heron) all work those out.
Beautifully shot, meditative, sublime in the sense that meanings and provocations enter the mind under any conscious filter.
5/5
Spider-Noir, Episodes 1-3
Nicholas Cage was last a superhero – as far as I know – as Ghost Rider, but a grizzled old noir detective is a much better fit for him. Spiderman Noir is an alternate Spiderman who you can see in the animated Spiderverse movies; I’ve read plenty of Noirverse comics over time, and they’re usually good fun, though I don’t know how they’ve fared recently.
Up to episode 3, at least – and I expect this whole series – this is a standalone series with no Spiderverse connections. It’s also filmed for black and white (though, in cowardly fashion, Amazon offer the choice of watching a colour version). Cage plays Ben Reilly: an occasional alternate universe Spiderman, in this case a hardboiled detective in a Noir world which seems, timeline wise, to be somewhere near ours (Vietnam is mentioned), but with technology a little behind or different (think Batman: The Animated Series).
It is, basically, very good fun. Cage mixes the serious and the camp with some degree of finesse, and the slow build into the tortured ex-superhero putting back on the mask is well presented. Nothing is very complex – we know who our femme fatale is (Felicia Hardy), we know who the bad guys are (Brendan Gleeson’s very effective mob boss, the US and City Governments to some degree), we have a wisecracking sidekick (Reilly’s secretary who has some detective skills of her own). It’s a series of tropes exemplified and that is both fine and in this case very enjoyable. The music is excellent, too. I don’t really expect this to reach new heights of sublimity, but I’m here for what it has to offer.