How the seasons inform our artistic culture

The seasons give shape and rhythm, as certain as the heartbeat. The poet and artist Ian Hamilton Finlay once proposed the idea of one-word poems. The title could be any length, but the poem would consist of a single word. For example: “One (Orange) Arm of the World’s Oldest Windmill” — that’s the title. “One (Orange) Arm of the World’s Oldest Windmill”.

Can we decode that one?

Windmills have their four great arms revolving, so the world’s oldest windmill has to be the four seasons. The one arm which is orange has to be a season — and the one-word poem is: “autumn”.

There’s magic in that. It’s like a riddle or what’s called a “kenning” — a metaphorical phrase that refers to the literal world through the imagination, like “The Whale’s Road” for the ocean, or “The Tree of Strings” for the harp. But the turn of the seasons, and the resources of the arts in our understanding of them, is our focus here. And it takes us through the cycle. If Beethoven’s Sixth is a high-point of summer, there is an autumn coming. But stay for a moment with that vast simplicity and teeming plenitude. This is the world before the Fall, the Garden of Paradise. John Milton is its poet.

Milton is sometimes considered brutally masculine, a puritanical Cromwellian, stern and austere. But DH Lawrence’s famous advice — never trust the teller, trust the tale, or, never heed the biography, go to the words themselves — was never more appropriate. There’s an image of the blind poet, turned sideways on his big chair, head over one arm, legs over the other, hand on brow, beginning his dictation to his daughter with a sigh: “Now I’m ready — milk me!” — and this chimes with his depiction of our first progenitors:

Not equal, as their sex not equal seemed;

For contemplation he and valour formed,

For softness she and sweet attractive grace;

He for God only, she for God in him.

That might be damning enough, if we were to mock it, and “mock mockers after that”. But let’s look at the world of Eve and Adam. Milton’s description of the creation of the animals and insects uses a vocabulary of close focus and detail: “The tawny lion […] springs as broke from bonds, / And rampant shakes his brinded mane” and then,

came forth whatever creeps the ground,

Insect or worm: those waved their limber fans

For wings…

In all the liveries decked of summer’s pride

With spots of gold and purple, azure and green;

…not all

Minims of nature; some of serpent kind,

Wondrous in length and corpulence…

…First crept

The parsimonious emmet, provident

Of future…

The rest are numberless…

Those “minims of nature” and the ant — the “parsimonious emmet” — all this speaks of a world of unembarrassed splendour, a coherent, unbroken, comprehensive universe of natural unity in which humanity is carefully and happily accommodated.

But it doesn’t last.

Paradise Lost would be magnificent for its vision of the Garden alone, but what happens in the course of the poem turns it into a much more profoundly human document, not only as Satan is expelled and turns into the prototype of the great Romantic Sinners, but even more movingly, in the greatness that comes upon Adam as he recognises, and finds a way to carry the burden of responsibility for his own human guilt.

The Funeral March in Beethoven’s third symphony begins with the hushed statement of the principal theme and that theme runs forward with inexorable push and purpose and drive. Whenever you begin to think he’s simply repeating himself, he turns a variation with astonishing and glorious invention. There are four major variations in the movement, but the most staggering one comes about eight minutes in. Just as the Fall of Adam and Eve is prefigured in the apple and the serpent in the Garden, the seeds of this development are there in the simple theme of the Funeral March itself.

Yet it comes without warning, a grand fugue enacting a kind of descent, growing and deepening in tension and force. It is one of the most gripping passages in symphonic literature, and a lifetime might be spent studying the symphony of which it is only a part.

But the point I want to emphasise here is that what that music does is similar to what happens in Milton and, most radically, in Shakespeare. It represents a kind of metaphysical reality, a reality beyond the physical world but that runs through the physical and the living. It is a reality bound up with the seasons, the facts of growth and decay, of birth and maturity and death. And the arts are our best understanding of these facts and this reality.

SHAKESPEARE’S comedy affords the most familiar example of this. When Satesmen and Officers of Law make their attempts to rule and order a world of unpredictable desires, we know the course of love will overturn their pious assertions. Shakespeare’s festive comedy is a happy recognition of holiday in nature and release from the “workaday” world. Spring becomes summer.

But it goes deeper.

In the comedy of Twelfth Night, Love’s Labours Lost and even in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, the most wonderful celebration of love and love’s victories, there is always a sense that if the wrong road had been taken, just underneath or above what’s happening, a much more dangerous and probably hostile nature is waiting to erupt in volcanic upheaval or torrential downpour. The comedies are never too far away from the tragic potential inherent in them.

In Julius Caesar, Brutus notes the lack in himself of Antony’s ‘quick spirit’ and ‘gamesomeness’. This alerts us to qualities that are more than required in the full, human universe Shakespeare’s plays inhabit. In Michael Long’s terms, it requires “a flexibility, an openness, a consciousness of ambiguity and relativity to which [...] the very necessity of [...] ordering is […] opposed.”

The complex contradictions here might lead to festive comedy, but they might just as surely lead to tragic loss. The sense of high summer’s plenitude must give way to autumn’s withering and the darkness and death of winter.

At the end of Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind” there is a rhetorical, and unconvincing, question: “If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?” You know the answer is heavily implied: No, of course, spring will be coming right along and there’s nothing to worry about really. But Shakespeare’s spring is much tougher than this, and the winter that passes before it is much more costly and violent. It is stronger, and in the end more reliable than the Romantic poets could allow, and it is also more beautiful.

Something of that hopeful beauty can be glimpsed, too, through the deep pessimism of Joseph Conrad. In Lord Jim, a character named Stein notes the ambivalent closeness of comedy and tragedy and offers his answer and advice: “Yes! Very funny this terrible thing is. A man that is born falls into a dream like a man who falls into the sea. If he tries to climb out into the air as inexperienced people endeavour to do, he drowns — nicht war? […] No! I tell you! The way is to the destructive element submit yourself, and with the exertions of your hands and feet in the water make the deep, deep sea keep you up.”

This is not simply surrender: great exertion is required. But a kind of submission must also take place, a recognition of the ambivalence of destruction and creation.

And that’s difficult. We’ll have to come back to it.