The novelist and poet Vita Sackville-West, probably best known today for the garden she and her husband Harold Nicolson created at Sissinghurst Castle in Kent, was born at Knole, a house that was left, when her father died, to her uncle. She had a nostalgic fascination for the Country House. Although she was not blind to the inequity and waste on which country houses were often built, she saw in the finest of them “the very spirit of England”, as she wrote in Knole and the Sackvilles (1922). Rather than the Palladian palaces of Blenheim or Chatsworth, she admired the “small manor houses which hide themselves away so innumerably among the counties”: “these irregular roofs, this easy straying up the contours of the hill, these cool-coloured walls, these calm gables, and dark windows mirroring the sun”.
Soon after her book about Knole was published, Sackville-West met Virginia Woolf. They fell in love and Woolf’s novel Orlando (1928), described by Sackville-West’s son Nigel Nicolson as “the longest and most charming love letter in literature”, is often seen as Woolf’s attempt to give to her lover in fiction the house she had been denied in fact. But Woolf too recognized that times had changed: “the house was no longer hers entirely, she sighed. It belonged to time now; to history; was past the touch and control of the living. Never would beer be spilt here any more … or holes burnt in the carpet … chairs and beds were empty … the great wings of silence beat up and down the empty house”.
But it was perhaps Sackville-West’s attachment to the land itself, rather than to the houses that stood on it, that inspired her finest writing. U. A. Fanthorpe once commented that where Sackville-West’s prose can be “aristocratic”, her poetry is “hard and definite, democratic, small in scale … doggedly rooted in Kent”. What Sackville-West needed was someone to say “Go more slowly. Mind the small things” – a lesson Sackville-West had in fact learnt from another garden poet, Andrew Marvell, whose words she quotes in an essay on his poetry: “Men may spare their pains where Nature is at work, and the world will not go faster for our driving”.
“Winter Afternoon” was first published in the TLS in 1938, less than a year before the outbreak of the Second World War, and then in Selected Poems (1941). Its attempt to find comfort and reassurance in the succession of the seasons and the rhythms of the countryside belongs to a pastoral tradition to which writers often turn at times of crisis. But it is the gardener’s sharp eye for detail that convinces us, here, that this is no mere trope for Sackville-West: it is a passionate conviction, born of love and deep belief.
Winter Afternoon
Summer may boast her sweets, but sterner days
Strip country bare and gild the nervous trees
With such an ancient light as summer never knew,
Low and experienced sun, aslant, askew,
Old man of seasons bent on crooked knees.
(See, on the moat’s embankment, like a frieze,
The slow procession leads the punctual hour
Across the primrose of the evening’s flower:
Two heifers treading the appointed ways,
Followed by a man with a stick,
And waddling cygnet and a dozen ducks
Strung out in ludicrous yet due design,
In grave march, never quick,
All homing in their usual evening line.)
Here is no colour, here but gold and ash.
Cold, cold the night will be; the dusk is chilled
Already with the winter’s coiling lash;
Earth to the moon will blanch.
Yet, rare musician sumptuously skilled,
The sunlight with a sinking finger plucks
Last notes from each bare branch.
Goldsmith of fields already brownly tilled,
Gilder of ridges left behind the plough,
Layer of gold leaf where no leaf remains,
The sunlight in an aged actor’s bow
Takes rich and low farewell of summer’s strains.
* * *
Ah, with what beauty did he touch the trees,
Ah, with what beauty did he touch the fields!
So delicate, so rich, so altering a touch
It held the heart confuted in a clutch;
An altering touch that magnified the heart
And set it from the common lines apart.
Such moments come, and shatter prudent shields,
Our poor reminders of mortalities.
* * *
(See, up the track come wagons strongly drawn,
Passing the window with their outer life;
Trusses of fodder, timber newly sawn,
Loads for a steady team.
The ruts are frosted and the horses steam
Snorting with foot-fall effort up the lane;
The carter’s boy alongside leaves the rein,
And pares a hazel switch with sharpened knife.
How calm, how strong, how permanent, how sane,
The venerable necessary theme!)
* * *
Is this the world’s last day, so placid seem
Earth and her beasts and men and seasons’ range?
So, for a million years, has life worked on
Varied from continent to continent,
From Asia to a patch of little Kent,
A ploughshare carving through the centuries,
Is this the world’s last day, that may exchange
Traditions for catastrophes?
All effort, patient or heroic, gone?
The little knowledge perilously won
Since men desire, inquire, and still aspire,
Scrapped on a planet’s paltry pyre
To perish half-way done?
* * *
Reprieve and ruin, ruin and reprieve.
Still the dread sentence rumbles like a far
Delaying storm above the herded sheep.
So long delaying that the soul takes leave
In reassurance still to disbelieve,
And still to live, and still to sow and reap.
Still rises once again the evening star
In ordered juncture as we, singly blest,
Turn our brave planet to a further rest
And let our hamlets fold themselves in sleep.
VITA SACKVILLE-WEST (1938)
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