Simon Coleman

Richard Jefferies wrote two great essays on the theme of Trafalgar Square in London.  One of them, ‘Sunlight in a London Square’, has already been featured on this website.  The following quote is from ‘The Lions in Trafalgar Square’ which explores the relationship between human life and the great unknown, with Landseer’s huge lions symbolising a link between ourselves and the cosmos.

 

‘At summer noontide, when the day surrounds us and it is bright light even in the shadow, I like to stand by one of the lions and yield to the old feeling. The sunshine glows on the dusky creature, as it seems, not on the surface, but under the skin, as if it came up from out of the limb. The roar of the rolling wheels sinks and becomes distant as the sound of a waterfall when dreams are coming. All the abundant human life is smoothed and levelled, the abruptness of the individuals lost in the flowing current, like separate flowers drawn along in a border, like music heard so far off that the notes are molten and the theme only remains. The abyss of the sky over and the ancient sun are near. They only are close at hand, they and immortal thought. When the yellow Syrian lions stood in old time of Egypt, then too, the sunlight gleamed on the eyes of men, as now this hour on mine. The same consciousness of light, the same sun, but the eyes that saw it and mine, how far apart! The immense lion here beside me expresses larger nature—cosmos—the ever-existent thought which sustains the world. Massiveness exalts the mind till the vast roads of space which the sun tramples are as an arm’s-length. Such a moment cannot endure long; gradually the roar deepens, the current resolves into individuals, the houses return—it is only a square.’

 

Here is a link to the full text.   http://www.gutenberg.org/files/27516/27516-h/27516-h.htm#THE_LIONS_IN_TRAFALGAR_SQUARE

 

I really encourage people to read the essay because it possesses a true strength of heart and mind.  I can’t fully explain what I mean by that; nor can I clearly explain why the essay has such a powerful effect on me.  Jefferies celebrates the lions as great art:

 

‘…these are truer and more real, and, besides, these are lions to whom has been added the heart of a man. Nothing disfigures them; smoke and, what is much worse, black rain—rain which washes the atmosphere of the suspended mud—does not affect them in the least. If the choke-damp of fog obscures them, it leaves no stain on the design; if the surfaces be stained, the idea made tangible in metal is not. They are no more touched than Time itself by the alternations of the seasons. The only noble open-air work of native art in the four-million city, they rest there supreme and are the centre.’

 

He then launches into an attack on the fashionable art of his day which he finds shallow and untrue to nature.  This short outburst is the one small blemish on the essay.  Having read the work a number of times, I began to see that it’s not really about visual art.  What I sense it possesses are poetic ideas of real importance.  I’m not a poet but I do think that poetic ideas exist in all people, whether or not they are ever recognised or expressed.  The belief that we can go beyond the given, the defined, our own private and petty fates, the expected outcomes of thought and action, and confront the unknown – belongs to the poetic insight and this, I feel, is what holds the essay together.

 

The mind, the idea, expressed by Jefferies’ lions, opens up possibilities for accessing new realms of thought and imagination – ‘cosmic’ realms where human life might know something of a greater Nature.  Time collapses, but the experience is fleeting as all true insights are.

 

How urgently we need poetic ideas in our data-driven world controlled by an ideologically-focused mass-media, not necessarily to escape it but to feel beyond it towards larger and freer channels of thought.  We can’t all be poets in the literary sense, but accessing the poetic archetype is surely a human necessity.