'In a Room Full of Sunshine'

“Most owls seem to hoot exactly in B flat according to several pitch-pipes used in tuning of harpsichords, and as strictly at concert pitch.”

The auditor here is Gilbert White, writing in Hampshire in 1770 in The Natural History and Antiquities of Selborne (1789). How rare is such a mind? White heard owl music. How many in the eighteenth century (or today) perceived such a convergence of worlds? He brought owls into the concert hall. I’m musically illiterate though I often see owls on campus and hear them in our neighborhood. Listen to the calls of great horned and barred owls.

I read the sentence quoted above not in White but in The English Year: From Diaries and Letters (Oxford University Press, 1967), edited by the poet Geoffrey Grigson. In his introduction, Grigson explains that he has collected observations by English writers of “something seen, something sensed, something or other felt and enjoyed, in the country around them, day after day, month after month, through the year.” Grigson gives the passage from White’s journal today’s date, Dec. 4.

The editor includes two other passages for Dec. 4, the first by Thomas Hardy, written in 1884 in Dorset: “A gusty wind makes the raindrops hit the window in stars, and the sunshine flaps open and shut like a fan, flinging into the room a tin-coloured light.”

One can see why Grigson selected the passage from Hardy’s journal as quoted by his wife, Florence Emily Hardy, in The Life of Thomas Hardy. Each image – stars, fan, “tin-coloured light” – is peculiar yet exactly right, much like Hardy’s poetry.

The other quote is from a writer unknown to me, George Sturt: “Ice lay hidden in the green of the Brussels sprouts that we gathered for dinner.”  It’s drawn from Sturt’s journal, written in 1892 in Surrey, and reads like an Imagist poem. Grigson has a fondness for arresting images and makes a point of avoiding passages that attempt to make grand philosophical statements. The quality of the writing is consistently outstanding.

One more example: Dec. 1 is represented by a fragment from William Cowper, the opening words of a letter the poet wrote to his friend the Rev. John Newton in 1789: “On this fine first of December, under an unclouded sky, and in a room full of sunshine. . . .”