Under the Blossoming Pear Tree

For the last two days I’ve been off work recovering from surgery to repair both an umbilical hernia and an epigastric hernia. I was off five days before then, quarantining after a COVID-19 test. Yes, even though I’ve been vaccinated since January, I still needed to be tested and go into quarantine ahead of the day of my surgery (which was this past Wednesday).

Anyway, I’m making a good and steady recovery; obviously very sore and being very careful in moving around. One thing I’ve enjoyed doing is sitting out in the backyard under the pear tree, which is just finishing its blossoming phase.

You may recall that back in March, on the spring equinox actually (left), I also enjoyed sitting under this pear tree as I read a biography of the great Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821). Well, believe it or not, I’m still reading that same biography.

It’s Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats by John Evangelist Walsh.

Like I said back in March . . . Yes, I know it’s an odd book to be reading at a time of year that’s all about new life. And yet human experience is always a profound blending of life and death, beginnings and endings, loss and promise, and, in the midst of such things, the longing and search for meaning. My work as a spiritual health provider (or chaplain) in the field of palliative care has certainly brought the mysterious gravity of both this longing and search for meaning to my awareness, and yet I’m not unsettled by acknowledging and sitting with it, even under a pear tree!

Which is a good segue into my sharing of the following from John Evangelist Walsh’s excellent Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats.

[As death approached, Keats questioned why he was] dying overcome by doubt and fear and in utter misery of spirit. Why [was] God doing this awful thing, depriving [him] of the final comfort he grants so many! (How familiar a cry that is, how much it resembles the earnest petition voiced by the father of the possessed boy to Jesus, “I believe, help thou my unbelief!”) In response, the appalled [friend and companion] Joseph Severn could only offer to read some passages from Jeremy Taylor’s Holy Dying. In [a letter to his friend Haslam] he added a fervent, obviously sincere hope “that some angel of goodness will lead [Keats] through this dark wilderness.”

The question of whether Keats – a poet at the same time both pagan and godly – on his deathbed came back to the faith he had disdained as a free-thinking teenager (becoming, if anything precisely, a Deist) cannot now be settled. The question remains, though, tantalizing as ever, still eliciting a cacaphony of opinion. One biographer will imperiously dismiss the very possibility, another will say it is unlikely or extremely improbable. Very few are willing to concede that it might have happened, that Keats in his last hours might have turned back to the faith of his youth.

Robert Gittings, one of the ablest of Keats’ chroniclers, briefly reviews the evidence, then concludes that everything said by Severn on the topic, early and late, was simply “to persuade himself that Keats had died a Christian.” The poet certainly did, Gittings agrees, become “more reconciled” to his fate at the end, but there is “no sign that he accepted any of the comforts of his friend’s Christianity.” What Gittings means to say is clear, of course, but he has not quite said it, showing how hard it can be when treating this question to keep the scales in balance. Some of the comforts of Christianty, Keats certainly did accept, and with gratitude, namely, the spiritual insights provided by Bishop Jeremy Taylor. During many weeks before his death, Keats listened attentively to Severn reading from the pages of Holy Dying, often twice a day, morning and evening. (Did Severn in answer to Keats’ unconscious prayer read the section entitled, “Of the practice of the grace of faith in time od sickness,” or another called, “Of repentence in time of sickness”? Perhaps Keats himself would have preferred to hear “Consideration of the Vanity and shortness of man’s life,” or a briefer comment on “The miseries of man’s life”).

Certainly Keats gave no definite sign of conversion, none that has entered the record. Yet there is one other small bit of evidence to be considered, one that has never been given it due weight, that is, the good example set by Severn’s tireless service on behalf of his friend during those long months in Rome. Keats knew very well that what his companion was doing for him was something out of the ordinary, knew that Severn was risking both his artistic future and his health (the interminable sleepless nights and the unrelenting daily attention, if nothing else). It puzzled him to explain why and how so young a man, with so much of his own life to live, could do so much so uncomplainingly. Then the answered dawned.

“Severn,” said Keats suddenly one day, “I now understand how you can hear all this – ’Tis your Christan faith; and here I am, with desperation in death that would disgrace the commonest fellow!” It is correct, of course, that Severn’s religious faith played its large part in enabling him to carry the strain (he said so himself), nor was it the first time that example spoke so loudly. Keats’ not only seeing the truth but putting it into words must not be lightly passed over. He’d be given, it appears, rather more than a nudge toward reconciliation.

Left: A portrait of Joseph Severn by his friend Seymour Kirkup (1822).

In later years Severn occasionally reverted to the question of Keats’ spiritual hunger in those last hours. Once in an article published in 1863 in both England and America, he recalled how he it had been with Keats during those pathetic final days at No. 26: “In all he then uttered he breathed a simple, Christian spirit; indeed I always think that he died a Christian, that 'Mercy,' was trembling on his dying lips, and that his tortured soul was received by those Blessed Hands which could alone welcome it.” In that belated statement a reader may place as much or as little credence as he wishes – taking care to note Severn’s own judicious “I always think,” which rightly does not insist on the accuracy of his opinion. But concerning one additional fact, since it was reported at the time by the man who witnessed it, there is no arguement. In his last hours when the suffering Keats felt that death was hovering only hours away, more than once he murmured a heartfelt Thank God!

– John Evangelist Walsh
From Darkling I Listen:
The Last Days and Death of John Keats
St. Martin's Pess, 1999
pp. 111-113

Related Off-site Links:
Ode to My Hero, John Keats – Simon Armitage (The Times, February 20, 2021).
John Keats: Five Poets on His Best Poems, 200 Years Since His Death – Ruth Padel, Will Harris, Mary Jean Chan, Rachel Long and Seán Hewitt (The Guardian, February 23, 2021).
Bringing Keats Back to Life – Anna Russell (The New Yorker, March 24, 2021).
How a Generation of Consumptives Defined 19th-century Romanticism – Michael Barrett (Aeon, April 10, 2017).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Reading About Keats on the Spring Equinox
• Celebrating the “Color of Spring” . . . and a Cosmic Notion of the Christ
• Whether Christian or Muslim, James Foley Remains a “Symbol of Faith Under the Most Brutal of Conditions”
• From the Palliative/Spiritual Care Bookshelf | II | III | IV | V | VI | VII
• George Yancy on the “Unspoken Reality of Death”
• Thomas Moore on the Circling of Nature As the Best Way to Find Our Substance
• The God from the House of Bread: A Bridge Between Christianity and Paganism | II | III | IV
• The Pagan Roots of All Saints Day
• At Hallowtide, Pagan Thoughts on Restoring Our World and Our Souls
• Advent: A "ChristoPagan" Perspective
• Gabriel Fauré's "ChristoPagan" Requiem

Reading About Keats on the Spring Equinox

Here in Minneapolis, the last two Saturday mornings (March 13 and today, March 20) have been just beautiful – warm, sunny, and . . . well, spring-like!

True, we had a mid-week snowfall (right), but there’s now only the smallest remnant of that. So I think it’s safe to say that we’ve seen winter’s last hurrah, especially with today being the spring equinox, a day “both holy and magical.”

I’ve been taking advantage of the return of spring by taking a chair outside and sitting in the backyard to read a book, and the book I’ve been reading is Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats by John Evangelist Walsh.

Yes, I know, some might consider it a rather odd book to be reading at the time of year understood to be all about new life, but human experience is always a profound blending of life and death, beginnings and endings, loss and promise. My work as a spiritual health provider (or chaplain) in the field of palliative care has certainly brought the mysterious gravity of this blending to my awareness, and yet I’m not unsettled by acknowledging and sitting with it.

Speaking of sitting, I should say that my sitting outside under the pear tree and reading a book about the romantic poet John Keats was very much inspired by a scene from Bright Star, when Ben Whishaw, playing Keats, similarly sits in a garden under a tree.

Oh, and trust me; if I had his outfit, I’d be wearing it. For as I’ve noted previously. I could quite happily go through each and every day dressed in the attire of a nineteenth-century gentleman. There’s just something about the style and deportment of such a figure that appeals to me – a reserved veneer masking a sea of passion! At least that’s what I project onto this particular figure, and it’s a projection prompted by a number of characters I’m drawn to in various films and TV shows – Dick Dewy (James Murray) in Under the Greenwood Tree, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) in The Time Machine, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) in Les Misérables, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) in The Woman in Black, John Mornay (Emun Elliott) in The Paradise, Dr. Alexander Sweet (Christian Camargo) in Penny Dreadful, Ross Poldark, that “renegade of principle” (Aidan Turner) in Poldark . . . and, of course, Whishaw as Keats.

Above: Abbie Cornish as Fanny Brawne and Ben Whishaw as John Keats in Jane Campion’s 2009 film Bright Star.

Which is a good segue into my sharing of the following from John Evangelist Walsh’s excellent Darkling I Listen: The Last Days and Death of John Keats.

As April [1819] drew to a close, suddenly, stunningly, from the scribbling of casual love verse [Keats] was swept to an entirely new level of inspiration, lofty past anything he’d known before – beyond his years, beyond his knowledge and experience of life, beyond even the technical artistry he’d shown in his previous writings. In rapid succession he produced four new poems, a ballad and three odes, that have long since found a place among those very few utterances that reach to the very pinnacle of lyric poetry. All four were directly inspired, if on different levels, by his consuming love for Fanny [Brawne].

The remarkable change that overtook Keats at this time was actually signaled in January, in a lesser way, by his writing of The Eve of St. Agnes (not inspired by Fanny yet surely written as his mind was aglow with her image). A long verse-narrative telling a simple love story, it offers little thought or action but much apt description of a sort that has earned it a special place in the hearts of many readers. Some weeks later came the ballad, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” a short but haunting portrayal of a knight whose heart is mysteriously entrammeled by a beautiful, enigmatic woman he meets in the woods (Fanny again). Almost immediately there followed the first of the three odes, “On a Grecian Urn,” then within another few days came the “To a Nightingale,” then “On Melancholy,” all finished by late May.

As with all great art, the three supreme odes have prompted any number of different, even contradictory interpretations – of course, as it should be. It is the special genius of poets to say many things at once, as life itself exhibits not one or two but many interwoven strands intricately patterned. Yet in pursuing the abstruser meanings of these three poems, critics seem often to overlook what is surely their true import and original, underlying inspiration. Each of the three great odes is a muffled cry from the very depths of the the heart over what appears the cruel transience and shortness of life, and the heartbreak of its close. Here is a lover – newly minted – in mortal anguish and despair over the harrowing thought that he, and by extension the woman he loves, will sometime have to die. Momentarily he dreams of alternatives – the seeming permanence to be found in art (“Grecian Urn”), and the soothing absence of individuality among lesser creatures (“Nightingale”). But neither of these ideas, static and lifeless as they are, he finds will serve (“Melancholy”). If being human means eventually to suffer death, it is still far, far better to possess life in all its glorious complexity, freedom, and capacity to feel.

Tragically, after completing the three great odes, Keats was given only another eight months in which to write before illness put a virtual end to his career a full year before his death. In those eight months, still riding the wave of his first inspiration, he wrote many fine things, wonderfully advanced and evocative things, adding to and securing his later fame. But never again, while several times coming close indeed, was he able to attain quite to the lofty height of the three odes. Whatever happened later between him and Fanny Brawne, this must always be remembered in her favor. Keats’ love for her, when it was new and vibrant that spring of 1819, gave him the one thing he so greatly craved and in the end was sure he had lost – literary immortality.

– John Evangelist Walsh
From Darkling I Listen:
The Last Days and Death of John Keats
St. Martin's Pess, 1999
pp. 36-37

Above: Frodo, my downstairs neighbors’ dog.

Related Off-site Links:
Ode to My Hero, John Keats – Simon Armitage (The Times, February 20, 2021).
John Keats: Five Poets on His Best Poems, 200 Years Since His Death – Ruth Padel, Will Harris, Mary Jean Chan, Rachel Long and Seán Hewitt (The Guardian, February 23, 2021).
Bringing Keats Back to Life – Anna Russell (The New Yorker, March 24, 2021).
How a Generation of Consumptives Defined 19th-century Romanticism – Michael Barrett (Aeon, April 10, 2017).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• In This In-Between Time
• A Prayer for the Moment Between
• O Dancer of Creation
• The Landscape Is a Mirror
• Imbolc: Celebrating the Freshness of New Beginnings
• Spring: “Truly the Season for Joy and Hope”
• A Day Both Holy and Magical
• Welcoming the Return of Spring (2018)
• Celebrating the Return of Spring (2017)
• In the Footsteps of Spring: Introduction | Part I | II | III | IV | V

"Of Thistledown and Magic": The Artistry of Ben Whishaw

A tidbit of entertainment news recently caught my attention. It's a short piece by Michaela Morgan about an actor I respect and admire, Ben Whishaw (pictured at right), and a TV show I've liked since I was a child, Doctor Who.

Peter Capaldi revealed this week that he would be playing Doctor Who for the last time in the show’s 2017 Christmas Special.

He announced the news on BBC Radio saying, “One of the greatest privileges of being Doctor Who is to see the world at its best. I can't thank everyone enough. It's been cosmic."

The news has sent the rumour mill into overdrive with fans trying to guess who will be selected to play the 13th Doctor next year.

The bookies favourite is currently openly gay actor Ben Whishaw, who is known for his roles in the James Bond franchise, as well as films such as Bright Star and In the Heart of The Sea. He also voices Paddington Bear, FYI.

The odds on Whishaw are currently at 5-1 with actors Richard Ayoade, Rory Kinnear, Miranda Hart and Jason Flemyng also rumoured to be in contention.

If Whishaw is indeed handed down the sonic screwdriver from Capaldi, he would be the first openly gay actor to play Doctor Who.

Since this piece was published, two other actors have been suggested as possible contenders for the role of the Doctor: Tilda Swinton and Sacha Dhawan. (7/17/17 Update: Jodie Whittaker announced as 13th Doctor.)

To be honest, I don't really care who plays the Doctor (and, yes, the correct name is "The Doctor," not "Doctor Who," which is the name only of the show, not the character!). My big hope is that whoever lands the role won't play the Doctor as manically as the last three actors have (David Tennant especially).

Also, I must admit that Doctor Who has lost much of is appeal for me since the 2011 death of Elizabeth Sladen who played Sarah Jane Smith, the Doctor's time and space travelling companion from years ago (1973-1976), yet who would later make special appearances on the show and even had her own successful spin-off show, The Sarah Jane Adventures (2007-2011).

Anyway, all that being said, I was happy to hear that the talented Ben Whishaw might be playing the Doctor. Time will tell, I guess!

In the meantime, here are three projects – two films and one TV series – that feature Ben and which I highly recommended.



Bright Star
(2009)

I've noted previously that I could quite happily go through each and every day dressed in the attire of a nineteenth-century gentleman. There's just something about the style and deportment of such a figure that appeals to me – a reserved veneer masking a sea of passion! At least that's what I project onto this particular figure, and it's a projection prompted by a number of characters in various films and TV shows – Dick Dewy (James Murray) in Under the Greenwood Tree, Alexander Hartdegen (Guy Pearce) in The Time Machine, Jean Valjean (Hugh Jackman) in Les Misérables, Arthur Kipps (Daniel Radcliffe) in The Woman in Black, John Mornay (Emun Elliott) in The Paradise, Dr. Alexander Sweet (Christian Camargo) in Penny Dreadful, and, of course, Ross Poldark (Aidan Turner) in Poldark.

No wonder, then, that I was immediately drawn to Ben Whishaw's portrayal of English Romantic poet John Keats in Jane Campion's 2009 film Bright Star.

In his November 2, 2009 article in The Telegraph, David Gritten wrote the following about this film and its lead actor.

You wouldn’t quite call it a season of mists and mellow fruitfulness, but there’s a chill in the air as you approach Keats House in Hampstead, and in its grounds, the leaves on the trees are turning various shades of russet. It’s almost autumnal enough to inspire an ode, and in an upstairs room, Ben Whishaw, who plays John Keats in Bright Star, Jane Campion’s new film about the poet, stares intently from a window, immersing himself in the natural beauty the view affords him.

Whishaw, who rose to fame when he played Hamlet in the West End straight out of drama school, is obvious casting to play Keats. In person, he seems the very stereotype of a Romantic poet. He is slightly built, with a gentle, sincere manner. He looks sensitive, and his default facial expression is faintly melancholic.

He virtually admits that he and Keats were a good fit: “Jane was so keen the film should not be 'acted’. She didn’t want to see any Big Acting, so it never felt like a performance. When it came to shooting, the most important thing seemed to be being honest about what you were feeling.”

Campion’s film, for which she also wrote the script, deals with the last three years of Keats’s short life, and sees him through the eyes of his near neighbour Fanny Brawne (played by Australian actress Abbie Cornish). Her family occupied one half of what is now Keats House, while the poet and his friend Charles Brown (Paul Schneider) took the other.

Keats and Fanny (who was largely despised by his friends) had a brief, doomed, ardent love affair which ended when Keats contracted tuberculosis and moved to the warmer climes of Italy to try and alleviate his condition. But he died there at the age of 25, having written some of the greatest poetry in the English language.

And following is Ben himself talking about John Keats and his life and legacy.

We think because he was a great poet he must have been highly thought of in his lifetime. But the critical establishment were very unimpressed by him as a person and a writer. In fact they were savage: one journal completely destroyed his first epic poem, Endymion.

To me, it seems incredible that he managed to get up every day and carry on. But Keats encountered death a lot in his life. Most of his relatives died. And I think that gives you a different perspective on what things mean. As well as sensitivity, he had real single-mindedness and resilience.

In preparing for his role in Bright Star, Ben said in a interview that the "key" to understanding Keats is the poet's concept of "negative capability," the "ability to be in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts without any irritable reaching after fact or reason."

Possessing this ability, Keats had the quality, says Ben, of "being very present in the mystery of life and very open to where life might take him or open to inspiration. . . . To me, this seems to be probably his most essential quality, that kind of level of sensitivity."



Lilting
(2014)

In 2014 Ben starred in Hong Khaou's debut film, Lilting, about a gay man struggling to come to terms with the death of his boyfriend Kai (Andrew Leung) and compelled to tell Kai's grieving Cambodian-Chinese mother Junn (Cheng Pei-pei) about his relationship with her son for the first time.

In August of 2014, Ben was interviewed by The Sunday Times Magazine about his experience of coming out and the similarities between the character he plays in Lilting and his own life.

Here's a little of what Ben shared:

My [coming out] experiences were not dramatic. . . . And everyone was surprisingly lovely. I hadn’t anticipated that they would be, but they were.

I identify with the character in Lilting in as much as I had a lot of fear in doing it for a long time. And who can say what? I’m not sure I know. But it takes courage and people have to do it in their own time, which is a negotiation you see happening in the film.

It’s hard to have a conversation with people you’ve known your whole life about a very intimate thing. It’s massively weighted with all sorts of stuff, whatever the wider world is saying. . . . It’s an intimate and private and difficult conversation for most people.

About Lilting Jonathan Romney writes:

Ben Whishaw plays Richard, a young man who hires a translator (Naomi Christie) to oil the wheels of communication between Junn (Cheng Pei-pei), an elderly Cambodian-Chinese woman living in a retirement home, and her English OAP beau (Peter Bowles). In reality, however, Richard is himself aching to connect with Junn, the mother of his recently deceased lover Kai (Andrew Leung). This delicate low-budget British miniature weaves a complex disquisition on mourning, memory, love and language, with a confident avoidance of overt emotional rhetoric. Director-writer Hong Khaou cleverly weaves Chinese and English dialogue, withholding subtitles when we need to be as much out of the loop as Richard. It's finely performed all round: Whishaw is wry, nervy and vulnerable, and veteran Cheng (a wuxia action queen from the 60s onwards) brings a rueful gravity to Junn, a woman deeply unimpressed by the world around her. Fluid, surprising camerawork (Ula Pontikos) and oblique but unfussy play with time frames make for an affecting, intelligent, unapologetically downbeat feature debut.

London Spy
(2015)

London Spy is a five-part British/American TV series created and written by Tom Rob Smith. It first aired on BBC Two in November-December of 2015. My friend Pete and I recently watched it on DVD. We found it to be both a compelling love story and an intriguing drama/thriller.

Writing about the series in The Guardian, Huw Oliver offers the following synopsis.

Subtler and more romantic than your usual spook fare, the plot spirals out of a gay love story – surely the first such intrigue in a mainstream TV spy drama – and is propelled by Whishaw’s perpetually downtrodden Danny. Working in a stock room by day and frequenting Vauxhall’s clubs by night, Danny is, says Whishaw, a bit lost. But everything changes when he bumps into the beneficent, enigmatic Alex[/Alister] (Edward Holcroft) on Lambeth Bridge in the early hours after a night out. The two characters are vastly different: Alex is an awkward and eloquent maths genius; Danny is, despite his circumstances, cheeky, charming and boyish. But they click and a relationship blossoms. All this time, Danny believes Alex to be an investment banker, but he is in fact a gifted MI6 spy. And when the latter suddenly disappears and the police start asking difficult questions, Danny gets sucked into the shadowy, subversive, terrifying world of espionage.

In her review of the series for The Guardian, Lucy Mangan calls London Spy "an unutterably delicious, satisfying dish," with Whishaw "the most powerful actor ever made out of thistledown and magic."

Writing for TV Insider, Matt Roush shares the following about London Spy.

It's a safe bet you've never seen a sex-pionage yarn quite like BBC America's wildly original and deeply moving London Spy, from novelist Tom Rob Smith (Child 44). A tragic love story masquerading as a spy thriller, this five-part drama is a terrific tour de force for Ben Whishaw as Danny, a romantically wishful, wistful and emotionally fragile drifter who falls for the strong and silent investment banker Alex (Edward Holcroft)—which may not be his real name, and almost surely isn't his true profession.

Their eight-month courtship is captured in passionate and moody detail, although Alex's guarded nature makes him an unending enigma to Danny, a puzzle that only deepens when Alex suddenly disappears. Spy quickly becomes a brooding, haunting and surreal mystery of identity as well as a poignant study of lives lived in the shadows: those of spies as well as homosexuals.

"Romantics make unreliable spies," says Danny's protector/mentor Scotty (a moving Jim Broadbent [left]), a former agent who knows only too well the toll of blackmail and self-denial. But Danny is resolute in pursuing the truth surrounding Alex, despite one contact's warning that "You have the very particular stink of a man out of his depth." The further Danny descends into a rabbit hole of secret conspiracy and paranoia, the more he realizes almost no one is who they seem and that his enemies will go to extraordinary lengths to protect their lies. (The tremendous supporting cast includes, in episodes to come, Oscar nominee Charlotte Rampling and Adrian Lester as pivotal figures from Alex's cloudy, troubled past.)

"You're looking for answers, but are you ready for them?" a voice on the phone taunts Danny. A warning viewers might heed as well, because the audacious revelations in the final chapters are shattering and disturbing reminders of the cost of truth in a world built on deception.

In one powerful scene in episode two of London Spy, Alister's/Alex's mother Frances (Charlotte Rampling) takes Danny aside and attempts to explain her deceased son to him.

Alister didn't think like ordinary people. He didn't feel what ordinary people feel. In his eyes everyone was a puzzle. He took immense satisfaction figuring out what a person wanted and then giving it to them, as if we were all computers waiting for the correct code. Alister could be anything a person wanted him to be. In your case, it appears you craved romance, a good old fashioned love story. He gave it to you. Meanwhile, he continued giving other kinds of stimulation to other kinds of people -- men and women. He was involved with someone who hankered after risk. He would have provided it. Danger. Pain. Submission. Domination. Alister was precocious sexually as he was intellectually. To him they were one and the same. Sex was just another form of decryption.

But Danny isn't having any of it. He responds by calming saying:

I haven't read many books. I haven't been to many places. But I have fucked a lot of people. And there's one thing you just can't fake: inexperience – body's tense when it should be relaxed; it hurts when it should be fun; and it's dirty when it should be clean. I don't care how smart you are. Your muscles can't lie. I'm talking about feeling his inexperience as clearly as I can feel this glass [in my hand]. Do you follow me, Frances? I can see you do. So I know for a fact you're lying. I know for a fact that your son, the man I loved, was a virgin. What I don't understand is why you're so keen to convince me otherwise.

And understanding this, of course, is what Danny is determined to do, no matter what it takes.

In a November 2015 article in The Guardian, Ben shared his take on London Spy and on Danny, the character he plays in it.

It doesn’t really feel like a spy thriller to me, although it sort of is. It’s broader than that, because it’s about a character who’s not within that world, about somebody who stumbles into it and to whom it’s alien and mystifying. So it doesn’t feel like a traditional spy drama in that sense. It’s more about his mind.

In the same article, London Spy's screenwriter and director Tom Rob Smith also comments on Ben's character, Danny.

Danny’s journey is essentially one of meeting people who are extraordinary in some particular way. He’s trying to decode what part these people play in the conspiracy, if there is one. People are very ambiguous and Ben as Danny is looking to figure out what roles these people play. It’s basically a thriller that explores the uncertainty of people, not the uncertainty of institutions.

And finally, from the same Guardian piece, here is Ben's London Spy co-star Harriet Walter (pictured with Ben at right) on the artistry of Ben's acting.

He’s totally truthful. You don’t quite know when he’s practising and when he’s just thinking and when he’s acting. And I constantly, still, need to learn from people like that. We always need to do a check on ourselves about truthfulness because every acting generation has a different conception of it.

Related Off-site Links:
A Day With Ben Whishaw, From Diner Coffee to Onstage Scars – Rebecca Milzoff (Vulture, May 17, 2016).
When You Whishaw Pawn a Star – Petra Halbur (Ponderings of a Cinephile, March 1, 2013).

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Dreaming of Spring
• What We Mean by Love

Winter Beauty

A few images this evening of the winter beauty of both my back yard here in south Minneapolis and along nearby Minnehaha Creek. Of course, the big change since these photos were taken is that the creek is now solidly frozen over.

Oh, and as a special treat this evening I also share John Keats' haunting poem, "The Winter's Wind." Enjoy!

O thou whose face hath felt the Winter’s wind,
Whose eye has seen the snow-clouds hung in mist
And the black elm tops ‘mong the freezing stars,
To thee the spring will be a harvest-time.

O thou, whose only book has been the light
Of supreme darkness which thou feddest on
Night after night when Phœbus was away,
To thee the Spring shall be a triple morn.

O fret not after knowledge- I have none,
And yet my song comes native with the warmth.
O fret not after knowledge- I have none,
And yet the Evening listens. He who saddens
At thought of idleness cannot be idle,
And he’s awake who thinks himself asleep.

– John Keats (1795-1821)

Above: The kind of path upon which one might expect to meet a faun! . . . Perhaps even Pan himself!

[And then I] looked in the very eyes of the Friend and Helper; saw the backward sweep of the curved horns, gleaming in the growing daylight; saw the stern, hooked nose between the kindly eyes that were looking down [at me] humorously, while the bearded mouth broke into a half-smile at the corners; saw the rippling muscles on the arm that lay across the broad chest, the long supple hand still holding the pan-pipes only just fallen away from the parted lips.

– Source

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• Winter Light
• Photo of the Day – December 11, 2016
• A Winter Reflection
• Winter Storm (2016)
• Winter Storm (2012)
• Shadows and Light
• Winter's Return
• A Winter Walk Along Minnehaha Creek
• Photo of the Day – December 9, 2012

Photography: Michael J. Bayly.

“Thou Hast Thy Music Too”

. . . Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

– John Keats
(from “To Autumn,” 1819)

Notes Wikipedia about John Keats’ poem “To Autumn”:

“To Autumn” is the final work in a group of poems known as Keats’ “1819 odes.” Although he had little time throughout 1819 to devote to poetry because of personal problems, he composed “To Autumn” after a walk near Winchester one autumnal evening. The work marks the end of his poetic career as he needed to earn money and could no longer devote himself to the lifestyle of a poet. A little over a year following the publication of “To Autumn” [in 1820], Keats died in Rome.

The poem has three eleven-line stanzas which describe a progression through the season, from the late maturation of the crops to the harvest and to the last days of autumn when winter is nearing. The imagery is richly achieved through the personification of Autumn, and the description of its bounty, its sights and sounds. It has parallels in the work of English landscape artists, with Keats himself describing the fields of stubble that he saw on his walk as being like that in a painting.

The work has been interpreted as a meditation on death; as an allegory of artistic creation; as Keats’ response to the Peterloo Massacre, which took place in the same year; and as an expression of nationalist sentiment. One of the most anthologised English lyric poems, “To Autumn” has been regarded by critics as one of the most perfect short poems in the English language.

“To Autumn” describes, in its three stanzas, three different aspects of the season: its fruitfulness, its labour and its ultimate decline. Through the stanzas there is a progression from early autumn to mid autumn and then to the heralding of winter. Parallel to this, the poem depicts the day turning from morning to afternoon and into dusk. These progressions are joined with a shift from the tactile sense to that of sight and then of sound, creating a three-part symmetry which is missing in Keats’ other odes.

. . . The last stanza contrasts Autumn’s sounds with those of Spring. The sounds that are presented are not only those of Autumn but essentially the gentle sounds of the evening. Gnats wail and lambs bleat in the dusk. As night approaches within the final moments of the song, death is slowly approaching alongside of the end of the year. The full-grown lambs, like the grapes, gourds and hazel nuts will be harvested for the winter. The twittering swallows gather for departure, leaving the fields bare. The whistling red-breast and the chirping cricket are the common sounds of winter. The references to Spring, the growing lambs and the migrating swallows remind the reader that the seasons are a cycle, widening the scope of this stanza from a single season to life in general.

Of all of Keats's poems, “To Autumn,” with its catalog of concrete images, most closely describes a paradise as realized on earth while also focusing on archetypal symbols connected with the season. Within the poem, autumn represents growth, maturation, and finally an approaching death. There is a fulfilling union between the ideal and the real.

– Source

See also the previous Wild Reed posts:
• O Sacred Season of Autumn
• Photo of the Day – October 21, 2012
• An Autumn Walk By Minnehaha Creek
• Photo of the Day – October 7, 2012
• Autumn Hues (2011)
• Photo of the Day – November 17, 2011
• Photo of the Day – October 27, 2011
• Photo of the Day – October 6, 2011
• The Beauty of Autumn in Minnesota
• Photo of the Day – September 29, 2010
• Trempealeau
• Rainy October Afternoon (2008)
• Out and About – September 2007

Related Off-site Link:
November Hare – The Leveret (November 2, 2012).

Photography: Michael J. Bayly.
Sketch of John Keats: Charles Armitage Brown, August 1819, one month before the composition of “To Autumn.”