Where the forest murmurs

by William Sharp

It is rarely now alluded to as the Galaxy, and probably never by unlettered people. In most parts of England for centuries, and it is said in many parts still, the common designation is ‘The Way of Saint James.’ This has a singular correspondence in the name popular among the French peasants, ‘the Road of Saint Jacques of Compostella.’ Originally a like designation was common in Spain, though for a thousand years the popular epithet runs El Camino de Santiago, after the Warrior-Saint of the Iberian peoples. I am told that ‘the Way of Saint James’ is common in certain counties of England, but I have never heard it, nor do I wholly recall the reason of this particular nomenclature. In some form the road-idea continually recurs. How many readers of these notes will know that the familiar ‘Watling Street’—that ancient thoroughfare from Chester through the heart of London to Dover—was also applied to this Galaxy that perchance they may look at to-night from quiet country-side, or village, or distant towns, or by the turbulent seas of our unquiet coasts, or by still waters wherein the reflection lies and scintillates like a phantom phosphorescence. Watling Street does not sound a poetic equivalent for the Milky Way, but it has a finer and more ancient derivation than ‘the Way of Saint James.’ The word goes back to Hoveden’s ‘Watlinga-Strete,’ itself but slightly anglicised from the Anglo-Saxon Waetlinga Straet, where the words mean the Path of the Waetlings, the giant sons of King Waetla, possibly identical with the giant Sons of Turenn of ancient Gaelic legend, heroes who went out to achieve deeds impossible to men, and traversed earth and sea and heaven itself in their vast epical wanderings. Another curious old English name of the Galaxy, of great beauty in its significance, is ‘Walsyngham Way.’ Why the Galaxy should be so called might well puzzle us, were it not explained by the fact that up till near the middle of the sixteenth century one of the most common English names of the Virgin Mary was ‘Our Lady of Walsyngham,’ from the fact that the Blessed Mother’s chief shrine in the country was at Walsyngham Abbey in Norfolk. Further, as ‘the Way to Walsyngham’ in common parlance signified the road to the earthly tabernacle of Mary, so ‘Walsyngham Way,’ as applied to the Galaxy, signified the celestial road to the virgin Mother in heaven. Much more barbaric is a name for the Milky Way still to be heard in Celtic Wales, Caer Gwydyon, the Castle or Fortress of Gwython. This Gwython or Gwydyon was a kind of Merlin Sylvestris. He was known as the Enchanter, the Wizard as we would say now, and was feared on this account, and because he was the son of Don, King of the Otherworld, Lord of the Secret People, the ‘fairies’ of later tradition. Like Grania, the beautiful wife of Fionn, whose elopement with Dermid and their subsequent epical odyssey is the subject of one of the greatest and to this day most popular of Gaelic legendary romances, the wife of Gwython fled from his following vengeance from land to land, across seas, over mountains, ‘to the ends of the earth,’ and at last with her faery lover dared the vast untrodden ways of the remote skies. But long before they could reach Arcturus, or whatever the star or planet to which they fled, Gwython overtook them, led by the dust which these mortal if semi-divine fugitives made along the soundless dark blue roads of heaven. He slew them and their winged horses and their aerial hounds, and standing on the verge of space flung the heads and limbs and bodies into infinitude. Hence the meteors and falling stars which at the season of the autumnal equinox and at the approach of winter may still be seen whirling adown the bastions of high heaven. So terrible in tragedy, so titanic the deed, that to all eternity, or as long as our world endures, the phantom iteration of that mighty vengeance shall commemorate the inappeasable anger of Gwython the Enchanter. Is there not convincing evidence in the unpassing dust of that silent highway of the doomed lovers ... the dust of the trampled star-way that no wind of space has blown to this side or to that, that no alchemy of sun or moon has burned up or like dew dissolved?

Besides ‘Watling Street,’ our Anglo-Saxon forbears had Iringes Weg or Wec and Bil-Idun’s Weg; Iringe and Bil-Idun having been famous descendants of the Waetla already alluded to. They were warders of the Bridge of Asgard, the Scandinavian Heaven. In time this Asgard-Bridge came to be given as a name to the Milky Way ... though the later poets applied the epithet also to the Rainbow. Readers of Grimm’s Teutonic Mythology will remember that he cites many collateral instances. Thus the Vikings knew the Galaxy as Wuotanes Straza, or ‘Woden’s Street’; the Dutch have in common use Vronelden Street, ‘the women’s Street’; and the German peasants commonly call it Jakob’s Weg. The Westphalian term is singular and suggestive, ‘Weather Street.’ One wonders if there is any common idea that weather is in any way as closely associated with the Milky Way as are the vernal floods and the autumnal rains with the Pleiades. Probably the bestowal of the name is due to the fact that when the Galaxy is clear and bright and scintillant the weather is serene and dry. A more poetic designation is that of the Finns, who delight in the term Linnunrata, the Birds’ Way, either from an old Finnish and Esthonian legend that once by a miracle all the songs of all the birds of the world were turned into a cloud of snow-white tiny wings, or from the more likely belief that it is the road of winged spirits on their passage from earth to heaven. This is, of course, a very ancient conception. The ancient Hindûs revealed it in the phrase ‘the Path of Ahriman’: the ancient Norse as ‘the Path of the Ghosts’ going to Valhalla: the ancient Gaels as the Hero-Way, leading from Earth to Flatheanas, the Abode of Eternal Youth. It is strange and suggestive that not only the North American aborigines called it ‘the Trail to Ponemah’ (the Hereafter), but that people so rude as the Eskimo and the Bushmen of South Africa call it ‘the Ashen Path,’ the road of fire-ember signals, for the ghosts of the dead. Even the Patagonians speak of the Milky Way as the white pampas where their dead are immortal huntsmen rejoicing in the pursuit of countless ostriches.

But of all popular names I do not think any is more apt and pleasant than that common to the Swedish peasantry, who call the Galaxy Winter Gatan—i.e., ‘Winter Street.’ It is the Winter Street we must all travel some day, if the old poets say true, when the green grass grows on our quiet beds, when the loudest wind will not fret the silence in our tired minds, and when day and night are become old forgotten dreams. May we too find it the Pathway of Peace ... not the least beautiful of the names of the Milky Way, not the least beautiful of the legends connected with that lovely wonder of our nocturnal skies.

SEPTEMBER

September: the very name has magic. In an old book, half in Latin half in English, about the months, which I came upon in a forgotten moth-eaten library years ago, and in part copied, and to my regret have not seen or heard of since, or anywhere been able to trace, I remember a singular passage about this month. Much had been said about the flowers of ‘these golden weekes that doe lye between the thunderous heates of summer and the windy gloomes of winter’; of those flowers and plants which bloom in gardens, and those, as the harebell and poppy and late-flowering gorse, which light the green garths of meadow and woodland; as the bryony, which trails among the broken copses and interweaves the ruddy masses of bramble; as the traveller’s-joy, which hangs its frail wreaths of phantom-snow along the crests of every hedgerow of beech and hornbeam. Of the changing colours of the trees, too, the old writer had much to say: of the limes ‘that become wan and spotted as a doe,’ of the mountain-ash ‘that has its long fingers dyed redd and browne,’ of ‘the wyche-elme whose gold is let loose on the wind after nighte-frosts and cold dawnes.’ Nor did he forget that ‘greate beautie of mistes’ which we all know; and he reached eloquence when he spoke of the apple-orchards and of the wall-fruits of ‘olde manor-gardenns’—‘the peache that women and poetes doe make the queene of fruites,’ ‘the rich glowe and savour of the apricock,’ ‘the delicate jargonell that keepes the sweetes of France in olde warme English gardenns.’ Of wild-fruit, also, he had dainty words and phrases. Blackberries, ‘the darke-blue bilberry,’ the sloe ‘whose excellent purple bloode maketh so fine a comfort,’ ‘the dusky clustres of the hasel,’ ‘the green-smockt filberte,’ and so forth. Even upon mushrooms he had words of sun and wind and dew, so lightsome were they, ardent and joyous, with a swift movement—as though writ by one who remembered gathering ‘musherooms’ in a sun-sweet dawn after a night of heavy dews, in company with another who laughed often in gladness and was dearest and fairest of all dear and fair things. ‘Howbeit,’ he added, after sorrowing that ‘many doe feare these goodly musherooms as poysonis dampe weedes,’ ‘this dothe in nowise abate the exceedynge excellence of Goddes providence that out of the grasse and dewe where nothing was, and where onlie the lytell worme turned in his sporte, come as at the shakynge of bells these delicate meates.’

Then, after some old-world lore about ‘the wayes of nature with beastes and byrdes’ in this month, he goes further afield. ‘And this monthe,’ he says, ‘is the monthe of dreames, and when there is a darke (or secret) fyre in the heartes of poetes, and when the god of Love is fierce and tyrannick in imaginings and dreames, and they doe saye in deedes also, yett not after the midwaye of the monthe; butt whye I know not.’

We hear so much of the poet-loved and poet-sung month of May, and the very name of June is sweet as its roses and white lilies and lavender, that it is become a romantic convention to associate them with ‘dreames’ and the ‘tyrannick’ season of ‘the god of Love.’ But I am convinced that the old Elizabethan or Jacobean naturalist was right. May and June are months of joy, but September is the month of ‘dreames’ and ‘darke fyre.’ Ask those who love nature as the poet is supposed to love her, with something of ecstasy perhaps, certainly with underglow of passion: ask those in whom the imagination is as a quickening and waning but never absent flame: ask this man who travels from month to month seeking what he shall never find, or this woman whose memories and dreams are many, howsoever few her hopes ... and the chance will be that if asked to name the month of the heart’s love, it will be September. I do not altogether know why this should be so, if so it is. There is that in June which has a time-defying magic: May has her sweet affinities with Spring in the human heart: in April are the flutes of Pan: March is stormy with the clarions of the winds: October can be wild with all wildness or be the calm mirror of the passing of the loveliness of the green-world. There is not a month that has not its own signal beauty, so that many love best February, because through her surge of rains appear days of blue wonder, with the song of the missel-thrush tost like spray from bare boughs—or November, because in the grey silence one may hear the fall of the sere leaves, and see mist and wan blueness make a new magic among deserted woods—or January, when all the visible world lies in a white trance, strange and still and miraculous as death transfigured to a brief and terrible loveliness on the face of one suddenly quiet from the fever of youth and proud beauty. There is not a month when the gold of the sun and the silver of the moon are not woven, when the rose of sunset does not lie upon hills which reddened to the rose of dawn, when the rainbow is not let loose from the tangled nets of rain and wind, when the morning-star and the evening-star do not rise and set.

And yet, for some, there is no month that has the veiled magic of September.

‘The month of peace,’ ‘the month of beauty,’ it is called in many Gaelic songs and tales; and often, ‘Summer-end.’ I remember an old rann, perhaps still said or sung before the peat-fires, that it was in this month God created Peace; again, an island-tale of Christ as a shepherd and the months as sheep strayed upon the hills of time. The Shepherd went out upon the hills, and gathered them one by one, and led them to the fold: but, before the fold was reached, a great wind of snow came down out of the corries, and on the left a wild flood arose, and on the narrow path there was room only, and that hardly, for the Shepherd. So He looked to see which one of the twelve He might perchance save, by lifting it in His strong arms and going with it alone to the fold. He looked long, for all were the children of His Father. Then He lifted September, saying, ‘Even so, because thou art the month of fulfilment, and because thy secret name is Peace.’ But when He came out of the darkness to the fold, the Shepherd went back between the wild lips of flood and tempest, and brought to the fold June, saying, ‘Because thy secret name is Joy’: and, in turn, one by one, He brought each to the fold, saying unto each, in this order, ‘May, because thy secret name is Love’; ‘April, because thou art made of tears and laughter’; ‘July, because thou art Beauty’; ‘August, thou quiet Mother’; ‘October, because thy name is Content’; ‘March, because thy name is Strife’; ‘February, because thy name is Hope’; ‘November, because thy name is Silence’; ‘January, because thou art Death’; and at the last, ‘December, whom I have left to the end, for neither tempest could whelm nor flood drown thee, for thy name is the Resurrection and the Life.’

And when the tale was told, some one would say, ‘But how, then, was September chosen first?’