Lost Lanes of Queen Anne’s Lace

When I first came back to England, on May the 7th, it seemed that summer had come early. The weather was surprisingly hot, and, for me, uncomfortably so. This hot spell lasted a few days before fading, and since then we have had mainly rain and chill, overcast days.

However, during the early warmth after my arrival, I was reminded at times of the peculiar freshness of an English spring or summer, the cool that relieves some of the hottest days, the lushness of the green and the smell from the damp soil. There are aspects to this coolness that I have yet to capture in words, and perhaps soon it will be beyond the reach of human experience, when the changed climate no longer offers such subtleties with seasonal regularity.

Even looking out from the window of the bus that I took back from Heathrow Airport, I am sure I thought of the poem ‘Cut Grass’, by Philip Larkin:

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

It dies in the white hours
Of young-leafed June
With chestnut flowers,
With hedges snowlike strewn,

White lilac bowed,
Lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace,
And that high-builded cloud
Moving at summer’s pace.

It was, in particular, that line, ‘lost lanes of Queen Anne’s lace’ of which I thought. It is one of those lines that seems to rely far more on music than on sense. Perhaps this is partly because for a long time I did not know what Queen Anne’s lace was. As far as I can determine, it is another name for the wild flower known as cow parsley. The meaning perfectly fits the image I had of the line.

It is perhaps appropriate that this poem is far from being Larkin’s most famous. The mention of those lost lanes seems to me an homage paid to all those quietly beautiful aspects of our life that are most easily forgotten because they do not seem to be part of the drama. They are simply in between, like weeds. But there they are, nonetheless, imbued with ineffable significance. These humble, overlooked beauties have been an obsession of mine, and it has often been my task in writing to do the impossible and bring what is eternally at the corner of one’s eye to the centre of one’s vision. That fleeting phantom of daydreaming beauty, it seems, always escapes. And yet, it always remains. There it is, still.

On my walks around the area, after my return, I took many photographs of the cow parsley. Such things bring me a calm like that of contemplating gravestones. Why, I can hardly say, unless it’s because, in some way, they remind you of who you truly are, that in between place that is not any particular drama. People are apt to judge and blame, and thereby force you into a role, and usually one you would rather not play. These white flowers remind you of those obvious things that are so easily forgotten. They ask nothing of you. Nor do they thrust themselves upon you. They are simply there, and as such, they allow you simply to be.

But why does Larkin refer to ‘lost lanes’? In what way lost? That, I would say, is part of the music of the line, rather than the sense. I cannot explain, but I suppose it makes me think of memories. That in between feeling seems to go so far back. Some of my most precious memories are not of events, but merely of such quietness, of myself standing in a lane, as if that lane of memory were one of the paths by which I might return to who I really am. The memories are particular, as the flower itself is a particular object, geographically limited. This is myself, somewhere in England. But the particular itself is so ineffable that it can sometimes make you weep, and so it points to eternity.

And yet, all this seems once again to be bringing the matter too much into the centre of vision. In the heat of summer there is a damp coolness that cannot be described. In an empty lane there are daydreams that can never be captured.