Winifred Knights, The Deluge, 1920, Oil on canvas, 152.29 x 183.5 cm, Tate: Purchased with assistance from the Friends of the Tate Gallery 1989. © Tate, London 2016. © The Estate of Winifred Knights
Looking at some early 20th century paintings
I struggle to recover the working words of the countryside,
the seasonal vocabulary of crops – well-known then.
What are those pretty piles that dot fields so decorously
in Winifred Knights’ cool canvases?
She knew of course, knew the cycle of the fields.
Of the next generation, I learned it from books. Stooks.
They are stooks: I retrieved the word with effort.
Sheaves (another struggle) gathered together steeple-like, to await the thresher.
An armful of cut wheat bound with twine is a sheaf.
Back to the gallery: stooks fill a field above rising water
in The Deluge (her Rome scholarship piece),
left trustingly to ripen in the sun,
now darkened by the shadow of the grim-reaper.
Winifred’s paintings honour women
and her landscapes are smoothly feminine too,
even as she records themes set in Italy.
A field has softened its stooks into mounds,
resilient like strong bread dough.
There are pilgrims in this scene – all women – resting:
some have settled among those icons of nurture.
There is water close by.
The painter offers an elemental vision.
_ _ _
Studying Winifred Knights’ pastoral scenes, I struggled to recall agricultural terms, which would have been commonplace in the 1920s. The artist had taken these realities of harvest time (like stooks of wheat, commonly called corn) and transmuted them for her own vision. This became the heart of my poem.
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