I. Hall of Mirrors, 1964 (2)

I love the rich allusion of the three named greens used in the poem:

Famille-verte, the classification of a style of Chinese porcelain of the Qing Dynasty, striking for its use of shades of green - there's a particular kind of fine luminous pale-ish green that comes to mind for me. The use of this term to refer to the lightbulbs at the not-quite-fairground is interesting because (even just in the French name) it so clearly belongs somewhere very distant in taste and time, including from the then-child's likely frame of reference.

Antique green, the colour of the greenery on the mother's dress - I imagine as the deep green that you would see on the walls of a late 18th/early 19th century salon, a shade you might find in Goethe's library or the Brighton Pavilion or on Napoleon's couch (the former perhaps too dark, the latter perhaps too bright). I don't know if this is what the poet intends by antique green, of course - and I see too from looking it up that verd-antique exists as a term for a kind of dark-green decorative stone popular in Roman times and after (I'm not sure that this rules out my own associations, however, since I'm thinking of a style of decor with a distinctly classical influence). "Antique green" here seems the dignified counterpart of the corroded verdigris lamps of the "backrooms of the heart" to come, and seems to hint at the ancient repeated story of the fall from grace, the expulsion from Eden raised in the last stanzas.

Verdigris, finally - corroded copper, which makes me wonder whether the pigments used for famille-verte porcelain and for the greens of Regency drawing rooms are also connected to copper. The corrosion suggests the corrupt core of the young boy that he himself, until this unlucky glimpse, has been unaware of - the grotesque passageways lit with sputtering tallow candles where the homunculus that is his true self lurks.

There is also the green of vegetation that appears as smell rather than sight: the "mayweed and trampled grass" of the second stanza, "the perfumes that passed for summer / in towns like ours." I especially appreciated this because it recalled for me summer events of small-town Scottish childhood - fairs or fêtes or similar which always had about them the smell of trampled grass trapped in the stale air of a marquee - the perfume indeed that passed for summer in a place where summer is more of a time of year than a real season, an aspiration more than a reality - like the events themselves, not "a fairground so much; / just an acre of clay on old man Potter's land." To go back to the photographs I mentioned yesterday, this is a photograph of the fairground illusion with the edges clearly showing, the wretchedness of the reality contrasting with the desperate attempt to get caught up in the momentary pleasures on offer - the smell of candy floss on the one hand, and of diesel on the other.