Pre-Raphaelites

Tags

Ashmolean, Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, King Arthur, Millais, Oxford, Pre-Raphaelites, Ruskin

From the closing exhibition at The Ashmolean, Oxford

Photos by Candia Dixon-Stuart

News From Nowhere

Tags

chloral, Cotswolds, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Guinevere, hollyhocks, Janey Morris, Julia Margaret Cameron, Kelmscott, La Belle Iseult, Lancelot, mille-fleurs, shape-changers, Topsy, William Morris

(The Parting of Sir Lancelot and Queen Guinevere

by Julia Margaret Cameron)

 

Since I live in the vicinity of Kelmscott now, here is an

old poem, re-blogged…

 

William:

I raised a latch of a door in the wall

and immediately knew this was home.

The garden’s rosy superabundance

was a mille-fleurs embroidery stitching

raucous cawing of rooks from those high elms, the

swifts wheeling, doves’ cooing and blackbird song.

A mulberry tree was central. Pastel

hollyhocks nodded their welcome and men

scythed reeds and floated them down the river

under the willow trees’ gray-green flickers.

Lead waterspouts were limply supported

from the mellow masonry and woodworm

pricked the panelling. I felt not sadness,

but a beauty born of melancholy.

Leaving my charcoal overcoat downstairs,

I inspected the quaint garrets where once

tillers and herdsmen slept under the eaves.

The sloping floorboards creaked under my feet.

I realised she had never loved me.

How could she? Women are all shape-changers.

This house is an E with its tongue cut out,

so it will never prattle its scandal.

Betrayal’s woven in its tapestries:

Samson with his eyes gouged out for his love.

Please, dear Janey, be happy…I cannot

paint you, but I love you – and now leave you.

Janey:

Some called it amitie amoureuse.

They dubbed me Guenevere, La Belle Iseult.

Once in this lost riverland, out of depth,

we drowned in our adulterous passion.

I heard carriages arriving at night,

so the cob’s harsh hooves had to be silenced

by leather shoes. I had no energy

when William was here, but took long walks

with Gabriel, who said our leaky punt

was not a poetic locomotion.

I keep my thoughts locked in my casket

in my bedroom. It was kind of Topsy

to bring me back that fine Icelandic smock.

Gabriel said it served his purposes well.

When they had Mouse the babes were not tiresome,

but Jenny’s impairment grows every day.

Tomorrow someone must trim the dragon.

In the studio I hear faint crying

over a stillborn child. He took chloral,

alcohol and would stay awake till five.

What was I to do with his exhumed verse?

Sir Lancelot had welded us as one.

I suppose I never loved him at all.

Tonight I left a pansy in Blunt’s room.

I am past sobbing that he does not come.

Merton Abbey Mills

Tags

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Epping Forest, Liberty, Merton Abbey Mills, Morris, Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Topsy, Wandle, William Morris

“If William Morris were alive today

he would turn over in his grave,” she said.

Reneging on co-operative roots,

weasly traders attempt to fob folk off

with cheap crazed pottery and Repro stuff

under bestriding Betjeman pylons

in the shadow of a silver Kaaba:

Sainsbury’s Savacentre.  Poor Topsy

would have topped himself to see his named pub,

a Riverside Free House, serving (slowly)

Pre-Raphaelite burgers and Liberty

Jacket potatoes.  Some spoof has written

under “Today’s Specials”: Leek and Cat Shit

Pie, £1.75 and Spinach and

Scrotum Quiche, £2.75.  Thick smoke

reminds one of past local industries:

snuff and tobacco.  Wading through potholes

one wonders at the willow-fringed Wandle

where fine printed silks were dipped by his hands,

dark, indigo-stained, like those large blue plums

which grew on the wall in his Woodford plot

in days when he rode through Epping Forest

in his miniature toy suit of armour,

looking for dragons to slay.  Now he knew

dyeing was an art and when the fierce floods

whipped the millwheel into activity

such as might have wrecked the very millhouse,

he may have thought his enterprise would fail

like the relationship with the beauty

who was such a burden to him.  But now

his Strawberry Thieves grace the punters’ ties.

“Have only beautiful or useful things”

falls on deaf ears, as past ideals take wings

and shopping trolleys fill with plastic junk

purchased from the monopolising store

which conserves workshops, but kills small growers.

Morris, you should be living at this hour.

England hath need of thee!  Here be dragons.

Textile printing at Merton Abbey c. 1890, from a booklet commemorating the 50th anniversary of the firm, 1911 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

News from Nowhere

Tags

Dante Gabriel Rossetti, Guenevere, Guinevere, Janey, Kelmscott, La Belle Iseult, Lancelot, Si Je Puis, Topsy, William Morris

William:

I raised a latch of a door in the wall

and immediately knew this was home.

The garden’s rosy superabundance

was a mille-fleurs embroidery stitching

raucous cawing of rooks from those high elms, the

swifts wheeling, doves’ cooing and blackbird song.

A mulberry tree was central. Pastel

hollyhocks nodded their welcome and men

scythed reeds and floated them down the river

under the willow trees’ gray-green flickers.

Lead waterspouts were limply supported

from the mellow masonry and woodworm

pricked the panelling. I felt not sadness,

but a beauty born of melancholy.

Leaving my charcoal overcoat downstairs,

I inspected the quaint garrets where once

tillers and herdsmen slept under the eaves.

The sloping floorboards creaked under my feet.

I realised she had never loved me.

How could she? Women are all shape-changers.

This house is an E with its tongue cut out,

so it will never prattle its scandal.

Betrayal’s woven in its tapestries:

Samson with his eyes gouged out for his love.

“Please, dear Janey, be happy..I cannot

paint you, but I love you – and now leave you.”

Janey:

Some called it amitie amoureuse.

They dubbed me Guenevere, La Belle Iseult.

Once in this lost riverland, out of depth,

we drowned in our adulterous passion.

I heard carriages arriving at night,

so the cob’s harsh hooves had to be silenced

by leather shoes. I had no energy

when William was here, but took long walks

with Gabriel, who said our leaky punt

was not a poetic locomotion.

I keep my thoughts locked in my casket

in my bedroom. It was kind of Topsy

to bring me back that fine Icelandic smock.

Gabriel said it served his purposes well.

When they had Mouse the babes were not tiresome,

but Jenny’s impairment grows every day.

Tomorrow someone must trim the dragon.

In the studio I hear faint crying

over a stillborn child. He took chloral,

alcohol and would stay awake till five.

What was I to do with his exhumed verse?

Sir Lancelot had welded us as one.

I suppose I never loved him at all.

Tonight I left a pansy in Blunt’s room.

I am past sobbing that he does not come.

Rest then and rest and think. The floods encroach.

They say the frost has killed all our moorhens.

I’ll try to sleep: si je puis, si je puis..

Morris’s painting La belle Iseult, also inaccurately called Queen Guinevere, is his only surviving easel painting, now in the Tate Gallery. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)