Tags
battledore, Broadway, Effie Gray, Emma Thompson, Glenfinlas, Hold Everything!, John McEnroe, Magic in the Moonlight, neurosis, Ruskin, sexual repression, Trossachs, You're the Tops!
Okay, so the poem below shows that I would have been much happier
going to see the film based on the Ruskin/ Millais/ Effie relationships
rather than mooning over Magic in the Moonlight, an anodyne feel-good
fantasy. I haven’t seen Emma Thompson’s latest script, but it surely
must have more psychological depth to it than the Chantilly froth which
curdled any baristic attempt to recreate the creamy caffeine reference to
the era of You’re the Tops. Incidentally, the film opens with an illusionist
show set in 1928, which was the year that Hold Everything!- the musical
whose most famous list song I have just referenced was first staged on
Broadway.
I have thought about writing some satirical lyrics: You’re the Pits!
John McEnroe could sing them.
Anyway, here’s something for those interested in a psychological
study of neurosis and sexual repression. You can listen to a man
talking to himself. Imagine the horror he would have
experienced had he found a hair in his bath!
RUSKIN FALLS
They thought I was in contemplative mood
when I gazed at those lichens and bubbles.
In fact, non-consummation makes one brood.
Damned rain exacerbated our troubles.
Effie assiduously sewed red cloth,
her hair crowned with a garland of foxgloves,
while Everett circled her like a moth,
the pair of them billing like turtle doves.
You’d look like a hyena if your wife
was trailing around the Trossachs like that.
You’d feel that you could take a palette knife
to the one against whom she leant and sat
for hours, reading Dante, while he drew.
And, having him cooped up in that snuff box,
tickling her with fern- as if I misconstrue.
His doodles made me uncomfortable.
He’d come in damp from studying these rocks,
clutching his oils, sepia ink, sable
brushes, teasing her, calling her Countess.
She even trimmed his hair for him one night,
collecting the blonde curls on The Witness,
some Edinburgh newspaper, not quite
read by William, or myself. And his hand
was bandaged because the fool had injured
it, trying to make unstable stones stand
in the stream, for her to cross. I’d endured
enough by then. I watched the salmon leap
in Glenfinlas waterfall and pondered
what was being sown and what would be reaped.
They played battledore in the barn, wandered
the moors and bogs. He said chilly mountains
made him love soft, warm breathing bodies and
all the while it incessantly rained- rains!
Do they think because they are in Scotland
the normal marriage vows do not apply;
that they can shelter under a shared plaid
and return soaking with another lie?
The bubbles have all burst, I’m afraid.
I stand in the midst of this turbulence.
Passions, torrent roars: I counter silence.
