In The Bleak Midwinter (1872)

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

Christina Rossetti

It has been set to music several times but,  for me, the most beautiful version is the one by Gustav Holst (1874-1934) written in 1906. Holst, in spite of his name and German ancestry, was as English as the Italian descended Rossetti siblings so what better than to hear their work performed by, who else, the choir of King’s College, Cambridge. It might all be very English but it travels very neatly too.

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STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

COLIN BELL’S PUBLICATIONS:

Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love
Ward Wood Publishing
October 30, 2013

http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm

Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window
Soaring Penguin Press
June 15, 2013
Poetry anthology

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Genius Floored: Whispers in Smoke
Soaring Penguin Press
June 6, 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Reaching Out
Cinnamon Press
December 2012
Poetry and short story anthology

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/product-item/reaching-out/

Tic Toc
A Kind Of A Hurricane Press
June 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.kindofahurricanepress.com/2014/06/tic-toc-is-now-available.html

The Blotter
The Blotter Magazine Inc.
November 2009
Three pages of poetry in the American South’s unique, free, international literature and arts magazine.

http://www.blotterrag.com/back-issues/2009-11.pdf

The Fib Review
Musepie Press
My Fibonacci poetry has appeared in this journal from 2009 until the present

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/writers.html

Shot Glass Journal
Muse Pie Press
My poetry has appeared in various issues of this short form poetry journal

http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/writers.html

Every Day Poets Magazine
Every Day Poets
I have various poems of the day published in this 365 days a year poetry magazine.

http://www.everydaypoets.com/?s=Colin+Bell

In The Night Count The Stars
Bittersweet Editions
March 1, 2014
An “uncommon anthology” of images, fragments, stories and poetry.

http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/in-the-night-count-the-stars.html#%2EU8ZFXY1dXoo

The post In the bleak midwinter – time to remember the Rossettis and Gustav Holst appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I couldn’t let my week of blogs about the wonderful Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain go by without mentioning the one painting exhibited there that has a personal significance for me beyond all the other great works in Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde.

Henry Wallis (1830-1916), one of the lesser known figures from this period, painted an image, Chatterton, that has stirred the imagination of every young Romantic ever since it was completed in 1856.

It is the very essence of the Romantic poet cut down tragically in his prime, alone in his garret room.

Thomas Chatterton (1752-1770) was born humbly in Bristol, England but had burning ambitions about becoming a great poet. He had, along with so many young writers, that mix of exaggerated hope and despair in his own abilities but, in his case, he had the added ingredient that ensured his immortality. He was prepared to do almost anything to make his name. He struck on the idea of creating a fake medieval poet called Thomas Rowley and then started to write many poems in an invented faux-medieval style going even further in his deceit by writing them on what looked like ancient manuscript paper. Good old England, of course, swallowed it whole and Thomas Rowley became the toast of the literary elite.

It was all going so well but, ah, the arrogance of youth, young Thomas grew jealous of Rowley and set out on his own, Dick Whittington like, from Bristol to London in 1770 at the still tender age of just 17 where he tried to establish himself, the real Thomas Chatterton, as a political radical writing world-changing pamphlets.

Well, needless to say, his pamphlets didn’t change the World and he was never, in his lifetime, to be as  famous as his creation, the soon to be infamous Thomas Rowley.

He never lived beyond 1770. He suffered from poverty, hunger, disappointment, frustration, (the list could go on) and, one day, he may have taken poison to end it all. His body was found alone in his garret room above a “bawdy house” in Brooke Street, Holborn, London and thus began his great career as Romantic martyr.

We would, on the whole, prefer him to have taken poison rather than dying, as some modern researchers suggest, from a cocktail of recreational and prescription drugs treating a possible venereal disease. Nothing will take away the young poet’s posthumous glory though especially as he will live, in death, forever in Henry Wallis’s classic icon.

So why is it so personal for me? Well, in my student days in Bristol, I collaborated with a good friend, David Richardson, now an old friend,  on a film about the life and death of Chatterton and, for the death scene, we spent no little time recreating the garret room in faithful imitation of Wallis’ invention. I knew every inch of that painting before I saw it, for the first time in the flesh, last weekend. It didn’t disappoint.

I was young too then when I worked on that film and I too was burning with Romantic dreams of becoming a writer just as David burned to be a film director, so I will always feel fond and also sad for young Thomas Chatterton who, not only inspired me with his youthful arrogance and daring but who also played an important role in a wonderful period of my life. It isn’t surprizing that the Pre-Raphaelites were so attracted to him too.

Here’s one of the crazily mock medieval poems that were nearly the making of him but which led to the unmaking of him.

On Happienesse

MAIE Selynesse on erthes boundes bee hadde?
Maie yt adyghte yn human shape bee founde?
Wote yee, ytt was wyth Edin’s bower bestadde,
Or quite eraced from the scaunce-layd grounde,
Whan from the secret fontes the waterres dyd abounde?
Does yt agrosed shun the bodyed waulke,
Lyve to ytself and to yttes ecchoe taulke?
All hayle, Contente, thou mayde of turtle-eyne,
As thie behoulders thynke thou arte iwreene,
To ope the dore to Selynesse ys thyne,
And Chrystis glorie doth upponne thee sheene.
Doer of the foule thynge ne hath thee seene;
In caves, ynn wodes, ynn woe, and dole distresse,
Whoere hath thee hath gotten Selynesse.

The post The Death of Chatterton – every young Romantic’s dream appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

In case we are ever tempted to think of those arty Pre-Raphaelites as mere fey decorative artist intellectuals, we should think of Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893), the painter who stood on the fringes of the “Brotherhood” but who shared many of their socialist ideals whilst also adding a bit of muscle. Last weekend I was at Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibition, “Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde” and the pictures have refused to leave my blogs all week.

Ford Madox Brown’s epic painting, Work humbled me into a fit of guilt at my own arty life so different from the central figures in his painting and so near, maybe, to some of the less productive members of society depicted here with Hogarthian scorn. I wouldn’t dare to, or want to, compare myself to the sneering philosopher Thomas Carlyle leaning against the fence in a rather jaunty brown hat on the right hand side foreground and looking decidedly pleased with himself as he talks, presumably, about the ethics of hard work with the then well-known cleric the Rev. Frederic Denison Maurice, Christian Socialist and founder of the Working Men’s College. The two intellectual moralists are not the centre of attention, the starring roles in this picture are definitely the heroic navvies busy digging a hole in the road on a hot summer afternoon. There is nothing fey about these men who, in Ford Madox Brown’s opinion, are putting some muscle into man’s highest destiny, finding salvation through hard work and a well-earned flagon of ale.

Some of the others in the picture will have a harder time getting to Brown’s Heaven which is not a place for the shadowy aristocrats on horseback or the do-gooding lady distributing anti-alcohol literature to the workers or even, in the far distance, hyprocritical politicians canvassing for safe seats in Parliament or even me, an innocent blogger struggling with his guilt. All levels of Victorian society are displayed on this Hampstead street but our sympathies are with those hard working guys in the centre – not the usual heroes in 19th Century paintings and not always respected even today.

Ford Madox Brown sympathised too with all of his countrymen and women who, in the early 1850s, took the brave, often perilous and definitely uncertain path of emigration overseas as the way to a better life. I found out recently that several of my relations made just such a journey in the early 1850s to Australia, as in this picture, and also to the United States. The painter’s sensitivity to the state of the central couple with their tiny child hidden in its mother’s shawl, stands as a memorial for all those lives uprooted in fear and hope during the middle years of the 19th. Century. Being the quirky man that he was though, the couple’s anxiety, all joined hands and fearful eyes, is framed by that bizarre row of strung up vegetables, turnip, beetroot and cabbage, in front of them and a crowd scene of varied social types behind. Ford Madox Brown continually delights with his sensitivity to humanity in all its guises.

Some of those brave voyagers must have feared the fate of Juan in Lord Byron’s satirical epic poem Don Juan. Ford Madox Brown’s painting shows the unfortunate Juan shipwrecked and washed up naked and near death on the shore of a Greek island where he is spotted by Pirate captain’s daughter, Haidee and her maid. Haidee appears to behave like all nice young unmarried ladies were meant to behave in the presence of a young naked man. She stands back but no so far back that she can’t see if Juan will respond to her maid’s touch. Male and female are exposed here, he quite literally in his vulnerability and she in the acknowledgement that even Victorian ladies had sexual desires. Madox Ford’s paintings are lessons in unadorned humanity that refuse to turn into sermons. It gives me a chance to revisit Byron’s wonderful poem too. Here is the relevant passage with its breathless eroticism delivered with Byronic tongue-in-cheek:

And as he gazed, his dizzy brain spun fast,
And down he sunk; and as he sunk, the sand
Swam round and round, and all his senses pass’d:
He fell upon his side, and his stretch’d hand
Droop’d dripping on the oar (their jurymast),
And, like a wither’d lily, on the land
His slender frame and pallid aspect lay,
As fair a thing as e’er was form’d of clay.

How long in his damp trance young Juan lay
He knew not, for the earth was gone for him,
And Time had nothing more of night nor day
For his congealing blood, and senses dim;
And how this heavy faintness pass’d away
He knew not, till each painful pulse and limb,
And tingling vein, seem’d throbbing back to life,
For Death, though vanquish’d, still retired with strife.

His eyes he open’d, shut, again unclosed,
For all was doubt and dizziness; he thought
He still was in the boat and had but dozed,
And felt again with his despair o’erwrought,
And wish’d it death in which he had reposed;
And then once more his feelings back were brought,
And slowly by his swimming eyes was seen
A lovely female face of seventeen.

‘T was bending dose o’er his, and the small mouth
Seem’d almost prying into his for breath;
And chafing him, the soft warm hand of youth
Recall’d his answering spirits back from death;
And, bathing his chill temples, tried to soothe
Each pulse to animation, till beneath
Its gentle touch and trembling care, a sigh
To these kind efforts made a low reply.

From Don Juan (Stanzas 111 – 114, Canto 2) by Lord Byron (1819).

Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1852-1856) by Ford Madox Brown. Tate Britain, London.

Victorian Christian piety is difficult to take seriously these days but religion was very important to even some of the most radical of the Pre-Raphaelites including Ford Madox Brown, who later lost his faith. He and some of his colleagues tried to create images for a realism in religious painting based on a new “scientific” theology where the figures from the Bible were to be real human being of flesh and blood still with us in the world around us. In their day, these pictures got their creators into trouble. Dickens hated Edward Burne-Jones’ painting of the Virgin Mary in Christ in the house of his parents (also in the exhibition) “she would stand out from the rest of the company as a Monster, in the vilest cabaret in France, or the lowest gin-shop in England”. (Dickens, Charles. “Old Lamps for New Ones.” Household Words 12 (15 Jun. 1850), 12-14.). That says more about Dickens’ narrow view of feminine sanctity than Burne-Jones’ poetic realism. Ford Madox Brown got into trouble too for his portrait of the semi-naked Jesus washing an embarrassed Peter’s feet in front of his confused but fascinated disciples. Brown wanted to show Jesus as a real human being, vulnerable and frail, humiliating himself in an act of loving humanity. 

 Jesus Washing Peter’s Feet (1876)  watercolour copy by Ford Madox Brown. Manchester City Art Gallery

Reluctantly, with no sales in sight, he was persuaded to dress Jesus in a loose slip but he liked his original image so much that he painted a watercolour copy which, I think, proves that his first idea was much more effective with its human message that transcends its theology.

The Light Of The World (1851) by William Holman Hunt. Keble College, Oxford.

The most famous of all the Pre-Raphaelite paintings in the 19th Century was William Holman Hunt’s The Light Of The World. An extraordinary study in the effects of candlelight and moonlight in the open air but loved by the Victorians for its gentle Northern European Jesus. I had never liked William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) as much as the work of the other Pre-Raphaelites, finding his openly didactic religious paintings a touch too, well, Victorian.  I know that his pioneering realism is much admired but I find those famous images of lost sheep and erring shepherds a bit too close to Sunday School lectures. Looking at his work in context with the other Pre-Raphaelites, I saw The Light Of The World in a different, er, light. Hunt’s Jesus is not so very different to Ford Madox Brown’s after-all. He is not Brown’s manly Nazarene carpenter’s son, in his golden frock and embroidered cloak but he is, for all his androgynous physicality, a vulnerable if slightly spooky human being. Over a century and a half later, we can see him less as Queen Victoria’s ideal Protestant icon and more as some freaky hippie a-coming knocking on the door to invite you to an all-nighter… and none the less “spiritual” for that.

The Scapegoat (1854-56) by William Holman Hunt. Lady Lever Art Gallery, Port Sunlight.

As much as I dislike Hunt’s lost sheep, I had to stop and stare at his weirdly unsettling image of the Biblical Scapegoat, the landscape painted on location by the Dead Sea to the South of Jerusalem. Just as I am not expecting Jesus to come knocking on my door, similarly I can admire this picture without  sympathizing with  Hunt’s symbolism of atonement and sacrifice. Not many people, I suspect, would go along with the idea of stranding a goat in the desert so that God can watch it die a lingering death and turn its red wooly crown white as a sign of forgiveness. We can see, though, a prophetic vision of T.S.Eliot’s Waste Land (1922) as well as more modern images of the world’s current ecological crises.  Victorian critics had a problem with Hunt’s use of a dumb beast as a religious symbol, we are more open to identifying with this forlorn, blood-splattered and abandoned creature lost in a ruinous landscape.

The Lady of Shallot (1905) by William Holman Hunt. Wadsworth Athenaeum Museum, Hartford, Connecticut.

Coming to the final room in this exhaustive and exhausting exhibition last weekend, I thought I had seen everything and was looking forward to a cup of tea and a buttered scone until I came across the  final picture in the show, Holman Hunt’s The Lady Of Shallot, based on Tennyson’s famous poem about the lady cursed to spend her life locked in a tower weaving scenes from life that she can only see reflected in a mirror. She lives this nightmarish existence until she sees handsome Sir Launcelot and breaks the curse’s rules, cracking the mirror and finding her death floating in a boat towards Camelot.

She left the web, she left the loom,
She made three paces through the room,
She saw the water-lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
The mirror cracked from side to side;
“The curse is come upon me,” cried
The Lady of Shalott.
From The Lady Of Shalott by Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1832)

The neurotic, erotically-charged hot-house story was the perfect Pre-Raphaelite theme and Tennyson had long been one of their “List of Immortals.” The quality and originality of the colours which literally gleam in psychedelic frenzy when seen in “the flesh” make this a must-see even if you are not also turned on by William Holman Hunt’s symbolism. When I saw this piece I just whispered “wow!” It was half a century in the making and finally completed in 1905 at a time when Picasso was already creating a new avant-garde but revisiting these artists in this fascinating exhibition, I was continually surprized and challenged by the original and provocative work of these unconventional and very hairy painters. The show more than justifies its subtitle “Victorian Avant-Garde.” Try to catch it before it finishes on 13th January 2013.

Ford Madox Brown (1821-1893)

William Holman Hunt (1827-1910)

The post Some of those Pre-Raphaelite ideals still impress. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

I went to the  “Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde,” Tate Britain’s Pre-Raphaelite exhibition last weekend and the face that stays with me is that of Jane Morris, the wife of William Morris, the artist and textile designer who was one of the younger members of the Pre-Raphaelites. she was also, probably, the mistress of Gabriel Dante Rossetti, one of the founding members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and, one of its most influential theorists too in creating the school of painting that mixed modern day realism with pre-Renaissance symbolism. Unwittingly, he also inspired “the look” that wowed Bohemian London in the second half of the 19th Century, a look that is still emulated today. Looking at her paintings, it is not difficult to see why. Jane Morris modeled for both artists, remained married to William but also friends with Rossetti who, in a series of sensationally languid paintings, immortalised this mysteriously alluring woman. Rossetti was also inspired to write poetry about the woman who was one of  “The” faces of the late 19th. Century. His poem Astarte Syriaca, a companion piece to his painting of the same name, is about the Syrian Goddess equivalent of the classical goddess Venus.

Astarte Syriaca

Mystery: lo! betwixt the sun and moon
Astarte of the Syrians: Venus Queen
Ere Aphrodite was. In silver sheen
Her twofold girdle clasps the infinite boon
Of bliss of the heaven and earth commune:
And from her neck’s inclining flower-stem lean
Love-freighted lips and absolute eyes that wean
The pulse of hearts to the spheres’ dominant tune.

Torch-bearing, her sweet ministers compel
All thrones of light beyond the sky and sea
The witnesses of Beauty’s face to be:
That face, of Love’s all-penetrative spell
Amulet, talisman, and oracle,
Betwixt the sun and moon a mystery.

Gabriel Dante Rossetti

Jane Morris appears again throughout the Tate’s exhibition but, another of my favourites is Rossetti’s La Pia, based on the story, in Dante’s Purgatorio, of the sad woman, ill-treated by her husband, who died without absolution and thus, in Dante’s rather unforgiving world view, has to languish in Purgatory. It was a role ideally suited to Jane’s melancholy and to Rossetti’s love of ethereal femininity – ethereal with a large dose of sensuality. Rossetti seems to have realized that he was giving Jane a form of immortality when he wrote about one of his portraits of her. He wasn’t wrong.


From The Portrait by Dante Gabriel Rossetti

This is her picture as she was:
It seems a thing to wonder on,
As though mine image in the glass
Should tarry when myself am gone.
I gaze until she seems to stir,—
Until mine eyes almost aver
That now, even now, the sweet lips part
To breathe the words of the sweet heart:—
And yet the earth is over her.

Jane was born into a working class family in Oxford and was “discovered” by Rossetti and his young friend Edward Burne-Jones and asked to model for them. She modelled too for William Morris who fell in love and married her. Married to Morris, she began her education and became a skilled linguist 

(French and Italian) and an accomplished pianist with a wide knowledge of classical music. She was “My Fair Lady” and might well have been George Bernard Shaw’s model for his play Pygmalion. As her photograph shows, her beauty was not exaggerated in those Pre-Raphaelite paintings. She is definitely the Queen of the Tate show.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882)

William Morris (1834-1896)

Be sure not to miss the William Morris section at the exhibition and try to resist the snooty temptation to rate his carpets and fabrics any less than the oil paintings in the other rooms. This carpet,  the Peacock and Bird Carpet, is worth the visit in itself. It sits next to some of Edward Burne-Jones most inspired tapestries and stained glass. Those Pre-Raphaelites were multi-talented. I wonder if Jane ever got to lie on William’s carpet.

The post Jane Morris, The pre-Raphaelites’ Muse, is queen of the Tate’s new exhibition. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

As much as I probably prefer Edmund Burne-Jones to the other Pre-Raphaelite artists,  I also love the work of John Everett Millais (1829-1896)  and there’s probably no doubt that was the best painter and, if I have to decide about this,  his Ophelia is possibly the best painting – it is certainly the most famous. It is much reproduced in books but you really have to be there to appreciate the glorious colours and the emotional impact of all those minute details painted with the outstanding technique that marked him out as a great artist when he was still a child.  I spent some time standing in front of it recently at the new Pre-Raphaelite exhibition at Tate Britain, “Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde” and, as with all A-list paintings, it was always surrounded by adoring fans.

Millais was often at his most inspired when working on subjects drawn from Shakespeare and here, reproducing on canvas what the playwright painted in words, he makes us mourn the death of Ophelia all over again after her flower-decked suicide, or here, possibly, her martyrdom, in a small river after her rejection by Prince Hamlet. In true Pre-Raphaelite style, Millais marries extreme realism, painted from nature, with an emotional symbolism expressed in vivid, vibrant colours in the manner of those early Dutch religious paintings of saints.  It is one of those rare images in art that we all remember after seeing it even only once.

“There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men’s fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death.”

Hamlet Act IV Scene vii

Another Shakespearean heroine, Mariana in Measure For Measure is shown in her reaction to the pain of rejected love. She too has been rejected by her lover, Angelo, and Millais shows us that she is suffering from more than pain, her body is contorted, physically yearning for her man, desperate to see him again. Shakespeare describes the dismal house, or grange, where the unfortunate Mariana is pining for love:

“There, at the moated grange, resides this dejected Mariana”. Measure for Measure. Act III. Scene i. Millais is thinking of this quote used by Alfred Lord Tennyson in his poem on the same subject, Mariana (1830). He quoted part of the poem on the picture’s frame when it was first exhibited:

“She only said, ‘My life is dreary,
He cometh not,’ she said.
She said, ‘I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!’

We know, from Millais’ dramatised eroticism, once again heightened by his vivid use of colour and lighting, that when Mariana finally gets her man that neither of them will be disappointed – in spite of those saintly figures in the stained glass.

Ferdinand Lured By Ariel (1850) by John Everett Millais. The Makins Collection

Millais found inspiration in Shakespeare’s The Tempest too. Prince Ferdinand has been washed ashore on a strangely magical island after the ship with the king, his father and the whole royal court, has been wrecked by a tempest. He wanders around the island believing that he is the sole survivor. The magician Prospero is manipulating all the characters in this drama so he sends the magical air spirit Ariel to lure him across the island where he will meet his future love, Prospero’s daughter, Miranda. Poor Ferdinand is confused, distressed and grief-ridden by Ariel’s macabre song that cruelly rubs in the terrible realities of death at sea. Millais creates a scene of true grotesquerie with a semi-visible chain of air spirits howling in ghostly harmony – insubstantial in livid green. The spirit world is rendered all the more ghostly in contrast to the obsessively detailed painting of the landscape and the bright and historically researched colours of poor Ferdinand’s costume.

Ferdinand:. Where should this music be? I’ the air or the earth?
It sounds no more; and, sure, it waits upon
Some god o’ the island. Sitting on a bank,
Weeping again the King my father’s wreck,
This music crept by me upon the waters,
Allaying both their fury and my passion
With its sweet air; thence I have follow’d it,
Or it hath drawn me rather. But ’tis gone.
No, it begins again.

ARIEL’S SONG
Full fathom five thy father lies;
Of his bones are coral made;
Those are pearls that were his eyes:
Nothing of him that doth fade
But doth suffer a sea-change
Into something rich and strange.
Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ariel: Hark! now I hear them,—ding-dong, bell.
Ferdinand: The ditty does remember my drown’d father.
This is no mortal business, nor no sound
That the earth owes. I hear it now above me.

The Tempest Act I scene ii

Isabella (1849) by John Everett Millais. Walker Art Gallery Liverpool.

It wasn’t just Shakespeare that attracted Millais poetic imagination, he went to Keats’ Isabella, or The Pot Of Basil for one of his first great paintings which was also one of the defining works in the newly established Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. The twenty year old artist condensed all the main ingredients of the story in this tightly packed composition.

Isabella loved Lorenzo, a humble employee in her family household. Lorenzo loves Isabella but Isabella’s brothers disapprove and plot to have him murdered. No prizes to work out who is who in this painting. Lorenzo, love-crazed in pink, offered the sickly pale Isabella half of his blood orange. Her loving dog nestles where Lorenzo would love to nestle whilst Isabella’s nastiest brother aims a brutal kick at the poor beast. The brothers are Judas Iscariots at Lorenzo’s Last Supper. The nastiest brother is cracking nuts suggestively and the nutcracker makes an even more suggestive shadow on the tablecloth. Recently art historians suspect was intended to illustrate his sexual agression.  We have all sat around dinner tables where all was not as it seemed. On the window sill behind Isabella is a large pot suitable for the basil plant that she would soon use to hide the severed head of her lover. Keats’  poem is encapsulated in this illustration taken from the poems opening stanza:

FAIR Isabel, poor simple Isabel!
Lorenzo, a young palmer in Love’s eye!
They could not in the self-same mansion dwell
Without some stir of heart, some malady;
They could not sit at meals but feel how well
It soothed each to be the other by;
They could not, sure, beneath the same roof sleep
But to each other dream, and nightly weep.

Keats: Isabella, or The Pot of Basil (1818)

These paintings based on poetry and conceived poetically have earned a place amongst the very greatest of British paintings so it was sad that such a gifted artist should abandon his revolutionary fervour and use his talents later in life to make himself a fortune as London’s most fashionable painter of beautiful but conventional pictures and to find himself “elevated” like his friend Edward Burne-Jones to a baronetcy. When I was a student, we called those career moves, “selling out.” Whatever, what he did, he did but before that, the young Millais left us some of the most memorable works from the Pre-Raphaelite movement – true works of poetry.

John Everett Millais ( 1829-1896)

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STEPHEN DEARSLEY’S SUMMER OF LOVE BY COLIN BELL

My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

It is now available as a paperback or on Kindle (go to your region’s Amazon site for Kindle orders)

You can order the book from the publishers, Ward Wood Publishing:

http://wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm 

…or from Book Depository:

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/Stephen-Dearsleys-Summer-Love-Colin-Bell/9781908742070

…or from Amazon:

http://www.amazon.co.uk/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Daps&field-keywords=Stephen%20Dearsley’s%20Summer%20Of%20love

feature=mhee

COLIN BELL’S PUBLICATIONS:

Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love
Ward Wood Publishing
October 30, 2013

http://www.wardwoodpublishing.co.uk/titles-fiction-colin-bell-stephen-dearsleys-summer-of-love.htm

Genius Floored: Uncurtained Window
Soaring Penguin Press
June 15, 2013
Poetry anthology

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Genius Floored: Whispers in Smoke
Soaring Penguin Press
June 6, 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.soaringpenguinpress.com/publications/poetry/genius-floored-whispers-in-smoke/

Reaching Out
Cinnamon Press
December 2012
Poetry and short story anthology

http://www.cinnamonpress.com/product-item/reaching-out/

Tic Toc
A Kind Of A Hurricane Press
June 2014
Poetry anthology

http://www.kindofahurricanepress.com/2014/06/tic-toc-is-now-available.html

The Blotter
The Blotter Magazine Inc.
November 2009
Three pages of poetry in the American South’s unique, free, international literature and arts magazine.

http://www.blotterrag.com/back-issues/2009-11.pdf

The Fib Review
Musepie Press
My Fibonacci poetry has appeared in this journal from 2009 until the present

http://www.musepiepress.com/fibreview/writers.html

Shot Glass Journal
Muse Pie Press
My poetry has appeared in various issues of this short form poetry journal

http://www.musepiepress.com/shotglass/writers.html

Every Day Poets Magazine
Every Day Poets
I have various poems of the day published in this 365 days a year poetry magazine.

http://www.everydaypoets.com/?s=Colin+Bell

In The Night Count The Stars
Bittersweet Editions
March 1, 2014
An “uncommon anthology” of images, fragments, stories and poetry.

http://www.bittersweeteditions.com/in-the-night-count-the-stars.html#%2EU8ZFXY1dXoo

The post Pre-Raphaelite master, John Everett Millais – poetic painter appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

At the weekend, I went to see the Pre-Raphaelite exhibition that is currently showing in London’s Tate Britain, “Pre-Raphaelites, Victorian Avant-Garde” billed as the first major show of these artists’ work in London for 25 years. It is definitely worth making the visit if you have any interest in the “Brotherhood” of artists that included John Everett Millais, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown and their younger followers William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones. There was a lot to take in as it is a very large exhibition spread through six rooms  where you can see practically every significant painting by these revolutionary but also historically-inspired artists. More of the others later but my initial response was pleasure at seeing so many pieces by one of my favourite British artists, Edward Burne-Jones (1833-1898) who managed, in a complex balance between realism and dream-imagery, to create a world inspired by myths and legends and made hypnotic and erotic with painted images frozen in time and flattened onto the canvas with an eye that went back to pre-Renaissance art, pre-Raphael, but which also looks forward to the Symbolists and other later art movements.

I was particularly pleased to see three of Burne-Jones’ Perseus paintings side by side – they are usually in Stuttgart’s public gallery. I have only seen them as prints before and was immediately drawn to the richness of their colour and, as large paintings, the power of their impact. The three displayed show scenes from the Perseus legend when the hero, fresh from killing the Medusa (whose face turns anyone to stone who dares look at her unless it is seen as a mirrored reflection). He has spotted the beautiful Andromeda  who has been chained to a rock in view of the ferocious sea monster the Kraken. Perseus kills the monster and wins the girl whilst keeping the Medusa’s severed head safely out of view in his handbag. In the final picture, The Baleful Head, he shows the head’s reflection to Andromeda.

This gory adventure story is rendered decorously with the characters frozen like those tableaux vivant popularised at Victorian pageants. The realism is minimal  even though we recognise all the details. We are not there and could never go there. Perseus and Andromeda inhabit that other world somewhere inside our heads where we understand a different often abstract reality and where the Perseus legend is almost incidental to the paintings’ meaning. That, for me, is the special quality of Edward Burne-Jones’ work.

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My novel, Stephen Dearsley’s Summer Of Love, was published  on 31 October 2013. It is the story of a young fogey living in Brighton in 1967 who has a lot to learn when the flowering hippie counter culture changes him and the world around him.

The post Edward Burne-Jones’ Perseus series is one of the stars of London”s Pre-Raphaelite show. appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.

 after the poet, also an enthusiastic entomologist, to mark his 80th birthday. I was glad to learn that Tomas Tranströmer is a collector of disparate things too.

The post Busy doing nothing all weekend with Tomas Tranströmer, Beethoven and the pre-Raphaelites, appeared first on Wolfie Wolfgang.