Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) recites the verses 679-683 (8th stanza of Part XVIII) from the poem Maud, published in the collection Maud and other poems in 1855. The poem, whose narrator passionately falls in love with a woman, is said to have been inspired by Charlotte Rosa Baring.
Ferdinand Lyle (Simon Russel Beale) pays Vanessa Ives (Eva Green) a visit and tells her about Alfred Tennyson’s death. He then quotes In Memoriam A.H.H., a poem written by Tennyson over 17 years and completed in 1849. It is a requiem for the poet’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam, divided into 133 cantos and written in four-line stanzas of iambic tetrameter; the rhyme scheme is ABBA.
The verses quoted are from the last stanza of the XXVII canto
I hold it true, whate'er befall; I feel it, when I sorrow most; ‘Tis better to have loved and lost Than never to have loved at all.
It was on this day in British history, 8 July 1822, that English poet Percy Bysshe Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. Shelley died after his boat, the Don Juan, sank while he sailed with two of his friends. Shelley’s body was washed ashore and later, in keeping with quarantine regulations, was cremated on the beach near Viareggio. Shelley’s ashes were interred in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome, near an ancient pyramid in the city walls. His grave bears the Latin inscription, Cor Cordium (“Heart of Hearts”), and, in reference to his death at sea, a few lines of “Ariel’s Song” from Shakespeare’s The Tempest: “Nothing of him that doth fade / But doth suffer a sea-change / Into something rich and strange.“
An 1889 painting by Louis Édouard Fournier, The Funeral of Shelley (also known as The Cremation of Shelley), contains inaccuracies. In pre-Victorian times it was English custom that women would not attend funerals for health reasons. Mary Shelley did not attend but was featured in the painting, kneeling at the left-hand side. Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured. Also, Trelawny, in his account of the recovery of Shelley’s body, records that "the face and hands, and parts of the body not protected by the dress, were fleshless,” and by the time that the party returned to the beach for the cremation, the body was even further decomposed. In his graphic account of the cremation, he writes of Byron being unable to face the scene, and withdrawing to the beach.
I’m convinced that some poets that write ‘complicated’ or hard-to-understand poetry don’t know what their words mean, but write them anyway in hopes of sounding poetic and profound.
If I’m entirely honest, and you say I must be, I want to stay with you all afternoon evening, night and tomorrow pressed into you so tightly that we don’t know whose belly made what sound, whose heart it is that is thumping like that until I don’t know if the sweat on my chest is yours or mine or ours.
As the tempo rises, I do my best to keep up, Eventually to shake my limbs into some sort of beauty that would be my own. The details are not pretty. The sweat, the sting of gel that makes my hands slip. One turn wrong and my nails (a delicate gunmetal grey) scratch new lines into your palm. When I can, I steal looks at my shadow to see what others see. Only then can I picture my chance at the beautiful. From the sidelines, I watch the others, fluid, their steps almost silent in the early fall evening. The sky is a heavy drum whose beats raise charcoal dust, the light is
An oppressive orange. This is pleasure still. As I vacillate into a half-etched pose, he says
Ain’t it love? When all those you’re beautifuldisappear And the sadness and dreams weep dry
I hate that we held goodbye so close Oh, say we’re satisfied Ain’t those still nights good? Ain’t money smoke in our eyes?
No coats come from kisses, baby but everywhere you remember our loving I can whisper, sweet woman
We tried to be a love they can’t lead
Our souls seemed to be alive
—
This poem was written by using only the lyrics to ‘Angie’ by the Rolling Stones. Not quite blackout poetry, more like patchwork poetry, but we’re getting there.
I told you about it one evening; the story gifted to me by a taxi-cab driver after a long night full of booze. About Saint Mary’s, a pointy, dark thing squatting somewhere near home, and about his grandfather, one run away from facing the Devil himself.
We laughed at his fear – bright and young in the dark of the backseat, unafraid, bold in the face of the ancient tales we didn’t care to understand.
we should do it, I said three times as fast as life for a glimpse of the Beast, for a thrill.
has anyone really done it ?
To burn your lungs with life (you light a cigarette) just for a glimpse of death ?
to revel in irreverence, utterly, to bask in the light granted only by sublime foolishness
to see how Evil looks when it isn’t scattered in dirty bills and drugged bruises.
I left the city before I could.
The Black Church remains, round the corner of inglorious ruins, a pointy, dark thing squatting somewhere in Dubliners’ lives waiting for those who will trade their soul with three turns, for a thrill.
I walked in the woods alone years ago, in the summer. There are no memories of any heat passing through the pine trees – It was always cold. Around me, on me, the scent of the rain. It seeped through the soggy canvas of our tent and we whispered about the dryness whose feeling we could not remember.
At night, the woods shuddered through the never-ending rain. It drowned the weak sheen of my flashlight. My feet crept on the little dark path I knew by heart, even when the late hours blotted it out.
The song sung by the rain I knew by heart too. It was different on the forest floor than on the pine needles and ghostly nettle plants that swayed as I walked by. The fabric of my shoes slushed silently as I trudged on, gorged with water and mud. Monotonous drum, ticking of the timeless hours of these days.
We never saw the rain stop in the forest. When the clouds drifted away for the sky to breathe for a minute or two, leaves and branches kept the sun away and still the drops would fall. Fatally. We sung along with them. Our voices grew wet, amphibious sirens sticking to the mossy trunks.
Eventually the rain stopped on the day we left. When I pull out letters and books from these eerie weeks in July, I see stories in their mudstains –
The green grey sound of soggy pine needles
and
the shadow of a drying raincoat, like a lonely ghost
leaning against the wind and the branches.
Poetry request for @courfee who requested amongst other things “the world before and after a rainfall”. I want this to be the first part of a two-world poem, but I don’t know when I’ll get started on the second part so I’m posting this one up anyways…
Thanks for your request, it was a pleasure to work on!
