haltijatar

Wafted in the air, the feathery dandelion carries me to a place of iridescent wings and sapphire dewdrops, wherein the fountain of life resides, flooding the darkness with Love. Ancient druidess ~  eternal romantic, weaver of magic sights.

[mirrors-and-pomegranates]

At times memory insists so strongly it torments us, as around some ecstasy denied. And from time to time, with cruel, angelic obstinacy, a recurring dream presents it to us all at once: the walled garden we seek weeping at its gate, the house deserted or destroyed, the invisible water that might speak to us, like the river Scamander, if only we could plunge our hand into it. . . .

– Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (New York Review Books Classics), p. 32

[mirrors-and-pomegranates]

In these few words, the mystery of time and the laws of miracle are established with immense nonchalance and yet as firmly as can be. For what can the failure to observe a limit lead to, if not a tragic regression in time, where one awakens in the morning to cold ashes?

– Cristina Campo, The Unforgivable: And Other Writings (New York Review Books Classics), p. 22

[pre-raphaelitae]

Edward Robert Hughes (1851-1914) ‘Oh, what’s that in the hollow, so pale, I quake to follow?’ ‘Oh, that’s a thin dead body, which waits the eternal term.’, 1893,

Christina Rossetti’s poetry dwells in a universe of blossoms and thorns, dazzling dichotomies that are tied to each other in the same manner that briars are attached to the same plant that bears beautiful roses.

In Amor Mundi, the theme of love becomes a realisation of the limitations of the self and therefore, the limitations of life too. The dialogue that the lovers in the poem have is an expression of a desire as old as time itself. They wish to escape the world forever, in order to live a sort of Edenic ideal where rules and limitations do not exist. Hence, the poem starts with the tempting invitation towards escapism and abandonment, a life that is not only isolated, but without care too, “[t]he downhill path is easy, come with me an it please ye.”

As they walk towards their new life, nature seems to send the lovers certain symbols as warnings about the direction that they’re heading. As soon as they are out of the “honey-breathing heather”, rainy clouds gather around them with an ominous air. Thus, even though the lovers walk towards their freedom, the sky suggests divinity’s disproval. The “message dumb, portentous” does not touch the lovers as their path is easy to walk and they do not know yet where their road might take them.

The “scaled and hooded worm”, dwelling “where velvet flowers grow thickly” is not only an image of decaying beauty and decadence, but by being covered in scales, it is the snake of temptation itself, reminiscent of the original sin. The discovery of death is through witnessing a “thin dead body” that supposedly awaits the day of the Judgement, unburied and neglected.

As the lovers understand that the path they’ve chosen has no return and it descends into darker domains, they wish to return but realise only too late that “[t]his downhill path is easy, but there’s no turning back.” Edward Robert Hughes’s painting of the dead body in the hollow suggests thus the tragic end that the lovers will eventually face too.

What creates a certain air of suspense about the painting is not the religious or moral connotation that the poem indicates. It seems that the sin is condoned by the painting and all that remains is the frightening realisation of mortality, which is accepted by degrees as the viewer gazes into the surprising peacefulness of the dead person’s countenance, and the still gaze filled with glowing blue. The surroundings that show newly blooming flowers and birds suggest a continuation of life, however corrupt or unruly, even in an abandoned and forgotten place like the grim hollow.

[pre-raphaelitae]

The Three Perfumes by Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh (1912)

The trio in the painting serenades through a cascade of colours reminiscent of a medieval carnival seen through rose-coloured glasses. The red flowers on either side build their way toward the top by metamorphosing into shapes reminiscent of poppies and briar roses. The flowers in the hair of their bearers turn into gigantic blossoms whose radiance is dimmed by the pale tones of the white lily, the emblem at the centre of the painting, emphasized even more by the circular shape that is created through the motif of flowers as well. In most of Margaret Macdonald Mackintosh’s paintings, regularity is manifested through a subtle use of circular shapes that emerge through a delightful use of colour and outlined by flowers, cloaks, or immense masses of hair.

The lily at the center of the painting is traditionally deemed as a symbol of purity, although it has been associated throughout the ages with fertility, since it “was fabled to have sprung from the milk of the Greek goddess Hera” (Jack Tresidder, The Watkins Dictionary of Symbols). The blue cloak that the subject on the left wears gives the impression of a peacock’s tail, brimming with shapes reminiscent of mushrooms, symbols of fertility, rebirth, and  creation after destruction (Jack Tresidder, The Watkins Dictionary of Symbols).

The roses next to the mouths of each of the subjects suggest self-expression, a comparison worthy of Perrault’s fairy tale, Diamonds and Toads, in which the heroine, thanks to her kindness and good behaviour receives as a gift the ability of having flowers or precious jewels coming out of her mouth whenever she speaks. If the fairy tale emphasises the idea that a good heart has the ability of bringing such blessings into one’s life, in the painting we witness the metamorphosis of creative expression whose results turn into majestic and healing experiences. There is no disharmony between body and soul, both of them tied to each other in the same way the style combines colours and shapes suggestive of Pre-Raphaelitism with the indefiniteness of Impressionism. This mixture of styles only emphasizes the rapture of creative instinct and artistic pull towards beauty that is witnessed in the facial expression of the three subjects. Even the title of the painting alludes to a reflection upon the ties between the world of the senses and that of the spirit, since “perfumes” themselves are elusive things that cannot be fully captured in the physical realm in spite of their sensual nature.

[achildlikeprincess]

[lovehoundd]

character aesthetics: Quentin & Caddy Compson

“If it could just be a hell beyond that: the clean flame the two of us more than dead. Then you will have only me then only me then the two of us amid the pointing and the horror beyond the clean flame… Only you and me amid the pointing and the horror walled by the clean flame.”    

 ―    William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury

[beljar]

I could smell the curves of the river beyond the dusk and I saw the last light supine and tranquil upon tideflats like pieces of broken mirror, then beyond them lights began in the pale clear air, trembling a little like butterflies hovering a long way off.

William Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury, 1929

[iamabax]

“If so much of our life is actually spent in dreaming, there must be some place in our literature for what corresponds to dreaming. Some dreams like these, in poetry or in sleep, arouse individual states of consciousness altogether different from any of our waking moods, and not to be recalled by any mere effort of the will. All our being, for the moment, has a new and strange colouring. We have another kind of life. I think myself, our life would be much poorer without our dreams; a thousand rainbow tints and combinations would be gone; music and poetry would lose many an indescribable exquisiteness and tenderness. You see I like to take our dreams seriously, as I would even our fun. For I believe that those new mysterious feelings that come to us in sleep, if they be only from dreams of a richer grass and a softer wind than we have known awake, are indications of wells of feeling and delight which have not yet broken out of their hiding-places in our souls, and are only to be suspected from these rings of fairy green that spring up in the high places of our sleep.”

— George MacDonald, on poetry and song

[avoyagetoarcturus]

Nycteris from “The Day Boy And The Night Girl” (1882) by George MacDonald

[thatwhichdoesnotsuffer]

“If instead of a gem, or even a flower, we should cast the gift of a loving thought into the heart of a friend, that would be giving as the angels give.”

— George MacDonald

[july-annabelle]

“of the Sleeping Beauty in the Wood; of the bleeding trees; a kiss cannot reach her through the incrusting alabaster. She is sleeping in the very death of dreams”

–George MacDonald, Phantastes

[the-flying-salmon]

Woman Reading in the Reeds, Saint-Jacut-de-la-mer

Jean Edouard Vuillard (1868–1940)

[books0977]

Reading. Lee Lufkin Kaula (American, 1865-1957). Oil on canvas.

Lee Lufkin went to New York to study painting with Charles Melville Dewey before traveling to Paris with her friend, Claire Shuttleworth, in 1894. There she studied at the Académie Colarossi with Edmond Aman-Jean and received encouragement from Charles Gruppé. In Crécy she met William J. Kaula whom she married in 1902.

[the-evil-clergyman]

Violette takes refuge from the boar, from Comtesse de Ségur’s Old French Fairy Tales by Virginia Frances Sterrett (1920)

[vavaharrison]

1.03

[danscape]

[detroitlib]

Frederick Sandys (1 May 1829 – 25 June 1904)

English Pre-Raphaelite painter, illustrator and draughtsman, of the Victorian era. (Wikipedia)

From our stacks: Illustration “’Rosamund, Queen of the Lombards’ Frederick Sandys.’Once a Week’ Vol. V. p. 631″ from English Illustration. ‘The Sixties’: 1855-70. By Gleeson White. Westminster: Archibald Constable and Co., 1897.