Tag: the fields

‘La Gioconda’

‘La Gionconda’ or the ‘Mona Lisa’
by Leonardo da Vinci, 1503-1506

HISTORIC, side-long, implicating eyes ;
A smile of velvet’s lustre on the cheek ;
Calm lips the smile leads upward ; hand that lies
Glowing and soft, the patience in its rest
Of cruelty that waits and doth not seek
For prey ; a dusky forehead and a breast
Where twilight touches ripeness amorously :
Behind her, crystal rocks, a sea and skies
Of evanescent blue on cloud and creek ;
Landscape that shines suppressive of its zest
For those vicissitudes by which men die. 

accessed via ‘The Poems of Michael Field’

Arguably the most famous painting in the world (and likely still the most famous back in the Fields’ day), the ‘Mona Lisa’ or ‘La Gioconda’ is a portrait painted by Italian renaissance artist Leonardo da Vinci. The painting has been the source of much speculation and imaginative theories for writers of all stripes and notably possesses a strong resemblance to Renaissance era portrayals of the Virgin Mary. This would not have escaped the Fields’ attention – particularly as later Roman Catholics – but there is something more noteworthy about the painting’s inclusion within Sight and Song. As a poetry collection which tackles vision and visuality, ‘La Gioconda’ holds a special place in the collection: as Professor Margaret Livingstone of Harvard University has pointed out, the lady’s smile vanishes when observed directly. This process is part of what is known as ‘foveal‘. The human eye does not identify shadows directly in its visual process, while peripheral vision does. This creates a somewhat illusionary smile – visual trickery. Perhaps the Fields experienced some of this visual trickery when inspecting ‘La Gionconda’.

Points of interest

  • Alternating perspectives
    The poem can be split into two halves. There is a subjective overview of the “cheek” and “calm lips”, the Mona Lisa “glowing” with a sly kind of “cruelty” manifesting in her devious smile playing upon Victorian visions of wildly untamed femme fatalewomen who “prey” upon unsuspecting subjects (see Linton’s essay on “Wild Women”[1]). Then we defer to the objective mountainous terrain attempting to enclose and tame her, the distant “crystal rocks” overlooking a landscape “suppressive” and all-consuming, as precarious as the lady herself with its ability to crush men – “vicissitudes by which men die”.
  • Re-writing a narrative
    But yet the dangerous landscape somehow pales in comparison to the lady we are greeted with courtesy of the Fields’ ekphrastic picture they have re-painted for us with words. The Fields plant seeds of corruption and secretive intent; they interlace the narrative with gems for us to detect and suddenly acknowledge anew. In their own way, they are remaking the original narrative Da Vinci painted for us. The painting becomes a dark story and the lady’s intentions become questionable.
  • Opposing binaries
    The poem is at war within itself: the Mona Lisa not only waits, eerily, to deploy her “cruelty” which contradicts her “soft” and “calm” nature, but the lashing of “sea and skies” fights to “suppress” the “zest” and therefore beauty of “cloud and creek”. Colours of day and night seem to juxtapose: “dusk” and “twilight” is contrasted by “blue” which creates a fluctuating palette.
  • Veiled language
    That is to say nothing of the “implicating eyes” which seem to infer that we, the onlookers, are guilty of something – perhaps of simply seeing – and this evokes amusement from her, a “smile” which works in conjunction with a “hand that lies” seemingly in wait to do something. Is this sexual tension? Mere observation? Her apparent “cruelty” is marked by a “dusky forehead and a breast” – is she guilty of terrible thoughts in that head as well as bodily sins involving that breast? The structuring of certain corporeal elements one after the other seems purposeful. The Fields dance delicately with words, never outwardly stating the lady’s intentions but never denying possibilities, either.
  • A daughter of decadence
    This lady becomes a spidery femme fatale, and her gaze is a web that ensnares us: this poem also warns the reader of the dangers of interpreting from seeing. We are not only seeing visually, but also psychologically: the subjective first half of the poem evidences this. There is undoubtedly something objectively “Historic” about her, but she also straddes then-modern beliefs in the 1880s onwards regarding decadent, sexually degenerate women harbouring precarious intentions.

Footnotes

[1] Eliza Lynn Linton, Nineteenth Century 30, No. 176 (October 1891): 596—605.

A Darker Chapter in the Fields’ Lives: ‘Underneath the Bough’

The ‘Third Book of Songs’ shares corresponding themes of monism, naturalism and pantheism with the other numbered ‘Books’ in Underneath the Bough. Plentiful fauns, bees, birds and Hellenic characters surface and then vanish throughout stanzas. In the ‘Third Book of Songs’ we are harkened back to ancient Greece and consumed by a temporal reverie, where the orderly Apollo and his arty Muses are unable to, for all their wisdom, appear to warn the narrator of a coming change in ‘When high Zeus first peopled earth’. This change, we can infer, is that of love. And love it seems is an unpredictable force that even the gods and their disciples cannot predict nor master.

“When high Zeus first peopled earth

Methinks my love to thee doth grow

Though must not leave me

It was deep April and the morn

Apollo and the Muses taught thee not

There comes a change in her breath

A girl

Our myrtle is in flower

Have you seen the olives at set of sun

She lies asleep: I watching do not dare

O sweet, all sweet, the body as the shyer

Mine is the eddying foam and the broken current

Sweet of my poet how sweet are the eyes, the eyelids

Though I sing high and chaunt above her

Shall there ever be a morn

I love her with the seasons, with the winds”

But something more than love is amiss in this first poem, which begins to resonate throughout ensuing poems. The “nurslings” are “Helpless” and “age” is plagued by mentions of “death”. This is all too soon accompanied by the mention of “Childhood” and “generations” as if this death and disaster will continue to “sing” throughout the narrator’s life. The narrator feels like a “broken current”, ravaged by confusion and no more than an “eddying foam” never quite able to settle for one path, one “current”. It seems the author Michael Field is dwelling on negative tidings.

“In eld’s weak palm found providence,

And each through influence

Of things beholden and not borne grew mild”

The above quotation implies that the narrator is disillusioned with providence by the influence of others and things seen and learned over time. Due to things “beholden” and things learned that were not “borne” before, providence loses its “influence” with the narrator’s increasing age – “In eld’s weak palm” – which paints a dreary picture.

Though a different stanza, the next one clearly identifies that this poem concerns the Fields themselves:

“Dear, had not the story’s truth

Most manifest?

Had our lives been twinned, forsooth,

We had never had one heart

…

We are bound by such close ties

None can tell of either breast”

The Fields, it seems, are in conflict with their inner selves, or perhaps their joined inner identity of ‘Michael Field’. Normally readers are unable to tell their words apart – “None can tell of either breast” – as such is the uniquely close nature of their bond, but this may no longer be the case. There now exists a fracture in their literary ‘oneness’.

This poetry comes after the absence of Bernard Berenson in their lives and emergence of a fascination with Catholicism, so the melancholy and confusion is understandable. Readers who choose to decode this poem as an insight into the Fields’ personal lives may choose to believe that this signals a shift in their spiritual beliefs. Poems become a desire for transcendence and creative stimulus, a need for answers to ‘art’ and ‘beauty’ and thus their respective aesthetic paths. Of course the Fields remain close, but Bradley and Cooper are undergoing alternative philosophical outlooks on aesthetics and spiritualism, looking for their “story’s truth”. They do not seem to know “with whom the Muse is guest” out of the two of them and therefore struggle to find poetic inspiration.

Implementing their signature synaesthesia, the poem quickly turns to the senses and self-reflection. “To see and smell the rose of my own youth” is a desire to revisit the past, perhaps of Berenson or of times of more aesthetic clarity. The same pessimism that haunts the first stanza returns in the next, for “gathering waters” creates tears of “grief” and the Fields outline a recent “Farewell” made. This good bye was necessary, and though further cements the Fields as one – “we must dwell together” – is bittersweet and difficult. It is not a literal parting – the language of the Fields is often veiled and careful – but rather the poem represents an emotional detachment, or spiritual “sever”.

Either way, this poem sets the tone for the subsequent ones in the ‘Third Book of Songs’, which feature a “tempestuous heart” and search for where “God art found”, a “disbodied sprite” and insecurities of feeling only “half poet and half child”. There is a “rent heart” and a “mournful land”, a “flute” sung with “distress” and other subtle nihilistic cynicisms. Titles such as ‘If I but dream that thou art gone’ and ‘There comes a change in her breath’ betray slight disturbances in the thoughts of ‘Michael Field’.

If we treat the ‘Third Book of Songs’ as a chapter in the Fields’ lives as much as a part of the story told throughout Underneath the Bough, then we can see this all-consuming change come full circle by the ‘Fifth Book of Songs’. Dionysus (or “Bacchus” as this collection refers to him) watches over this change, his “glazing eyes” and “athirst” for something in ‘A land of riotous harvest and of sweat’ resounding the Fields’ quest for something. In ‘Full summer and at noon; my waste-bed’ it is declared that “None shares my vision!” and even “fern and flower are blind”. All seems futile and even nature and the world itself cannot see what the storytellers of the poems do. There is no creativity, no inspiration to be found.  ‘Michael Field’ is left with but one thing to do: he must renew himself, as the “young phoenix” does in ‘As the young phoenix, duteous to his sire’:

“So joyously I lift myself above

The life I buried in hot flames to-day ;

The flames themselves are dead — and I can range

Alone through the untarnished sky I love,

And trust myself, as from the grave one may,

To the enchanting miracles of change.”

The Fields, then, recognise that they must move ahead and without dwelling on the ‘old’ they have created. Change is inevitable but not necessarily damning. If one can “trust myself” then there can be “miracles of change” – brighter, better, progressive change.