the hair between her legs was darkly yellow and curlier than the long straight hair of her head

The Prince had all his young life known the story of Sleeping Beauty, cursed to sleep for a hundred years, with her parents, the King and Queen, and all of the Court, after pricking her finger on a spindle.

But he did not believe it until he was inside the castle.

Even the bodies of those other Princes caught in the thorns of the rose vines that covered the walls had not made him believe it. They had come believing it, true enough, but he must see for himself inside the castle.

Careless with grief for the death of his father, and too powerful under his mother’s rule for his own good, he cut these awesome vines at their roots, and immediately prevented them from ensnaring him. It was not his desire to die so much as to conquer.

And picking his way through the bones of those who had failed to solve the mystery, he stepped alone into the great banquet hall.

The sun was high in the sky and those vines had fallen away, so the light fell in dusty shafts from the lofty windows.

And all along the banquet table, the Prince saw the men and women of the old Court, sleeping under layers of dust, their ruddy and slack faces spun over with spider webs.

He gasped to see the servants dozing against the walls, their clothing rotted to tatters.

But it was true, this old tale. And, fearless as before, he went in search of the Sleeping Beauty who must be at the core of it.

In the topmost bedchamber of the house he found her. He had stepped over sleeping chambermaids and valets, and, breathing the dust and damp of the place, he finally stood in the door of her sanctuary.

Her flaxen hair lay long and straight over the deep green velvet of her bed, and her dress in loose folds revealed the rounded breasts and limbs of a young woman.

He opened the shuttered windows. The sunlight flooded down on her. And approaching her, he gave a soft gasp as he touched her cheek, and her teeth through her parted lips, and then her tender rounded eyelids.

Her face was perfect to him, and her embroidered gown had fallen deep into the crease between her legs so that he could see the shape of her sex beneath it.

He drew out his sword, with which he had cut back all the vines outside, and gently slipping the blade between her breasts, let it rip easily through the old fabric.

Her dress was laid open to the hem, and he folded it back and looked at her. Her nipples were a rosy pink as were her lips, and the hair between her legs was darkly yellow and curlier than the long straight hair of her head which covered her arms almost down to her hips on either side of her.

He cut the sleeves away, lifting her ever so gently to free the cloth, and the weight of her hair seemed to pull her head down over his arms, and her mouth opened just a little bit wider.

He put his sword to one side. He removed his heavy armour. And then he lifted her again, his left arm under her shoulders, his right hand between her legs, his thumb on top of her pubis.

She made no sound; but if a person could moan silently, then she made such a moan with her whole attitude. Her head fell towards him, and he felt the hot moisture against his right hand, and laying her down again, he cupped both of her breasts, and sucked gently on one and then the other.

They were plump and firm, these breasts. She’d been fifteen when the curse struck her. And he bit at her nipples, moving the breasts almost roughly so as to feel their weight, and then lightly he slapped them back and forth, delighting in this.

His desire had been hard and almost painful to him when he had come into the room, and now it was urging him almost mercilessly.

He mounted her, parting her legs, giving the white inner flesh of her thighs a soft, deep pinch, and, clasping her right breast in his left hand, he thrust his sex into her.

He was holding her up as he did this, to gather her mouth to him, and as he broke through her innocence, he opened her mouth with his tongue and pinched her breast sharply.

He sucked on her lips, he drew the life out of her into himself, and feeling his seed explode within her, heard her cry out.

And then her blue eyes opened.

“Beauty!” he whispered to her.

She closed her eyes, her golden eyebrows brought together in a little frown and the sun gleaming on her broad white forehead.

He lifted her chin, kissed her throat, and drawing his organ out of her tight sex, heard her moan beneath him.

She was stunned. He lifted her until she sat naked, one knee crooked on the ruin of her velvet gown on the bed which was as flat and hard as a table.

“I’ve awakened you, my dear,” he said to her. “For a hundred years you’ve slept and so have all those who loved you. Listen. Listen! You’ll hear this castle come alive as no one before you has ever heard it.”

Already a shriek had come from the passage outside. The serving girl was standing there with her hands to her lips.

And the Prince went to the door to speak to her.

“Go to your master, the King. Tell him the Prince has come who was foretold to remove the curse on this household. Tell him I shall be closeted now with his daughter.”

He shut the door, bolting it, and turned to look at Beauty.

Beauty was covering her breasts with her hands, and her long straight golden hair, heavy and full of a great silky density, flared down to the bed around her.

She bowed her head so that the hair covered her.

But she looked at the Prince and her eyes struck him as devoid of fear or cunning. She was like those tender animals of the wood just before he slew them in the hunt: eyes wide, expressionless.

Her bosom heaved with anxious breath. And now he laughed, drawing near, and lifting her hair back from her right shoulder. She looked up at him steadily, her cheeks suffused with a raw blush, and again he kissed her.

He opened her mouth with his lips, and taking her hands in his left hand he laid them down on her naked lap so that he might lift her breasts now and better examine them.

“Innocent beauty,” he whispered.

He knew what she was seeing as she looked at him. He was only three years older than she had been. Eighteen, newly a man, but afraid of nothing and no one. He was tall, black haired; he had a lean build which made him agile. He liked to think of himself as a sword—light, straight, and very deft, and utterly dangerous.

And he had left behind him many who would concur with this.

He had not so much pride in himself now as immense satisfaction. He had gotten to the core of the accursed castle.

There were knocks at the door, cries.

He didn’t bother to answer them. He laid Beauty down again.

“I’m your Prince,” he said, “and that is how you will address me, and that is why you will obey me.”

He parted her legs again. He saw the blood of her innocence on the cloth and this made him laugh softly to himself as again he gently entered her.

She gave a soft series of moans that were like kisses to his ear.

“Answer me properly,” he whispered.

“My Prince,” she said.

“Ah,” he sighed, “that is lovely.”

A N. Roquelaure (Anne Rice)
The Claiming of Sleeping Beauty

Midnight

The moon shines white and silent
On the mist, which, like a tide
Of some enchanted ocean,
O’er the wide marsh doth glide,
Spreading its ghost-like billows
Silently far and wide.

A vague and starry magic
Makes all things mysteries,
And lures the earth’s dumb spirit
Up to the longing skies:
I seem to hear dim whispers,
And tremulous replies.

The fireflies o’er the meadow
In pulses come and go;
The elm-trees’ heavy shadow
Weighs on the grass below;
And faintly from the distance
The dreaming cock doth crow.

All things look strange and mystic,
The very bushes swell
And take wild shapes and motions,
As if beneath a spell;
They seem not the same lilacs
From childhood known so well.

The snow of deepest silence
O’er everything doth fall,
So beautiful and quiet,
And yet so like a pall;
As if all life were ended,
And rest were come to all.

O wild and wondrous midnight,
There is a might in thee
To make the charmed body
Almost like spirit be,
And give it some faint glimpses
Of immortality!

James Russell Lowell

a thousand words for love

Ancient Egyptians had fifty words for sand & the Eskimos had a hundred words for snow. I wish I had a thousand words for love, but all that comes to mind is the way you move against me while you sleep & there are no words for that.

Brian Andreas
Story People: Selected Stories & Drawings of Brian Andreas

Love…

God, I do love you. You say I use no endearments. That strikes me as funny. When I wake up in the Persian dawn, and say to myself ‘Virginia…Virginia…’

Vita Sackville-West
30th March 1927 letter to Virginia Woolf

an extraordinary virtuoso display of rhythm

But the tragic in the gothic, as I have said, is inextricably tied to the comic and satirical, and nowhere more so than in Poe, most of whose tales, after all, may well be parodies: some of them, even, parodies of others of Poe’s tales, or indeed parodies of themselves, such are the dense interweavings generated by gothic’s generic instability. Yet again, one could say that all of these possibilities are in one sense encompassed by the repetition, and the soul of repetition, Poe surreptitiously informs us, is the endlessly repetitive cry of the raven, and the “difference” that our imaginative hearing may infuse into it – under conditions of loneliness or deprivation; under conditions, perhaps, of insanity:

“once upon a midnight dreary, while i pondered, weak and weary,
over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
while i nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“’tis some visitor,” i muttered, “tapping at my chamber door –
only this, and nothing more.”

And so the poem continues: a tissue of repetitions, an extraordinary virtuoso display of rhythm, mainly trochaic octasyllabics, and rhyme, which some readers have seen as building up to its terrible climax (the subject’s apparent realization, not so much of the merely human loss of his lover as of the absolute unfreedom which will now continue to be his lot into an unimaginable and radically dehumanized future) while others have regarded it simply in the terms which Poe once offered, as a dry exercise in the possibilities of verse. in this ongoing difference, one might see the lineaments of the broader argument about the gothic: does repetition involve diminution or intensity?

All the poems I have so far mentioned involve one specific trope: namely, the intrusion of death into life. To say that thus baldly, of course, is to say nothing in particular: what else can death be but an intrusion into life? sometimes, people speak of “untimely” or “premature” death; but such comments are difficult to bring to sense unless we are speaking of a residual belief in “threescore years and ten,” which, of course, must have been originally metaphorical given the radically shorter lifespan which would have been available at the time the relevant part of the bible was written. but in gothic in general, and in gothic poetry more specifically, what we experience is the immediacy of such an intrusion, as well as something of an exploration of the complex guilts which assail us when in the presence, or present absence, of death.

death, that of our loved ones, mostly, but also proleptically our own, is, so to speak, our own fault. in gothic it is as though were we not burdened by this compulsion to repeat, to kill, to sacrifice, to worship the devil, we could live forever; gothic is always on the edge, as in for example Maturin or Robert Louis Stevenson, of discovering the elixir of life. but within gothic poetry there are darker, countervailing forces at work, and we often find them in the works of the most apparently respectable of poets. no British poet could emblematize respectability more conclusively than Tennyson (which presumably reveals what we may always have known, namely that respectability and depression are the two faces of Janus), yet he was capable not only of writing that great work of obsessive homosocial melancholia in memoriam (1833–50) but also powerful sonnets of death and the afterlife like “now sleeps the crimson petal” (1847):

“now sleeps the crimson petal, now the white;
nor waves the cypress in the palace walk;
nor winks the gold fin in the porphyry font:
the fire-fly wakens; waken thou with me.

now droops the milkwhite peacock like a ghost,
and like a ghost she glimmers on to me.

now lies the earth all danaë to the stars,
and all thy heart lies open unto me.

now slides the silent meteor on, and leaves
a shining furrow, as thy thoughts in me.

now folds the lily all her sweetness up,
and slips into the bosom of the lake:
so fold thyself, my dearest, thou, and slip
into my bosom and be lost in me.”

Doubt and repetition: so far we have identified these as crucial features of gothic poetry, ways of dealing with or at least addressing the dark materials, material and spiritual, which form the bedrock of such poetry. But what this sonnet reminds us of is a further issue, which has to do with a need for mastery, for control. Tennyson here, of course, performs a translation: the attempted abjection of death turns, magically, into the abjection of the female. The presumably female addressee here is reduced to a mere aspect of the narrator’s imagination: whether she is living or dead would hardly disturb the texture of the meditation.

Of course it could be argued, thinking of Thomas Hardy, for example, that such concerns have nothing to do with the critic: there are in poetry no persons, either living or dead, to disturb the texture of textuality. But what I think gothic may do is to disturb the apparently bland and smooth surface of such critical assumptions. Lives leave their traces, and even the most calm of seas is disturbed by waves, and even the most serene of meditations is sometimes betroubled by a “glimmering”: a relic of the past, a hint of the phantomatic, perhaps even more especially so when the strenuous attempt has been made to expel such troubling, perhaps even indecent, non-respectable, material, and even more especially when that material happens to be female. And of course the issue of male and female gothic, whatever those vexed terms might mean, has come to a centrality in recent criticism, although perhaps at the expense of how one might consider gothic in terms of a more various, a more diffuse perversion.

And so, under the sign of perversion, inevitably as the nineteenth century closes around us (to allude to Virginia Woolf) to A.C. Swinburne. there are many of Swinburne’s poems which could be considered to touch upon gothic themes: certainly many of them are concerned with death, and many of them again deal with extreme physical states. much of Swinburne’s always-observable venom was reserved for the Christian church, with what he saw as its frigid palliatives which prevented people from engaging with the full savour of life which can spring only from a continuing and “lively” sense of mortality. “After death” (1866), however, is a peculiar poem even by Swinburne’s peculiar standards: one piece of evidence for this is that its rhythms are far from perfect, which is remarkable in a poet whose mastery of rhythm has been argued to be greater than that of any other poet writing in English.

our protagonist (“the dead man” – did Stevie Smith read this poem before she wrote “not waving but drowning”?) is laid in his coffin, and cursed:

“the first curse was in his mouth,
made of grave’s mould and deadly drouth.

the next curse was in his head,
made of god’s work discomfited.

the next curse was in his hands,
made out of two grave-bands.

the next curse was in his feet,
made out of a grave-sheet.”

Is this a children’s skipping-game? is it a corrupt version of an ancient ballad? in its spanning of simplicity and horror, perhaps it enacts again the instability of the gothic, the ever-complex question of what truly frightens, and whether indeed words, or visual images, can actually do that at all. At all events, the dead man protests; the four boards of the coffin, who are his interlocutors, respond with what seems to be an extended riddle, or series of riddles. The dead man asks whether some ghastly fate has overtaken his family (in the old sense, including servants), and the boards reply that it has not. On the contrary, his family is doing just fine, but unfortunately:

the dead man answered thus:
“what good gift shall god give us?”

the boards answered him anon:
“flesh to feed hell’s worm upon.”

All is “power and greed and corruptible seed,” as Bob Dylan would put it many years later, hopes of forgiveness or redemption are but children’s play. Gothic is sometimes seem as reflecting a sense of divine injustice, but of course far more frequently it reflects a view of the consequences of ill deeds done but not forgotten. History, the history we take to be valid, will reshape events according the narratives we need, typically the narratives of the victors: gothic introduces us to a different kind of memory, a repertoire of the past from which nothing can be erased, where all the forgettings of the past are capable of re-manifesting themselves: as ghosts, as revenants, as phenomena of the repetition. That, of course, could also be taken to be a description of Freud’s view of the unconscious.

It would probably be neither fair nor accurate to claim that gothic poetry from 1700 to 1900 constitutes a unitary “tradition,” in any of the manifold usages of that vexed word. This is at least in part because it is difficult, given gothic’s constant misgivings about origins, to think through gothic as a tradition at all: it is instead involved in continual remaking, repetitions with difference, and is always haunted by the ghosts of its own pasts, the legends, the fairy-tales, the edges of history with which it is preoccupied: the “pre-occupations” which lay stake to their own space, lodged within the apparently stable house of any “occupied” institution. It is also because gothic itself keeps on invading spaces which attempt to set limits around themselves; gothic comes as a reminder that the boundaries between life and death are always malleable, permeable, penetrable.

But what one can say is that there is a gothic impulse which pervades: I have alluded above to Stevie Smith, but of course were we to move to more recent poetry, then we would also need to consider Sylvia Plath, many of whose most emblematic poems, “daddy” perhaps most clearly among them, engage with the vampiric, with ways in which the dead find some of their apparent fulfilment in preying on the susceptible bodies and minds of the living.

What one can also say is that, if we are to think that “romanticism,” whatever that term might mean, spreads itself in its most obvious ways across the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, then it is also true that its most basic assumptions – about the primacy of the emotional life of the writer, about the ultimate significance of feeling, about the necessity of a kind of “incarnation” within the word – have persisted and still persist into the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. In this constellation, then, the persistence and recrudescence of gothic themes – the intrusion of death, the need to host, however unwillingly, reminders of the past, the impossibility of expunging the notion of haunting – is hardly surprising, and is given further inflections through new “explanations” of this persistence, through, for example, new identifications of the sites and effects of trauma.

Gothic poetry is, then, about doubt: it is about doubt as to the limits of human thought; it is about the limits of the human in general; it is a series of attempts to cope with the omnipresence of the wound, the irruption of the deathly into the apparently perfected body. The “perfect” is an illusion; if we are to move beyond it, we need to remind ourselves of the realms where perversion and even, in some cases, torture prove to us that the body cannot provide its own remedies for its ills. Ghosts and phantoms are problematic, to be sure: but so too are physical distortions, corporeal malfunctions, and perhaps these are harder to talk about. Yet in the end maybe they are the same: the apparent misrepresentations of the human body which we find in gothic are, in fact, full representations of that body as it in fact functions, never perfectly, always marked by the wound which is the precursor of death, what Poe referred to as “the conqueror worm.”

David Punter
Gothic Poetry 1700–1900
The Gothic World

translation

Looking at the gaps between the words as you move from one language to another, and the way meaning disappears into the gaps — that experience is what I value most about translation. We operate all the time with language as if it says what we mean. It never does, but you don’t realize the flaccidity of that until you are actually trying to make one thing in one language into another language. It’s like being on a surface with a lot of cracks in it and looking down through the cracks to something like another world down there that you can almost see, almost express, but not quite. It’s frustrating in the sense that there’s an ideal understanding down there that’s not available but, on the other hand, it doubles reality because we don’t live in that ideal world, we live up here, and yet you can glimpse down through the cracks to that other thing.

Anne Carson
Interviewed by Kate Kellaway for The Guardian, Sunday 3oth October 2016

on the lookout for adventure

We may say that all ages are dangerous to all people, in this dangerous life we live. But the thirties are a specially dangerous time for women. They have outlived the shyness and restraints of girlhood, and not attained to the caution and discretion of middle age. They are reckless, and consciously or unconsciously on the lookout for adventure. They see ahead of them the end of youth, and that quickens their pace.

Rose Macaulay
Dangerous Ages

love that has no shame

Love pure, love simple, love entire; love that has no shame; no remorse; that is here, that is gone, as the bee on the flower is here and is gone.

Virginia Woolf
Flush