Andrew's Wiki
Farmers Bride

Bio

• 1869-1928
• Daughter of an architect; London (moved to Bloomsbury 1890; lived there till 1922); father’s family owned the famous Isle of Wight inn, “The Bugle”
  • Vacationed at Isle of Wight farm belong to dad’s family
    • Also vacationed as adult, France and Belgium
    • One time with six women to visit convent
  • Read at the British Museum Reading Room since 1891
  • Education: only focused on what she cared about naturally (lit, art, music)
  • Quite advanced: smoked, cursed, refused chaperones
• Between Victorian and modernism
• Some siblings insane; scared she would pass it on, so decided not to marry
• 1894: Yellow Book publishes a short story, “Passed”
• Meanwhile, Temple Bar publishes her work
• 1912: “The Farmer’s Bride” in The Nation
• 1916: The Farmer’s Bride published by Monros; Poetry Bookshop
  • Reviewed by H D for Egoist
• Essay on “The Poems of Emily Bronte”
• Loved by Hardy, de la Mare, Sassoon; friend of May Sinclair; supported by the Monros (Harold Monro, Poetry Bookshop); Hugh Walpole and Robert Bridges liked her stuff; Va Woolf approved it
• Slight financial troubles after father’s death; they take in lodgers; given a Civil List pension in 1923
• Anglo-Catholic phase, like her painter sister Anne
• Suicide by Lysol
• Val Warner’s info
  • Best stuff: monologues
  • “Strong natural sense of rhythm”
  • Combines Georgian content (countryside, religion: that’s all 1890s) with modernist style (rhymed free verse)
    • What could have been her influences for rhymed free verse? Laforgue (F S Flint in 1908s hypes it up), Arnold (“Dover Beach”), Whitman
  • Difficulties: “rawness” that isn’t ironic or reflective but just subjective; obscurity; conversationality
  • Compares to D H Lawrence’s poetry
  • Prose work was influenced heavily by James, Hardy, Poe, Wilde, Zola
  • Topics: women; romance/love/passion; natural beauty; male personae as narrators; negation, renunciation, death

Some Images from Her Poems

• Dead new-born lambs; children playing “shop” as a funeral procession goes on; leafless winter poplar as dead wayside dog; the “pecheresse” used by a man and then dropped, ruined; dead children (her three siblings who died?)

“Fame”

• Fame changes evaluations: the narrator wants to be beyond fame, but says that she cannot spare it. She talks of people in the know who visit her house, knowing how to “sift the unpainted from the painted faces” and how to “fit the singer to his song.” Opposed to them are “blind Earth’s great silences and spaces” which are “the old known things that are new” (nature, which is indifferent to all human activity). She wants to replace fame with a dream, but the dream turns out to be morbid: the dead lamb
• Lots of “yets” “buts” and “ors:” the mind is going back and forth, never resting
• Question/answer, exclamation points: quite emotional

“Saturday Market”

• Descriptions of various commodities are juxtaposed w/narrator’s advice of hiding your heart (wrapping it up, putting it in a tree) b/c the kind of life and humans who patronize Saturday Market laugh at you. Wonderful image of someone being laughed down for something she has, she goes home, and it’s her bleeding heart under her shawl.
• Narrator says that no one notices death (blood running down) on Saturday Market
• This is the connex of death and commodities (Andrew Miller on Thackeray in Vanity Fair)

“The Quiet House”

• Narrator faces house emptied by death (mother and two kids), banishment (one son), and reclusiveness (father); and hemmed in by father’s tight grip
• “everything has burned, and not quite through,” not quite enough for death (too much burning = death, narrator says); she is “burned and stabbed half through”
  • “the pain is deadly sweet”
  • liminal state between life and death
  • the lovely kills her: roses make her unhappy
• Makes the cycle of life painful: everything is still the same outside (contrast between changed inside and unchanged outside), but inside a worse kind of cycle is present: “day follows day / The same” of pure repetition
  • Might relate back to “Farmer’s Bride,” where the cycle of nature turns out to seem cruel when you exit from the human life cycle
• Hint of cousin’s friend wooing her, but she realizes he never will come, and the only hope for her is eventual death

“In Nunhead Cemetery”

• The sad thing is, death comes a dime a dozen: talks about how “you do not miss a rose” but he thinks it’s terrible that the flower he holds in his hand will die within the hour
• Children also seen not to care about death (as in “The Narrow Door,” kids playing shop as the funeral procession goes past)
• Male narrator whose fiancee has just died
• “the eyes of the Crystal Palace train / Looking down on us”
• Lots of description of London: Trafalgar Square; the cemetery is in London too
• Meditative tone lets loose to raw passion: “Though I am damned for it we two will lie / And burn, here where the starlings fly” (bleak world)
  • Doesn’t want to admit loss
• Christianity has failed to give him that sense of security he had when he was a child
• Alienation: has nowhere else to go

“The Fete” (appeared in Egoist thanks to Sinclair’s recommendation)

• A rather long poem of unevenly sized verses
• Sixteen-year-old boy away at school in Paris using little bits of French admidst English
• Mentions the Place d’Armes, an important site for the 1871 Commune – which is now all quiet
• Discipline: surveillance by all around you, in public, in dormitory
  • Chafing against it: wants freedom: “Si, c’est defendu, mais que voulez-vous?”
• Boredom: repetition of “all summer through”
• Just beginning to understand death, loss, loneliness, autumn—but still has moments of joy: “We left behind us the old world of dread, / I and the wind as we strode whistling on under the Winter sky.”
• “Fete” here is the Fair: three days in Spring
  • The lady horse rider is a vision of heroism, reminding him of King Arthur of battles of war, despite the “dirty grin” clown; sexual attraction perhaps
• “Summer was this, the gold mist in your eyes; – / oh God! it dies, / But after death -,
  • How complex the punctuation is: back and forth, back and forth, showing uncertainty
• Then, after a certain range of line lengths (four to twelve syllables) she bursts out with two long long ones
  • “The smell of beasts, the smell of dust, the scent of all the roses in the world, the sea, the Spring / The beat of drums, the pad of hoofs, music, the dream, the dream, the Enchanted Thing!”
  • Such changes are made to mimic a release of emotion after the artful constraint of previous lines; to show explosion of memory and sense; very much an 1890s tool
  • Seems like the real fete is Spring itself: you are brave then
• Passion changes: “Nothing will be the same again” and now he will be okay with destruction (it’s not all a good thing: “there had been violets there, / I shall not care”)
  • Let’s compare it with “To a Young Girl” by Hopkins (Margaret, Margaret, why are you grieving?”)
• “There is something new in the old heavenly air of Spring:” this is like that other line about the new old stuff in “Fame” (and like in Fame, this quality belongs to nature, which renews itself)

“The Farmer’s Bride”

• The male narrator chooses a bride who is too young. She is so scared of sexuality, shy and more of a friend to the animals, that she ran away. But they caught her, she’s locked up, and now she stays in the attic, avoiding men, although she dutifully keeps up housework. The farmer longs for her.
• “Shy as a leveret, swift as he / Straight and slim as a young larch tree / Sweet as the first wild violets, she, / To her wild self. But what to me?”
• I’d say she sounds like Hardy: her quiet use of the vernacular to express pain; the rhyme scheme is always there though it alters in each verse; but without oppressively intrusive meter: enough like iambic pentameter not to call attention to itself, but NOT iambic pentameter.
• Description of nature, changing into autumn, holds the most poignancy: just like she has turned against “all things human,” he has to turn to nature to describe the loss of her. Seems like the farmer was too attuned to natural rhythm of farming (said that he wooed her too soon b/c he had more to do at “harvest”—but now it’s harvest time and he only sees death now).
• Uses ungrammatical farmer talk: “runned away” “when us was wed”
• Nature in tension with the human: the human must master nature (the farmer), but the woman identifies with nature (and he also controls her). Seems like the farmer wanted too much, so now she’s as elusive as nature itself, neither of which he can enjoy now (“What’s Christmas?” with just the two of em, he laments)

“Rooms”

• “I remember rooms that have had their part / In the steady slowing down of the heart.”
  • “where for good or ill – things died.”
    • love the caesura!
• They’re clearly seaside rooms (damp, seaweed, tide)
• Narrator says that “you and I” are both already dead “though every morning we seem to wake and might just as well seem to sleep again” and then compares it to real death
  • Cf Jean Rhys’ two deaths in Wide Sargasso Sea

One Act Play: “The China Bowl”

• In house of Cornish fisherman, along coast
  • Synge: setting, dialect, death and cruelty of the sea (killed the dad, two sons, many of the townspeople, turning one insane)
  • Topic resembles James
• Characters
  • Rachel: small, over 70, mending fishing net (mother)
    • Reminiscing (for example the daughter Jenefer who ran away, whose sampler she looks at); worrying that David’s wife doesn’t like her, wants her dead, wants David all to herself b/c wife does so much around house
  • David: tall, handsome, about 40, cutting bait (son)
  • Miss Maxwell: charming, good-manners, about 30 (painter; Londoner)
    • Art: the artist’s temperament will change the work, will make it more than mere representation: what the artist sees that no one else can
    • Women in London looking for better way than sex (kisses) to control men
    • Her rival is Teddy Barclay, a dandyish sort whom Susannah detests b/c “not a real man” (ie gay)
  • Susannah: tall, red-headed, “rather savage” 23-yr-old (wife, pregnant)
    • Brings in picture of her done by Miss Maxwell as a study for Delilah, wants to hang it where Jenefer’s sampler is
    • Has an Old Testament understanding of God and interpersonal relations
    • Temptation: says that her love and passion should mean more to him than anything else (ie his mother); that she loves him more than she loves God (but it just sounds like rhetoric to me and she’s just a flirt; she even tells his mom that he’s nothing special)
    • Her faith gone b/c God let all those people die in the wreck
• The Bowl
  • Sits on the Bible
    • Husband brought it to Rachel the year they married, “back from foreign lands” and used for christening
  • Miss Maxwell wants it, she “fancies” it
    • Susannah wants a trip to Plymouth in exchange for it (she’s curious about its “giddy” pace with cars and people crowded around “shop windys”)
      • Her idealistic “I want to see the world” becomes farcically circumscribed when she answers to Miss Maxwell’s “seeing the world is expensive, “Thirteen and fivepence, theer and back.”
    • Sold for twenty shillings
  • Apparently it’s normal for such exchanges: a man came down to “old Steve” and offered to pay for false teeth in exchange for an old mirror
  • Rachel comes in to see Susannah taking the bowl out for Miss M: confrontation! David ends up hitting Susannah, who leaves him; David goes out to fish b/c upset
  • Rachel blames Miss M, who says “I guess I disobeyed tenth commandment,” (thou shalt not covet) and says that she’s got the “collector’s vice” of wanting more and more (insatiable)
    • She says to buy a bowl not off her poor household, but from Lord Vivian with his “grand place” and “all sorts of gimcracks”
    • She says to the richer, “they’m just another ornament to take and boast on,” whereas to the poor they don’t have many so they matter more; “you’m born to buy and we’m born to sell” so that when hard times come, the rich take advantage of poor and buy what little they had: calls it “cheat”
• Words
  • Rachel notes that Miss M seems to hate the word “cheat” but will do it anyway, just as a prostitute blushes at word “harlot” but still is a harlot and just as the members of parliament “lie” just to get people’s votes but don’t want to be called liars. Rachel points to Final Judgment, which is beyond mere verbiage.
  • Miss M says, “The word is more horrible than the thing.” but she can’t explain why.
• Rich v Poor
  • Rachel: We just want to be let alone, but you don’t! They want more “soft places” and use their “long tongues and long pockets” to do so
• After this class argument, we learn David’s dead: dead for a bowl, “a piece of painted cloam.” Susannah blames Rachel and tells her off. And Rachel dies of heartbreak and shock. And Susannah realizes that Rachel has won b/c now David and Rachel are together in heaven. Jealousy reigns.