Pre-Raphaelite and other Poets

by Lafcadio Hearn

Against the haloed lattice-panes
The bridesmaid sunned her breast;
Then to the glass turned tall and free,
And braced and shifted daintily
Her loin-belt through her côte-hardie.
The belt was silver, and the clasp
Of lozenged arm-bearings;
A world of mirrored tints minute
The rippling sunshine wrought into 't,
That flushed her hand and warmed her foot.
At least an hour had Aloyse,—
Her jewels in her hair,—
Her white gown, as became a bride,
Quartered in silver at each side,—
Sat thus aloof, as if to hide.
Over her bosom, that lay still,
The vest was rich in grain,
With close pearls wholly overset:
Around her throat the fastenings met
Of chevesayle and mantelet.

Absolutely real as this seems, we know that the details must have been carefully studied in museums. Elsewhere, except perhaps in very old pictures, these things no longer exist. There are no more loin-belts of silver, no côte-hardies, no chevesayle or mantelet. I cannot explain to you what they are without pictures—further than to say that they were parts of the attire of a lady of rank about the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Brides do not now have their white robes "quartered in silver"—that is, figured with the family crest or arms. Why silver instead of gold? Simply because of the rule that brides should be all in white; therefore even the crest was worked in white metal instead of gold. By the word vest, you must also understand an ancient garment for women; the modern word signifies a garment worn only by men. "Grain" is an old term for texture. The description of the light playing on the belt-clasp of the bridesmaid, in the second stanza, is a marvellous bit of work, the effect being given especially by three words—"lozenged," "rippling," for the sunshine, and "minute," for the separate flushes or sparklings thrown off from the surface. But all is wonderful; this is painting with words exactly as a painter paints with colours. Sounds are treated with the same wonderful vividness:

Although the lattice had dropped loose,
There was no wind; the heat
Being so at rest that Amelotte
Heard far beneath the plunge and float
Of a hound swimming in the moat.
Some minutes since, two rooks had toiled
Home to the nests that crowned
Ancestral ash-trees. Through the glare
Beating again, they seemed to tear
With that thick caw the woof o' the air.

One must have been in the tower of a castle to feel the full force of the first stanza. The two girls are in a room perhaps one hundred and fifty or two hundred feet above the water of the moat, so that except in a time of extraordinary stillness they would not hear ordinary sounds from so far below. And notice that the poet does not tell us that this was because the air did not move; he says that the heat was at rest. Very expressive—in great summer heat, without wind, the air itself seems to our senses not air but fluid heat. And the same impression of summer is given by the description of the two crows flying to their nest and back again, and screaming as they fly. The poet does not say that they flew; he says they toiled home—because flying in that thick warm air is difficult for them. When they return he uses another word, still more impressive; he says they beat again through the glare. This makes you hear the heavy motion of the wings. And he describes the crow as seeming to tear the air, because that air is so heavy that it seems like a thing woven.

Here is a strangely powerful stanza describing the difficulty of speaking about a painful subject that for many years one has tried to forget:

Her thought, long stagnant, stirred by speech,
Gave her a sick recoil;
As, dip thy fingers through the green
That masks a pool,—where they have been
The naked depth is black between.

Any of you who as boys have played about a castle moat, and stirred the green water weeds covering the still water, must have remarked that the water looks black as ink underneath. Of course it is not black in itself; but the weeds keep out the sun, so that it seems black because of the shadow. The poet's comparison has a terrible exactness here. The mind is compared to stagnant water covered with water-weeds. Weeds grow upon water in this way only when there has been no wind for a long time, and no current. The condition of a mind that does not think, that dares not think, is like stagnant water in this way. Memory becomes covered up with other things, matters not relating to the past.

Now we can take four stanzas from the scene of the secret family meeting, after the shame has been confessed and is known. They are very powerful.

"Time crept. Upon a day at length
My kinsfolk sat with me:
That which they asked was bare and plain:
I answered: the whole bitter strain
Was again said, and heard again.
"Fierce Raoul snatched his sword, and turned
The point against my breast.
I bared it, smiling: 'To the heart
Strike home,' I said; 'another dart
Wreaks hourly there a deadlier smart.'
"'Twas then my sire struck down the sword,
And said, with shaken lips:
'She from whom all of you receive
Your life, so smiled; and I forgive.'
Thus for my mother's sake, I live.
"But I, a mother even as she,
Turned shuddering to the wall:
For I said: 'Great God! and what would I do,
When to the sword, with the thing I knew,
I offered not one life but two!'"