Transcript Hair, Memory and Mourning Jewellery: The

Hair, Memory and Mourning
Jewellery :
The Nineteenth-century
Fabrication of Death
Dr Lucetta Johnson
Afar away the light that brings cold cheer
Unto this wall,—one instant and no more
Admitted at my distant palace-door.
Afar the flowers of Enna from this drear
Dire fruit, which, tasted once, must thrall me here.
Afar those skies from this Tartarean grey
That chills me: and afar, how far away,
The nights that shall be from the days that were.
Afar from mine own self I seem, and wing
Strange ways in thought, and listen for a sign:
And still some heart unto some soul doth pine,
(Whose sounds mine inner sense is fain to bring,
Continually together murmuring,)—
“Woe's me for thee, unhappy Proserpine!”
Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘The Garden
of Proserpine’ in Poems and Ballads, 1866
Pale, beyond porch and portal,
Crowned with calm leaves, she stands
Who gathers all things mortal
With cold immortal hands;
Her languid lips are sweeter
Than love’s who fears to greet her
To men that mix and meet her
From many times and lands
She waits for each and other,
She waits for all men born,
Forgets the earth her mother,
The life of fruits and corn;
And spring and seed and swallow
Take wing for her and follow
Where summer song rings hollow
And flowers are put to scorn.
lines 49-64 and pp. 137-8.