Blake's 'illumination' (the poem is plate 39 of Songs of Innocence and of Experience ; see
p. 1420) further complicates an already highly ambiguous poetic text. In the picture are two worms?one eating a leaf in the upper left corner, the other coming out of the fallen blossom at the bottom?and three female figures, two of which, situated on the thorny stems above the engraved text, appear to be in postures of despair. The third female figure, emerging from the blossom, has arms flung forward in an expression of either ecstasy or terror. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON DC , USA/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.
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Glad Day, or The Dance of Albion, William Blake, ca. 1793
Blake kept returning to this image of liberation. He first designed it in 1780, shortly after finishing his apprenticeship as an engraver, when the vision of a rising sun and a radiant human body may have expressed his own youthful sense of freedom. But later, in an age of revolution, he identified the figure as Albion?'Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves.' For Blake the giant Albion represents the ancient form of Britain, a universal man who has fallen on evil, repressive times but is destined to awake and to unite all people in a dance ol liberty, both political and spiritual. Eventually, in ferusalem (ca. 1820), Blake's last great prophetic work, the figure of Albion merged with Jesus, risen from the tomb as an embodiment of 'the human form divine'? immortal and perpetually creative. BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.
First draft of The Eve of St. Agnes, John Keats, 1819
The extant holograph of The Eve of St. Agnes?here a part of the page containing stanza 30 (see p. 1837) ?is possibly the messiest and most fragile manuscript in all of English poetry. The poem's Spenserian stanzas require an elaborate calculation of rhymes ahead of time to line up the quadruple b-rhymes and triple c- rhymes needed for each stanza. In page after page of this first draft, Keats's final wording varies in only a phrase or two (if that much) from the version that was published in 1820, still the standard text. THE HARVARD KEATS COLLECTION, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE.
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Interior of Tintern Abbey, J. M. W. Turner, 1794
Turner painted this watercolor at the age of nineteen, a year after Wordsworth made his first visit to the abbey (1793) and four years before the poet returned for a second visit ( 1798), as recorded in the famous 'Lines . . .' pondering the changes that have taken place in both the speaker and the scene in the interim (see p.
1491). In Turner's version?as, in a different way, in Wordsworth's?the ruined symbol of religion, towering above two tiny human figures, presumably tourists, in the lower left, is in the process of being taken over (allegorically superseded) by the more powerful force of nature. VICTORIA & ALRERT MUSEUM, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.
Lord Byron, by Thomas Phillips, 1835 (after an original of 1813)
Garbed theatrically in an Albanian soldier's dress that he had purchased while on his travels, Byron appears in this portrait as one of his own exotic heroes. The profits from his 'Eastern' tales Lara and The Corsair in fact helped pay the painter's fees for the portrait, which Byron commissioned in 1813, choosing to be pictured not as a member of the
British Establishment but as an outsider. The archives of London's National Portrait Gallery record more than forty portraits of Byron done during his lifetime,
as well as a waxwork model from life
made by Madame Tussaud in 1816: a
statistic that suggests the poet's keen
awareness of the magnetism and mar
ketability of his image. NATIONAL POR
TRAIT GALLERY, LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN
ART LIHRARY.
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Madeline after Prayer, Daniel Maclise, 1868
Maclise's painting illustrates the particulars of Madeline's freeing her hair 'of all its wreathed pearls' (The Eve of St. Agnes, line 227; see p. 1836) and more generally the stanzas describing the 'casement high and triple-arch'd' and other furnishings of her bedroom. The pre- Raphaelite-influenced picture captures the rich colors and textures of the situation, but Keats's words actually provide many more details than the painting, including the hidden observer of this scene, Madeline's lover, Porphyro, who grows faint on seeing Madeline's appearance as a 'splendid angel.' THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES ON MERSEYSIDE, WALKER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, UK.
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The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, ca. 1783-1791
The first version of this painting created a sensation when the Swiss- born artist Fuseli exhibited it at London's Royal Acadcmy in 1781. Even Horace Walpole, who had used his own nightmare of 'a gigantic hand in armour' when composing his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, found Fuseli's trademark blend of violence, eroticism, and the irrational excessively disturbing: 'shockingly mad, madder than ever; quite mad' was Walpole's verdict on the witchcraft scene that Fuseli exhibited four years later. It is no surprise to leam that during the 1920s Sigmund Freud kept an engraving of The Nightmare on display. SNARK/ART RESOURCE, NY.
Illustration of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gustave Dore, 1 876
Coleridge's poems?especially The Ancient Mariner and 'Kubla Khan,' with their abundance of color, texture, and mysterious detail? have been illustrated many times. Dore's elaborate engravings, originally published in an edition of the poem in 1876, are perhaps the best known of all, 'darkly brooding, richly detailed, almost symphonic in their comprehensiveness and complexity,' as one critic has described them. This plate illustrates lines 59?60, 'The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around' (see p. 1617). FROM THE RIME OF I HE ANCIENT MARINER, DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.
