More than macabre … A woman looks at Inverse Reverse Peverse (1996) by Cerith Wyn Evans at the Royal Academy’s Sensation exhibition.

Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, great grand-niece of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, felt overshadowed by her illustrious ancestor, but hers was nonetheless a talent to reckon with. Her best-known poem is “Unwelcome”. It’s not my favourite, though it has a brilliant first stanza:

We were young, we were merry, we were very very wise,
     And the door stood open at our feast,
When there passed us a woman with the West in her eyes,
     And a man with his back to the East.

Subsequently, it loses some of that rhythmic panache, and takes a disappointing turn into Gothic cloak-and-dagger-el. We find ourselves in a medieval scene (“The hound forgot the hand of her lord”) and the universality of the allegory seems compromised, a dimension lost. It remains a good, gloomy old tale, but falls short of its potential as a parable drawn from specific, lived experience. I prefer the subtler, tougher writing of “The Other Side of a Mirror”.

This is no mere tale of the macabre. The protagonist’s eye is fixed in a ruthless, painterly way on the shocking mirror-image that she recognises as herself. We are almost in the presence of the anti-Christ in stanza two, as the ghastly face stares out of its anti-halo of hair “which formed the thorny aureole/ Round hard unsanctified despair”. We can imagine the Gorgon, too, with her thatch of hissing snakes. But the speaker is, of course, confronting her own banished identity. It is the other self of the Victorian ideal woman, falsely sanctified as wife and mother and carer – “the angel in the house”. A society that fears and silences the more truthful version of femininity turns it into a monster. The acceptable but false woman hides outlawed emotions and despised talents, just as she may literally hide behind her hair, but she knows, as a writer, that the force and presence of her authentic self cannot be escaped. This poem records the terrifying, if briefly exhilarating, encounter.

The use of the word “envy” (stanza two, line three) is strange and arresting, as if it had been a synonym for “wish” or “desire”. It’s not, grammatically, the envy that is no longer hidden; and the poet doesn’t tell us “what once no man on earth can guess”. And yet, envy must be part of that un-guessable thing – envy of men, perhaps? The later stanza with its references to “the leaping fire/ of jealousy and fierce revenge” confirms the suspicion.

That little detail about the lips (“parted lines of red”) is extraordinarily effective. It suggests an ugly wound, and at the same time, a mouth that has been painted in order to please men and win love. Horror, so perfectly understated, is no mere Gothic fantasy: it’s simple and real and full of pathos.

The poem is tightly structured, and builds in power as it moves from stanza to stanza. The moment of self-recognition at the end might seem predictable to the psychologically astute modern reader, but it has a subtle “frame”, which is denial, set up earlier in that final stanza. This wish to turn away from the revelation once again undercuts the Gothic turn with a sad and powerful realism. Let this “real me” be unreal, let her be merely a ghost, the speaker seems to say.

Although a successful novelist, Coleridge was never sure of herself as a poet, and wrote under the melancholy pseudonym “Anodos”, meaning “on no road”. But she was, of course, firmly on the road to what we would now understand as a modern feminist poetics. The breakthrough to a self-image that is neither angel nor monster remains for most women, writers or not, a difficult work-in-progress.

The Other Side of a Mirror

I sat before my glass one day,
     And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
     That erst were found reflected there –
The vision of a woman, wild
     With more than womanly despair.

Her hair stood back on either side
     A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
     What once no man on earth could guess.
It formed the thorny aureole
     Of hard unsanctified distress.

Her lips were open – not a sound
     Came through the parted lines of red.
Whate’er it was, the hideous wound
     In silence and in secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
     She had no voice to speak her dread.

And in her lurid eyes there shone
     The dying flame of life’s desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
     And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy, and fierce revenge,
     And strength that could not change nor tire.

Shade of a shadow in the glass,
     O set the crystal surface free!
Pass – as the fairer visions pass –
     Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
     That heard me whisper, “I am she!”

___________

Full article and photo: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2009/may/11/poem-of-the-week-mary-elizabeth-coleridge