So I’ve been doing reading for my dissertation and i’ve been turned onto some interesting avenues by the articles i’ve been reading, namely starting with Spenser’s ‘bower of bliss’ (ironic name as i’ve learnt) and Rappaccini’s Daughter, which is a story about some girl who is bought up around poisonous plants and becomes toxic herself and kills her true love by accident (has a lot of links to Keats’ ‘Lamia’).

This is a verse of poetry, from my epic poem, which i wrote earlier on whilst thinking about the above ideas:

I’m in the middle of the desert but at the end of the earth

In a graveyard where flowers grow from dead men’s hearts

Frozen bowers for sublime light arise in a crystalline rebirth

Refracting the truth; is the whole really final? Or is the whole just a part?

Lonely Hester Prynne read Keats’ second Hyperion and fell

Under Moneta’s spell of isolation, unable to escape for

All the crystal blooms she could muster, forced to become the bell

Of the ball; at once the king, the queen, the whole, the part of the court.

As Hester realised she was my nightingale, I was struck

By melancholic awe in which I could only hear her song,

But she was beyond me, fading far away into the epoch,

Dissolving into forgetfulness, realising that she didn’t belong

To my world. Could she really be the truth in beauty? The beauty in truth?

Alas, my catechistic dysphoria is underpinned by soft, dwindling ruth.

 

(I use the word ruth not as a name but in the sense of the definition on http://dictionary.com – if you’re interested go and check it out here – fyi dictionary.com is one my favourite website)