Abstract
This chapter addresses Poems of Adoration (1912), the volume of devotional poetry written by Cooper, to demonstrate how Christian religious forms had existed beside pagan ideas throughout Bradley and Cooper’s writing lives, and to show how easily ideas of love and sacrifice shift from Greek to Anglican to Catholic associations. To highlight themes of sacrifice, this chapter examines poems that feature martyrs—those who sacrifice themselves for love of God—and centers on the one poem that represents a martyr of Michael Field’s own making: Salome in “A Dance of Death.” By representing Salome as an artist figure admired for her graceful dance, Cooper makes her an analogue for the artist experiencing the tension between artistic freedom and religious obedience. This chapter argues that analogy is the primary mode of expression in these poems of adoration—analogy that draws but also diverges from Tractarian models. The same analogical thinking that allowed Bradley and Cooper to reconcile Greek and Christian symbols is at work in Poems of Adoration, reconciling aesthetic love of beauty with worship of God. When worship is like art, and when Dionysus is like Christ, argument by analogy is the best way to represent as well as to understand the role of the creator, whether God or artist.
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Notes
- 1.
F. Elizabeth Gray, Christian and Lyric Tradition in Victorian Women’s Poetry (London: Routledge, 2010), 8.
- 2.
Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 28, 1913, British Library, Add.MS.46803, f.13r.
- 3.
In adapting analogy, Michael Field is rethinking a staple of Tractarian poetics. G. B. Tennyson notes that the doctrine of analogy is “a theological position that is also an aesthetic one,” one that intimately connects the poetic, the moral and the mystical. For the Tractarians, however, these three exist in a hierarchal relationship, with the mystical at the top and the poetic primarily serving to lay the groundwork necessary to achieving the moral and the mystical. G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry: The Tractarian Mode (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), 52, 54. Connecting the moral, the mystical and the poetic had been part of Michael Field’s lifelong artistic project. But Cooper would not have embraced a system of analogy that comparatively devalued the poetic. I discuss Michael Field’s revisions of Tractarian analogy in more detail below.
- 4.
Because this version of the Salome story has the status of Gnostic myth that has been handed down for centuries, Megan Becher-Leckrone looked for its source but was unable to locate any evidence for its existence before the 1890s. Megan Becker-Leckrone, “Salome: The Feshishization of a Textual Corpus,” New Literary History 26, no. 2 (1995): 249. Richard Ellmann records this version of Salome’s story in his biography Oscar Wilde. Ellmann writes that Wilde at one time intended to write a play called The Decapitation of Salome, based on a story he told to Symbolist poet-playwright Maurice Maeterlinck and his lover the French opera singer Georgette Leblanc: banished by Herod, Salome eventually made her way to “the deserts of snow.” Crossing a frozen lake, she “fell into the water and the jagged ice cut into her flesh and decapitated her, though not before she managed to utter the names of Jesus and John. And those who later went by saw, on the silver plate of the re-formed ice, showing like the stamen of a flower with rubies, a severed head on which gleamed the crown of a golden nimbus.” Richard Ellmann, Oscar Wilde (New York: Knopf, 1988), 344–345.
- 5.
Michael Field, Works and Days: From the Journal of Michael Field, ed. T. and D. C. Sturge Moore (London: John Murray, 1933), 307.
- 6.
René Girard, “Scandal and the Dance: Salome in the Gospel of Mark,” New Literary History 15, no. 2 (1984): 317.
- 7.
Marion Thain, “Michael Field”: Poetry, Aestheticism and the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 15. To be sure, the context of Oscar Wilde’s play Salome (1891) and Aubrey Beardsley’s illustrations for it, Gustave Moreau’s painting “Salome Dancing Before Herod” (1876), Richard Strauss’s opera Salome (1905), or any of the era’s other multitudinous Salome representations, will also influence how readers understand Michael Field’s Salome. And because Michael Field’s oeuvre makes repeated references to extra-textual sources, both written and visual—from Sapphic fragments to Renaissance paintings to Roman history— Michael Field taught readers to expect intertextuality. The issue is that this often-anthologized poem generally appears among other decadent and aesthetic poetry and divorced from devotional context.
- 8.
Cynthia Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion in Victorian England: Jewish Identity and Christian Culture (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 4.
- 9.
Frederick S. Roden, Same-Sex Desire in Victorian Religious Culture (Palgrave Macmillan, 2002), 192.
- 10.
Roden, Same-Sex Desire, 193.
- 11.
Charles Ricketts, Michael Field, ed. Paul Delaney (Edinburgh: The Tragara Press, 1976), 2.
- 12.
Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 9, Oct.-Dec. 1895, British Library, Add.MS.86784, f.56r.
- 13.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46790, ff.178r-v.
- 14.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46802, f.41r.
- 15.
Michael Field, “The Heavenly Love,” Oxford University, Bodleian Libraries, Ms.Eng.poet.d.56. Cooper added annotations to Bradley’s table of contents (likely at some later date; the annotations are in the margins and use different ink) that date the earliest as April 1883 and the latest as August and September 1885, with the majority from 1884. As Chap. 3 notes, Bradley and Cooper were still “Arran and Isla Leigh” in 1880; they used “John Cooley” in 1882, and became Michael Field by the time of Callirrhoë ’s 1884 publication.
- 16.
Letter to Edith Cooper, 16 April 1885, Oxford University, Bodleian Libraries, MS.Eng.lett.c.418, f.91, lines 25–26. Further citations of this poem will give the line numbers in text.
- 17.
Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, 101.
- 18.
John Gray authored Silverpoints (1893), a touchstone of decadent poetry; he became a Catholic priest in 1901. Cooper copied Bradley’s letter into the diary. Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 21, Jan.–Sept. 1907, British Library, Add.MS.46796, f.221v.
- 19.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46796, f.220v.
- 20.
One is also reminded of Bradley’s accounting of the origins of Callirrhoe in a conversation with Professor Marshal: “‘What is literature,’ said Prof. Marshall, ‘but the expression of intense enthusiasm?’” Michael Field, Callirrhoe and Fair Rosamund, rebound and annotated, Oxford University, Bodleian Libraries, MS. Eng.poet.e.70, f.11.
- 21.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46795, f.231r.
- 22.
Michael Field, Add.MS.46795, f.232r.
- 23.
Michael Field, Add.MS.46795, f.232r.
- 24.
J. G. Frazer, The Golden Bowl: A Study in Comparative Religion, vol. 1 (London: Macmillan, 1890), 320, 330.
- 25.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46795, f.234v.
- 26.
Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 2, 1888–1889, British Library, Add.MS.46777, f.81v.
- 27.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46786, f.100r. Cooper copied Berenson’s letter to them in the diary; Bradley recorded the reply she sent.
- 28.
Michael Field, Add.MS.46786, f.100r.
- 29.
Michael Field, Add.MS 46786, ff. 100v.
- 30.
Michael Field, Poems of Adoration (London: Sands, 1912). Further citations of this work are given in text.
- 31.
I choose “as” instead of “like” as the marker of comparison because, among the hundreds of associations in Poems of Adoration, only twelve use “like.”
- 32.
Sara Lyons, “Secularism and Secularisation at the Fin de Siècle,” in The Edinburgh Companion to Fin-de-Siècle Literature, Culture and the Arts, ed. Josephine M. Guy (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018), 125.
- 33.
Richard Frith, “‘Heartsease I found’: Rossetti, Analogy, and the Individual Believing Subject,” Literature and Theology 28, no. 1 (March 2014): 30. John Keble’s The Christian Year (1827) is the best-known volume of poetry featuring “Tractarian Analogy,” which works to illustrate “the sacramental system … through external nature.” G. B. Tennyson, Victorian Devotional Poetry, 94.
- 34.
Frith, “‘Heartsease I found,’” 33.
- 35.
Andrea Henderson, “The Physics and Poetry of Analogy,” Victorian Studies 56, no. 3 (Spring 2014), 389–390.
- 36.
Henderson, “The Physics and Poetry of Analogy,” 392.
- 37.
Henderson, 393.
- 38.
Dionysus, like Christ, “came to bring / Life”; “to gladden and exalt.” Coresus claims that all gods who come to enrich human life must suffer, and “Dionysus thus suffered.” Like Christ, Dionysus is “a god” who “forsakes / Olympus to infuse divinity / In man’s mean soul.” Michael Field, Callirrhoë (London: George Bell, 1884), 22, 23.
- 39.
This rhyme scheme does not appear in Keble’s volume, which generally has only two couplets following an initial quatrain. Cooper is adapting his pattern of couplets following (or preceding) a quatrain without replicating it exactly—just as she adopts his use of analogy without entirely replicating it.
- 40.
The same rhyme—“dumb/come”—ends Noontide Branches , the masque that represents the passing of Greek gods, nymphs, and satyrs in the age of Christian worship. This couplet evokes a similar sense of questioning unease. See Chap. 5 for further discussion.
- 41.
Douglas Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined: Violence, Atonement, and the Sacred (London: Continuum, 2011), 189.
- 42.
Hedley, Sacrifice Imagined, 188.
- 43.
Hedley, 187.
- 44.
Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 18, 1904, Add.MS.46793, f.46v.
- 45.
Emma Mason, “Devotional Poetry,” in The Oxford Handbook of British Poetry, 1660–1800, ed. Jack Lynch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), 563–564.
- 46.
Mason, “Devotional Poetry,” 564.
- 47.
Kirstie Blair, Form and Faith in Victorian Poetry and Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), 40.
- 48.
Kirstie Blair, “The Influence of the Oxford Movement on Poetry and Fiction,” in The Oxford Handbook of the Oxford Movement, ed. Stewart J. Brown, Peter B. Nockles, and James Pereiro (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), 410.
- 49.
For instance, the aabcbc rhyme scheme of Keble’s “St. Stephen’s Day” also appears in Long Ago ’s “Yea, gold is son of Zeus: no rust”; “She comes, and youthful voice”; “No other girl—O bridegroom, though art right—”; “Grow vocal to me, O my shell divine!”; and “Above a fisher’s tomb.” The aabccb rhyme scheme of Keble’s “Fourth Sunday in Advent” (among many others) is also found in Long Ago’s “They plaited garlands in their time”; “Queen Dawn, in immortality doth bask”; “Dear bridegroom, it is spring; the boughs rejoice”; and “Night fell: Selene proud and pale.” The ababccdd pattern of Keble’s “Sexagesima Sunday,” “Fifth Sunday in Lent,” “First Sunday After Easter,” and “Second Sunday After Easter” orders Long Ago’s “Ah, Procne, wherefore does thou weary me?”; “Delicate Graces, come”’; “‘Sing to us, Sappho!’ cried the crowd”; “Deep in my mirror’s glossy plate”; and “We sat and chatted at our ease.”
- 50.
Jill Ehnenn, “‘Thy Body Maketh a Solemn Song’: Desire and Disability in Michael Field’s ‘Catholic Poems,’” in Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, ed. Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), 194.
- 51.
Kirstie Blair, “Breaking Loose: Frederick Faber and the Failure of Reserve,” Victorian Poetry 44, no.1 (Spring 2006): 28.
- 52.
Blair, “Breaking Loose,” 33.
- 53.
Ehnenn, “‘Thy Body Maketh a Solemn Song,’” 193.
- 54.
Emma Mason, “‘Her Silence Speaks’: Keble’s Female Heirs,” in John Keble in Context, ed. Kirstie Blair (London: Anthem Press, 2004), 130.
- 55.
Mason, “‘Her Silence Speaks,’” 130.
- 56.
Blair, Form and Faith, 8.
- 57.
Blair, 166, 16.
- 58.
Leire Barrera-Medrano, “‘St. Teresa, I Call on You to Help’: Michael Field and Spanish Mysticism,” in Michael Field: Decadent Moderns, ed. Sarah Parker and Ana Parejo Vadillo (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2019), 211.
- 59.
Barrera-Medrano, “‘St. Teresa, I Call on You to Help,’” 212.
- 60.
Barrera-Medrano, 212.
- 61.
Maureen Moran, Catholic Sensationalism and Victorian Literature (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2007), 233.
- 62.
Maureen Moran, “The Heart’s Censer: Liturgy, Poetry and the Catholic Devotional Revolution,” in Ecstasy and Understanding: Religious Awareness in English Poetry, from the Late Victorian to the Modern Period, ed. Adrian Grafe (London: Continuum, 2008), 32.
- 63.
Moran, Catholic Sensationalism, 233; Moran, “The Heart’s Censer,” 34.
- 64.
An early version of this reading appeared in Nordlit 28 (2011) in an article titled “Michael Field’s ‘A Dance of Death.’”
- 65.
Jonathan Farina, “‘Dickens’s As If’: Analogy and Victorian Virtual Reality,” Victorian Studies 53, no. 3 (Spring 2011): 432.
- 66.
Farina, “‘Dickens’s As If,’” 427.
- 67.
Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 23, 1908, British Library, Add.MS.46798, f.161v.
- 68.
Thain, “Michael Field,” 136.
- 69.
The setting of sun and ice not only follows the logic of “both/and” but also alludes, I think, to Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan” (1816), which describes the “sunny dome” and “caves of ice” of Xanadu. As a poem about the authority of the poetic voice/visionary poet, this allusion is particularly apt. Similarly, “Kubla Khan” is both Eastern and Western, both regular and changing in form, and—as I will argue about “A Dance of Death”—ultimately concerns the poet’s artistic vision and prophetic power.
- 70.
Cooper was living an existence of “both/and” when she noted the impossibility of leaving their past and its decadent associations entirely behind in a diary entry of 7 May 1907: “We have been abjuring the nineties, & all their spirit, in the Church John Gray of Silverpoints has raised for the Divine Presence, beautiful, austere, consecrated—& Alfred Douglas’ is the voice that calls to the world to receive us as we come forth of the church.” Michel Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46796, ff.101v-102r. Now a priest, former decadent poet John Gray was guiding their conversion, and Alfred Douglas—former lover of Oscar Wilde—had written “A Neglected Poet” for the Academy after having read the Mosher edition of Underneath the Bough . He praised their work, declaring that “it is a disgrace to this country” when “a poet of Michael Field’s caliber is driven to America for a publisher and a public.” A. D. [Alfred Douglas], “A Neglected Poet,” Academy 71 (20 Apr. 1907): 388, HathiTrust.
- 71.
Oscar Wilde, “Salome,” in The Complete Works of Oscar Wilde, vol. 5, Plays I, ed. Joseph Donohue (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 725, lines 849–851.
- 72.
Henderson, “The Physics and Poetry of Analogy,” 395.
- 73.
For an analysis of how Michael Field sees John’s prophetic vision in comparison with their own artistic vision, see Marion Thain’s chapter on Wild Honey from Various Thyme in her “Michael Field.” She grounds her discussion of its “apian aesthetic” in its cover image of a swarm of bees and reference in the epigraph to John the Baptist. Thain concludes that Michael Field “figure themselves as higher divinity—as the creators of the ‘Honey-book’ which when handed down and ingested will allow its readers/digesters to become prophets of the second coming.” Marion Thain, “Michael Field,” 141.
- 74.
There is also “abundant evidence that lustral bathing was an important aspect of Greco-Roman religions,” suggesting another analog between pagan and Christian rites. Daniel N. Schowalter, “Baptism,” in The Oxford Companion to the Bible, ed. Bruce M. Metzger and Michael D. Coogan (Oxford: Oxford UP, 1993), 73.
- 75.
Frith, “‘Heartsease I found,’” 33.
- 76.
Chapter 5 discusses Cooper’s reading of Newman. See also Michael Field, Works and Days, vol. 10, 1896, British Library, Add.MS.46785, ff.77–78.
- 77.
John Henry Newman, Meditations and Devotions of the Late Cardinal Newman, ed. William P. Neville (London: Longmans, Green, 1893), 48, HathiTrust.
- 78.
Newman, Meditations and Devotions, 48, 49.
- 79.
In this twenty-four line poem, “as” appears six times; it signifies synchrony once, and the other uses are in comparisons. Her room is “still / As a cave” (lines 1–2); someone is at her door “As stood… / The Angel when thy fear was sore” (lines 7–8); “No creature” is “half so still as thou” (line 10). Into this stillness, Christ enters, “very white / His body, lovely as first light” (lines 12–13). Finally, when hearing Christ “her arms rise up, her eyes/ Raised as at morning sacrifice” (lines 20–21). While these analogies do not provide specific insight into Mary’s analogic relationship to martyrs or to Michael Field, they demonstrate the insistent form of representation in the volume of poetry.
- 80.
This is the apostle Peter. Born Simon, when Christ calls him the rock of the Church, Simon becomes known as Peter, which is Greek for rock: “And when Jesus beheld him, he said, Thou art Simon the son of Jona: thou shalt be called Cephas, which is by interpretation, a stone” (John 1:42).
- 81.
Michel Field, Works and Days, ed. Sturge Moore, 314.
- 82.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46798, f.39v.
- 83.
Chris White, “‘Poets and Lovers Evermore’: The Poetry and Journals of Michael Field,” in Sexual Sameness: Textual Differences in Lesbian and Gay Writing, ed. Joseph Bristow (London: Routledge, 1992), 40; Mary C. Sturgeon, Studies of Contemporary Poets, revised and enlarged (Dodd, Mead, 1919), 360.
- 84.
Scheinberg, Women’s Poetry and Religion, 9.
- 85.
Chris Snodgrass, “Keeping Faith: Consistency and Paradox in the World View of Michael Field,” in Michael Field and their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007), 177.
- 86.
Sturgeon, Michael Field, 54. Also see Snodgrass, “Keeping Faith,” 171; Roden, “Michael Field,” 156; Kit Andrews, “The Dialectics of Conversion: Marius and Michael Field,” in Michael Field and Their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007), 99–101; Camille Cauti, “Michael Field’s Pagan Catholicism,” in Michael Field and their World, ed. Margaret D. Stetz and Cheryl A. Wilson (High Wycombe: Rivendale Press, 2007), 181; Hilary Fraser, “The Religious Poetry of Michael Field,” in Athena’s Shuttle: Myth, Religion, Ideology from Romanticism to Modernism, ed. Franco Marucci and Emma Sdegno (Milan: Cisalpino Press, 2000), 128.
- 87.
Michael Field, Works and Days, ed. Sturge Moore, 312.
- 88.
Julia Kristeva, The Severed Head: Capital Visions, translated by Jody Gladding (New York: Columbia University Press, 2012), 65.
- 89.
Snodgrass, “Keeping Faith,” 178.
- 90.
Emma Donoghue, We Are Michael Field (London: Absolute Press, 1998), 29.
- 91.
Amanda Paxton, Willful Submission: Sado-Erotics and Heavenly Marriage in Victorian Religious Poetry (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2017), 8.
- 92.
Sturgeon, Michael Field, 96. She further suggests that their devotion and sacrifice reveals more about Cooper’s and Bradley’s characters than the Church itself: “The martyr brings to his religion so much more than he takes from it. And these two poets brought their heroic temper, nurtured on love and discipline by many years of labor at their art. Not the Church, but their own splendid humanity, inspired and supported those acts of noble folly.” Mary C. Sturgeon, Studies of Contemporary Poets, 357.
- 93.
Donoghue, We Are Michael Field, 134.
- 94.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46798, 160v.
- 95.
Michael Field, Add.MS.46798, 39r.
- 96.
Michael Field, Add.MS.46798, 39r.
- 97.
Sturgeon notes that two of the poems in Poems are Adoration are by Bradley—she does not identify which two—and that two in Mystic Trees are by Cooper: “Qui Renovat Juventutem Meam” and “The Homage of Death” (Michael Field 94–95). Ehnenn usefully points out, however, that although “the books were written individually” Bradley and Cooper “edited and ordered them collaboratively, and each felt more than a small degree of joint responsibility for both” (Ehnenn, “‘Thy Body’” 190).
- 98.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46802, f.44r.
- 99.
Michael Field, Works and Days, Add.MS.46798, 39r.
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Richardson, L.M. (2021). Devotional Poetry: Poems of Adoration (1912). In: The Forms of Michael Field. Palgrave Studies in Nineteenth-Century Writing and Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-86126-1_7
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