Several Strangers by Claire Tomalin

Author:Claire Tomalin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141909509
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2008-10-20T04:00:00+00:00

What are heavy? sea-sand and sorrow:

What are brief? today and tomorrow:

What are frail? Spring blossoms and youth:

What are deep? the ocean and truth.

And if she repeatedly expressed a longing for death as an escape from the frustrations and weariness of this world, no one was more responsive to the scents and flowers and brightness of summer, and to the whole notion of ecstatic enjoyment. Battiscombe sees the tension between her Italian blood and her English upbringing as a source of pain and spur to genius; I suspect some deeper sense of outrage in her along the lines of the verses quoted at the start of the article: if she couldn’t be Dante Gabriel, she would be ‘doubly blank’.

Her life did become doubly blank. How painful it is to hear (from her affectionate brother William) of her ‘oppressive gratitude’ for insignificant favours, of her ‘almost stereotyped smile’; how terrible the testimony of her last illness when, far from turning easily to long-desired death, she fell into mental as well as physical agony and, when left alone, screamed so loudly that her neighbour felt obliged to write a letter of protest to William. This is the girl with the scissors again. She was a magnificent poet; why is there no complete edition of her poems in print?

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