Valentine Ackland by Frances Bingham

Author:Frances Bingham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Handheld Press
Published: 2021-02-28T20:14:14+00:00

And Valentine questioned, of the two women present at the awakening, ‘On whom did his eyes first dwell / When the cloth was wound from his head?’ 23 She saw herself as the reborn Lazarus-figure returned from the dead, but to Sylvia the unwelcome revenant was Elizabeth.

Valentine was simultaneously writing poems which asserted the supremacy of the spirit, beautiful meditations on time and eternity. Yet even here, her conclusion about the importance of the moment – now – could be read as an argument for immediate action:

To Now, which is all we have, eternities deliver Each one of us this present from the anonymous giver. 24

Sylvia had, in Valentine’s eyes, such a pure character that she had no need to worry about the state of her soul; it was perfectly robust. She was sometimes interested in Valentine’s current reading, but always from the human angle, the art inspired or the ritual practised. Her distance from this hugely important aspect of Valentine’s life perhaps contributed to the estrangement Valentine was feeling when she wrote: ‘This I have longed for beyond all count of cost / And yet know nothing of, know only what I have lost / In turning from you, my dearest love of old, / Love more beloved than any, love more true.’ 25

On her birthday in 1948 Valentine wrote a poem to Sylvia, as she always did, ‘I wait through the year’s long days for a sign of your favour’, which, as this first line indicates, suggests a growing intellectual distance between them, finally overcome by great love in the triumphant ending: ‘I stood so, at the year’s end, to-day, and suddenly saw you, / Crossing the time-emptied square to bring me your favour.’ 26

For their nineteenth anniversary on 12 January 1949, Valentine’s poem to Sylvia was again double-edged, describing various ‘ones’ who had been loved, apart from the ‘one alone’ who ‘stayed in all weather / Stayed through the long years, stays forever.’ (A compliment of a kind.)

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