Victorian Poetry

Bodies are everywhere in the poetry of Michael Field (Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper). They dance in ecstasy, are wound about with snakes, doze in the grass, stomp grapes for wine, kneel before altars, and suffer decapitation. Throughout Field’s oeuvre, the poets display an interest in the poetic representation of bodies, that is, how to translate the physicality of the body—its sensations, its lines, its place in space—into language. In the course of such translation, the body becomes a signifier for Bradley and Cooper and allows them to communicate a range of emotions and ideas. The nature and use of the body evolves over the course of Michael Field’s career, becoming, in their final published volumes, inseparable from the religious fervor and spirituality that accompanied their 1907 conversion to Catholicism. Here, I begin with a discussion of bodies in Field’s poetry, specifically Sight and Song (1892), and then move to an examination of the poetry written about and around their conversion to demonstrate how they depicted the act of participating in Catholicism as a fully physical, embodied experience. In doing so, Field uses the physical body to engage with spiritual questions prompted by their conversion. The experience of conversion both provided new, rich subject matter for Field and created the opportunity for the expansion of their artistic reach, from writing poems of eye and ear to writing poems that more fully embody a sensory aesthetic experience.

Field’s interest in depicting the physical body is perhaps felt most strongly in the 1892 volume Sight and Song—every poem in this volume depicts figures.¹ The poems in Sight and Song are each matched to a painting, an endeavor that was part of Field’s emerging aesthetic theory, which, as Ana I. Parejo Vadillo explains, was to “develop an epistemology of sight intrinsically related to poetry.”² Of the thirty-one paintings represented in the volume, only one, da Vinci’s Drawing of Roses and Violets does not include human figures. Field puts the figure of da Vinci himself into the poem, however, as they meditate on the act of composition: [End Page 179]

Leonardo drew the blooms     On an April day:How his subtle pencil loved its toil,     Loved to draw!”

(ll. 12–15)

The poem places the reader in the mind of Leonardo as he seeks to capture the spirit and the secrets of the flowers. The concluding stanza presents Leonardo’s task as a fight against time, decay, and death: “Leonardo drew in spring, / Restless spring gone by, / Flowers he chose should never after fade” (ll. 34–36). The flowers captured in his art, unlike those in nature, will not wither and die. The inclusion of the figure of da Vinci in this poem suggests a conscious effort on the part of Bradley and Cooper to include human figures in all the poems of Sight and Song. Moreover, the specific subject matter of this poem—the work of the artist and the sanctity of art—reminds readers of the place of the artist in relation to the work. Although da Vinci is not visible in the study of violets and roses, Bradley and Cooper make him visible in their poem. By embodying da Vinci in the poem and allowing their reader to see his pencil tracing the lines of the flowers, they express a commitment to the power of the body and its inseparability from the experience of art.

I start with the da Vinci poem because this interest in the power of the body and physical presence runs throughout much of Field’s work. In Sight and Song, bodies are part of the translation act, conveying emotion and sensation and connecting the poet, subject, and reader. In the later works, such emotions and sensations are complicated as Field attempts to embody the experience of spirituality and conversion in their poetry and uses the body to articulate the relationship between the human and the divine. Much of the critical work on Sight and Song has focused on the gaze and the way in which Field’s ekphrastic poetry mediates that...