Victorian Poetry

Aesthetic and Decadent poetry

her life in 1889, the aunt and niece (Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper)
who wrote jointly as Michael Field composed more than twenty volumes.
Their work - which cannot be attributed to either Bradley or Cooper on an
individual basis - certainly undermines the idea that poetry is the product
of a single author. The mythical prophet Tiresias, who was both male and
female, emerges as a significant figure in Field's writings. As Chris White
observes: "Two women, writing under/through a man's name, operate as
Tiresian poet, whose strength derives from femaleness and whose authority
derives from the masculine Poet identity which can change the world." 20
By comparison, Yopie Prins has shown how in their volume titled Long
Ago (1889) - which adapts the lesbian poet Sappho's fragments - Bradley
and Cooper "develop a model of lyric authorship in which voice is the
effect of an eroticized textual mediation between the two of them rather
than the representation of an unmediated solitary utterance." 21 These
insights throw important light on how Michael Field represents eroticism
in one of the untitled lyrics collected in Underneath the Bough (1893):

A Girl,

Her soul deep-wave pearl

Dim, lucent of all lovely mysteries;

A face flowered for heart's ease,

A brow's grace soft as seas

Seen through faint forest-trees:

A mouth, the lips apart,

Like aspen-leaflets trembling in the breeze

From her tempestuous heart.

Such: and our souls so knit,

I leave a page half writ -

The work begun

Will be to heaven's conception done,

If she come to it. 22

It goes without saying that young women have often been the subjects of
English lyrics. But here a sensuous girl remains central to the creation of
this delicate poem: she is as much a participant in its "conception" as the
"I" who waits for her to complete the "work begun." Importantly, these
lines imply that lesbian desire can transcend the conventional antithesis
between subject and object (speaker and beloved). Moreover, it is an
author with a male name who mediates this passion, adding further
intricacies to the poetic voice that admires the girl's "mouth, her lips
apart."

In the poetry of the late 1880s and 1890s, the desire to resist conven-
tional boundaries - whether of poetic form, sexual identity, or social mores