The Norton Anthology of English literature. Volume 2

Why did I laugh tonight? No voice will tell,

898 Why is the word pretty so underrated?, 2377 Why should I blame her that she filled my days, 2029 Why the Novel Matters, 2269 "Why, William, on that old grey stone, 250

Widow at Windsor, The, 1819 Wild Swans at Coole, The, 2033 Wilde, Oscar, 1686 ['Will sprawl, now that the heat of day is best, 1296 Wilt thou go with me, sweet maid, 858 Wind, 2594 Windhover, The, 1518 Winter: My Secret, 1464 Winter's Day, A, 213 Witch, The, 1792 With blackest moss the flower-plots, 1112 With Rue My Heart Is Laden, 2044 Wollstonecraft, Mary, 158, 167 Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me, 1882 ["Woman's cause is man's, The"], 1136 Woman's Thoughts about Women, A, 1596

Women of England: Their Social Duties and Domestic Habits, The, 1584

Woolf, Virginia, 2080 Wordsworth, Dorothy, 389 Wordsworth, William, 243

Workbox, The, 1882 World is too much with us, The, 319

Would that the structure brave, the manifold music I build, 1303

Written after Swimming from Sestos to Abydos, 611 Written at the Close of Spring, 40 Written in the Church-Yard at Middleton at Sussex, 41

Yeats, William Butler, 2019

Yes, I remember Adlestrop�, 1956 Yes! in the sea of life enisled, 1355 Yes, injured Woman! rise, assert thy right!, 35 Yesterday all the past. The language of size, 2424 You did not come, 1870 You did not walk with me, 1881 You love us when we're heroes, home on leave, 1962 Your bed's got two wrong sides. Your life's all grouse, 2533

.

The Romantic Period (1785-1830)

La Prise de la Bastille, le 14 Juillet 1789, Claude Cholat, 1789

This amateur painting (in gouaehe on cardboard) was made "on the spot" by one of the participants in the five-hour siege, a local wine merchant, and presented to the French National Assembly two years later. The storming of the Bastille�the fortress and state prison in Paris, a hated symbol of absolutism�marked the entry of the lower classes ("the people") into the Revolution. The anniversary of the event, July 14, is the principal French national holiday.

REUNION DES MUSSES NATIONAUX/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

Plate 1 of The Marriage of Heaven and Hell, William Blake, 1790-93

This title page of a work composed in the early years of the French Revolution (see p. 1430) juxtaposes lighthearted activities (birds and humans soaring, strolling, playing music, dancing, embracing) with bleak and ominous surroundings (the leaflessness of the trees, the intensity of the flames). The larger reclining figures at the bottom of the page, sexy but genderless, are usually read as a devil and an angel whose embrace symbolizes the union ("marriage") of contraries running throughout the work.

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON DC ,

USA/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

The Sick Rose, William Blake, 1794

Blake's "illumination" (the poem is plate 39 of Songs of Innocence and of Experience ; see

p. 1420) further complicates an already highly ambiguous poetic text. In the picture are two worms�one eating a leaf in the upper left corner, the other coming out of the fallen blossom at the bottom�and three female figures, two of which, situated on the thorny stems above the engraved text, appear to be in postures of despair. The third female figure, emerging from the blossom, has arms flung forward in an expression of either ecstasy or terror. LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, WASHINGTON DC , USA/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

.

Glad Day, or The Dance of Albion, William Blake, ca. 1793

Blake kept returning to this image of liberation. He first designed it in 1780, shortly after finishing his apprenticeship as an engraver, when the vision of a rising sun and a radiant human body may have expressed his own youthful sense of freedom. But later, in an age of revolution, he identified the figure as Albion�"Albion rose from where he labourd at the Mill with Slaves." For Blake the giant Albion represents the ancient form of Britain, a universal man who has fallen on evil, repressive times but is destined to awake and to unite all people in a dance ol liberty, both political and spiritual. Eventually, in ferusalem (ca. 1820), Blake's last great prophetic work, the figure of Albion merged with Jesus, risen from the tomb as an embodiment of "the human form divine"� immortal and perpetually creative. BRITISH MUSEUM, LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

First draft of The Eve of St. Agnes, John Keats, 1819

The extant holograph of The Eve of St. Agnes�here a part of the page containing stanza 30 (see p. 1837)�is possibly the messiest and most fragile manuscript in all of English poetry. The poem's Spenserian stanzas require an elaborate calculation of rhymes ahead of time to line up the quadruple b-rhymes and triple c- rhymes needed for each stanza. In page after page of this first draft, Keats's final wording varies in only a phrase or two (if that much) from the version that was published in 1820, still the standard text. THE HARVARD KEATS COLLECTION, HOUGHTON LIBRARY, HARVARD UNIVERSITY, CAMBRIDGE.

.

Interior of Tintern Abbey, J. M. W. Turner, 1794

Turner painted this watercolor at the age of nineteen, a year after Wordsworth made his first visit to the abbey (1793) and four years before the poet returned for a second visit ( 1798), as recorded in the famous "Lines . . ." pondering the changes that have taken place in both the speaker and the scene in the interim (see p.

1491). In Turner's version�as, in a different way, in Wordsworth's�the ruined symbol of religion, towering above two tiny human figures, presumably tourists, in the lower left, is in the process of being taken over (allegorically superseded) by the more powerful force of nature. VICTORIA & ALRERT MUSEUM, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.

Lord Byron, by Thomas Phillips, 1835 (after an original of 1813)

Garbed theatrically in an Albanian soldier's dress that he had purchased while on his travels, Byron appears in this portrait as one of his own exotic heroes. The profits from his "Eastern" tales Lara and The Corsair in fact helped pay the painter's fees for the portrait, which Byron commissioned in 1813, choosing to be pictured not as a member of the

British Establishment but as an outsider. The archives of London's National Portrait Gallery record more than forty portraits of Byron done during his lifetime,

as well as a waxwork model from life

made by Madame Tussaud in 1816: a

statistic that suggests the poet's keen

awareness of the magnetism and mar

ketability of his image. NATIONAL POR

TRAIT GALLERY, LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN

ART LIHRARY.

.

Madeline after Prayer, Daniel Maclise, 1868

Maclise's painting illustrates the particulars of Madeline's freeing her hair "of all its wreathed pearls" (The Eve of St. Agnes, line 227; see p. 1836) and more generally the stanzas describing the "casement high and triple-arch'd" and other furnishings of her bedroom. The pre- Raphaelite-influenced picture captures the rich colors and textures of the situation, but Keats's words actually provide many more details than the painting, including the hidden observer of this scene, Madeline's lover, Porphyro, who grows faint on seeing Madeline's appearance as a "splendid angel." THE BOARD OF TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES ON MERSEYSIDE, WALKER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, UK.

.

The Nightmare, by Henry Fuseli, ca. 1783-1791

The first version of this painting created a sensation when the Swiss- born artist Fuseli exhibited it at London's Royal Acadcmy in 1781. Even Horace Walpole, who had used his own nightmare of "a gigantic hand in armour" when composing his Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto, found Fuseli's trademark blend of violence, eroticism, and the irrational excessively disturbing: "shockingly mad, madder than ever; quite mad" was Walpole's verdict on the witchcraft scene that Fuseli exhibited four years later. It is no surprise to leam that during the 1920s Sigmund Freud kept an engraving of The Nightmare on display. SNARK/ART RESOURCE, NY.

Illustration of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Gustave Dore, 1 876

Coleridge's poems�especially The Ancient Mariner and "Kubla Khan," with their abundance of color, texture, and mysterious detail� have been illustrated many times. Dore's elaborate engravings, originally published in an edition of the poem in 1876, are perhaps the best known of all, "darkly brooding, richly detailed, almost symphonic in their comprehensiveness and complexity," as one critic has described them. This plate illustrates lines 59�60, "The ice was here, the ice was there, / The ice was all around" (see p. 1617). FROM THE RIME OF I HE ANCIENT MARINER, DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

.

The Victorian Age (1830-1901)

Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dy ing�Typhoon Coming On),

J. M. W. Turner, 1840 The subject of Turner's painting�slaves thrown overboard, still in chains, as a storm approaches�is the occasion for apocalyptic use of light and color. For several years John Ruskin owned this painting, a gift from his father; but he later sold it, finding the subject "too painful to live with." While many contemporaries criticized the painting for what they saw as its extravagance, Ruskin praised iL as Turner's noblest work, in a passage from Modern Painters that is one of Ruskin's own finest passages of prose painting. BURSTEIN COLLECTION/ CORBIS.

.

Ophelia, John Everett Millais, 1851-52

Millais's painting illustrates the lines from Hamlet (4.7.137-54) in which Gertrude describes Ophelia's drowning herself. Many of the individual plants and llowers�the pansies on her dress, the violets around her neck�derive from the queen's speech and Ophelia's mad scene (4.5.163�94). Like much Pre-Raphaelite art, the painting sets an erotic subject in the midst of photographically precise, symbolic detail. The model for the painting was Elizabeth Siddal (later to become Dante Gabriel Rossetti's wife), who posed for the picture in a warm bath. ERICH LESSING/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

Work, Ford Madox Brown, 1852, 1856-63

Brown's painting constructs a comprehensive picture of Victorian society through the relationships of various classes of the population to work. The excavators at the center represent work in its essential, physical form; the leisured gentry on horseback at the top of the painting have no need to work; the ragged girl in the foreground cares for her orphaned brothers and sisters. Under the trees are vagrants and distressed haymakers. Thomas Carlyle and

F. D. Maurice, "brain workers" whose social ideas influenced the painting, stand on the right. MANCHESTER CITY ART GALLERY, MANCHESTER, UK.

.

The Awakening Conscience, William Holman Hunt, 1853�54

Every detail of Hunt's painting of a fallen woman, hearing the voice of conscience while in the arms of her lover, has symbolic resonance�the soiled glove on the carpet, the bird that has escaped the cat, the songs on the piano ("Oft in the Stilly Night") and on the floor ("Tears, Idle Tears"), the window through which the woman gazes, reflected in the mirror behind the couple. Like Millais's Ophelia, the painting surrounds and interprets its subject with a crowded canvas of discrete, photographically rendered objects. TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

Soul's Beauty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-70

Also titled Sibylla Palmifera (the palm-bearing sibyl), Soul's Beauty represents the

unattainable ideal that inspires the artist. Painted as a companion to the sonnet of the same name, the picture strives to represent and evoke

the erotic and aesthetic absorption the poem allegorizes.

Rossetti devoted the last fifteen years of his painting career to these looming frontal portraits with richly decorated

backgrounds, the details of which carry symbolic signifi

cance (in this painting, the

arch of life, the cupid, the poppies, the skull, the butter

flies). THE BOARD OF

TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL

MUSEUMS AND GALLERIES ON

MERSEYSIDE, LADY LEVER ART

GALLERY, LIVERPOOL, ENGLAND.

Body's Beauty, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1864-73

Also titled Lady Lilith (after Adam's first wife, who ran away to become a witch), Body's Beaut)' represents sensual absorption. Paired with the sonnet of the same name, the painting associates the sexual allure of the woman at the center with the golden hair that represents her value, and her narcissistic contemplation of herself with the art that she embodies. Like the Lady of Shalott, Lady Lilith is a weaver, but a deadly one�the poppies and roses surrounding her link death and sexuality. DELAWARE ART MUSEUM, WILMINGTON, USA/SAMUEL AND MARY R. BANCROFT MEMORIAL/ BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

.

The Beguiling of Merlin, Edward Burne-Jones, 1870-74

Burne-Jones draws on a medieval version of the Arthurian legend for this painting, in which Merlin's pupil, Nimue (also called Nimiane, Vivian, or Vivien), uses one of Merlin's own spells to imprison him in a hawthorn tree. The winding branches of the tree, echoed in the Medusa-like snakes of Nimue's hair, create a flat decorative surface. Although the

Nimue of the story is a femme fatale enchanting the helpless Merlin, her posture and expression and the simi

larity of the two faces make the paint

ing ambiguous. THE BOARD OF

TRUSTEES OF THE NATIONAL MUSEUMS

AND GALLERIES ON MERSEYSIDE, LADY

LEVER ART GALLERY, LIVERPOOL,

ENGLAND.

The Passing of Arthur, Julia Margaret Cameron, 1875

Using photography in the way that earlier artists had used engravings to illustrate literary texts, Cameron produced a set of tableaux vivants to illustrate Tennyson's Idylls of the King, posing family and friends in costume, in a combination of reality and fantasy that recalls the Pre-Raphaelites. This photograph illustrates lines 361�93 of The Passing of Arthur (see

p. 2033), where the three queens attend the dying king in the barge that takes him to Avalon. HULTONDEUTSCH COLLECTION/CORBIS.

.

Nocturne in Black and Gold, the Falling Rocket, James A. M. Whistler, 1875

Whistler's impressionist painting of fireworks approaches the abstraction suggested in his title. He emphatically rejected the precise depiction of objects in earlier Victorian painting. When the critic John Ruskin saw the painting in Grosvenor Gallery, he wrote in Fors Clavigera that he "never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face." Whistler sued Ruskin for libel and won; but he was awarded damages of only one farthing, and the trial left him financially ruined. THE DETROIT INSTITUTE OF ARTS, USA/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY. GIFT OF DEXTER M. FERRY, JR.

.

Climax, Aubrey Beardsley, 1893

After seeing a drawing in Studio magazine of Salome holding the head of John the Baptist, Oscar Wilde asked the artist, Aubrey Beardsley, to illustrate the English translation of his play Salome. The engraving makes the sexuality of the two figures ambiguous, and links them through the likeness of their faces and their Medusa-like hair. The decorative surface of the drawing absorbs its morbid, erotic subject in aesthetic pattern. FROM BEST WORKS OF AUBREY BEARDSLEY, DOVER PURIFICATIONS, INC.

.

The Twentieth Century an a Aft er

Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, Pablo Picasso, 1907

This masterpiece by Spanish expatriate painter Pablo Picasso helped unleash the experimental energies of modern art. The painting breaks with formal traditions of one-point perspective and human modeling, violently fracturing space in jagged planes. At the same time it defies conventions of sexual decorum in the visual arts, confronting the viewer with five naked prostitutes in a brothel. The masklike faces, particularly of the women to the right, echo African art; they suggest the crucial role non-Western art will play in the development of modernism. The abstract faces, angular forms, and formally fragmented bodies intimate the revolutionary techniques of analytic cubism that Picasso and his French collaborator Georges Braque would develop in Paris from 1907 to 1914. THE MUSEUM OF MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

The Merry-Go-Round, Mark Gertler, 1916

Painted in the midst of World War I, The Merry-Go-Round explores the insufferable condition of life on the home front and on the battlefields. Its circularity describes the frustration of the deadlock on the Western Front, while its mingling of automatized soldiers and women conveys the sense of psychological menace pervading civilian society. The grinning puppet- like figures and the fun-fair setting convey an atmosphere of ghastly levity, in which war becomes a game. Glaring artificial colors contribute to the impression of a violent and confined world, where even nature is mechanical. TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

Over the Top, 1st Artists' Rifles at Marcoing, 30th December 1917,

John Northcote Nash, 1918

John Nash enlisted in the Artists' Rifles in 1916 and survived several attempts at going "over

the top" before his appointment as a War Artist two years later. In this painting he powerfully recollects the futile danger of an attack near Cambrai in 1917. A line of soldiers clambers out of a crude, wound-red trench to trudge through snow toward an unseen enemy. Several men are killed immediately, then fall prostrate or fall back into the ready-made grave of their recent refuge. Years later Nash recalled that the advance had from the outset been doomed, "was in fact pure murder," designed to divert attention from a bombing raid elsewhere. Of the eighty men who set out, only twelve, including Nash, returned. IMPERIAL WAR MUSEUM,

LONDON, UK/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

.

Tube Shelter Perspective (1941) and Family Group (1947), Henry Moore

In their disparate treatments of space and community, these works powerfully demonstrate the antithetic atmospheres of war and peace. Moore took up sketching during World War I because of a scarcity of sculpting material. His impression of crowds sheltering in the London Underground during an air raid, ranged in parallel lines down a seemingly endless tunnel, evokes the involuntary intimacy of strangers�forced into proximity, yet still isolated and anonymous. Family Group, by contrast, expresses a postwar moment of relative security, when the birth of Moore's only daughter coincided with the government's promotion of traditional family values, and Moore's return to sculpture found a ready market for large- scale public art. Two parents, infants on their knees, sit in a cozy circle, their bodies merging

in a physical expression of unity. The holes within the sculpture recall the wartime tunnel,

transforming it from a void that swallows

masses of people to a harmonious space con

trolled by the bodies. FAMILY GROUP: CHRISTIE'S

IMAGES/CORBIS; TUBE SHELTER PERSPECTIVE: HENRY MOORE FOUNDATION; TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

Painting, Francis Bacon, 1946

Bacon's nightmarish association of the slaughterhouse with the emblems of political and religious power conjures both the suffering and the hypocrisy of the twentieth century. The bust of a man, his face overshadowed by an open umbrella, surrounded by microphones, the whole superimposed upon a butcher's display, evokes the discrepancy between rhetoric and means of power. While the umbrella offers a ludicrous symbol of respectability, the visual parallels between man and meat draw attention to the brutal foundations of political inlluence. The man's broad shoulders resemble the squared outline of the carcass behind him. The red and white of his face, and his exposed teeth, suggest the flesh and bone of the beef. Incongruous religious references, in the cruciform spread of the carcass and the churchlike decorations on the walls, augment the painting's insinuations of corruption. THE ESTATE or FRAINCIS BACON/ARS, NY/DACS, LONDON; DIGITAL IMAGE; THE MUSEUM OE MODERN ART/LICENSED BY SCALA/ART RESOURCE, NY.

.

Model-with Unfinished Self-Portrait, David Hockney, 1977

In Model with Unfinished Self-Portrait layers of illusion, realism undermined by artifice, and pictures within pictures draw our attention to the deceptive nature of painting. At first we seem to see in mirror image a model (Gregory Evans, Hockney's lover) sleeping while the artist paints; but as the title implies, the figure in fact lies in front of Self-Portrait with Blue Guitar, a painting developed concurrently with Model, depicting Hockney as Picasso, drawing a guitar. Hockney used the relationship between the canvases to reinforce his persona: Model invokes Picasso's technique of combining naturalistic with stylized or unfinished elements; while Self-Portrait, which eventually incorporated a bust of Dora Maar, Picasso's mistress, encourages an analogy between Picasso, Hockney, and their respective muses. PRIVATE COLLECTION/BRIDGEMAN ART LIBRARY.

.

Naked Man, Back View, Lucian Freud, 1993

Freud's nudes study the details of the human body with an unflinching fascination that is modern in its refusal to censor or sentimentalize. Bowery, Freud's model, was a two-hundredpound nightclub performer, famous for the gorgeous and outrageous costumes he used to reinvent himself in public. Yet Freud, recalling their first encounter, remembered the shape of his lower limbs rather than his outfit, observing that "his calves went right down to his feet, almost avoiding the whole business of ankles altogether." His depiction of Bowery in the nude strongly evokes the magnificence and the vulnerability of a body better known for its sartorial transformations. COURTESY OF ACQUAVELLA GALLERIES, INC. � 1993 THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART, PURCHASE LILAACHESON WALLACE GIFT (1993.71).

.

Marsyas, Anish Kapoor, October 9, 2002 -April 6, 2003

Designed as a temporary installation to fill the vast central Turbine Hall at London's Tate Modern, Marsyas consists of a dark-red plastic membrane joining together three steel rings, two positioned vertically at either end and the third hung horizontally between. Its title refers to Marsyas, the satyr whom, in Greek mythology, Apollo flayed alive, and the membrane's color and contortions evoke flesh, even mutilated flesh. Yet the whole structure also has an ethereal quality, opening around each ring like the throat of an enormous flower. Suspended in the air, its intense, monochromatic surface resisting spatial recession, it seeks, as Kapoor has commented, "to make body into sky." COPYRIGHT 2002 ANISH KAPOOR; TATE GALLERY, LONDON/ART RESOURCE, NY.