One of my favourite paintings. Happened upon it in the Bristol Art Gallery.
Mariana in the Moated Grange
With blackest moss the flower-plots
Were thickly crusted, one and all:
The rusted nails fell from the knots
That held the pear to the gable-wall.
The broken sheds look’d sad and strange:
Unlifted was the clinking latch;
Weeded and worn the ancient thatch
Upon the lonely moated grange.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, “The night is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
Upon the middle of the night,
Waking she heard the night-fowl crow:
The cock sung out an hour ere light:
From the dark fen the oxen’s low
Came to her: without hope of change,
In sleep she seem’d to walk forlorn,
Till cold winds woke the gray-eyed morn
About the lonely moated grange.
She only said, “The day is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
About a stone-cast from the wall
A sluice with blacken’d waters slept,
And o’er it many, round and small,
The cluster’d marish-mosses crept.
Hard by a poplar shook alway,
All silver-green with gnarled bark:
For leagues no other tree did mark
The level waste, the rounding gray.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said “I am aweary, aweary
I would that I were dead!”
And ever when the moon was low,
And the shrill winds were up and away,
In the white curtain, to and fro,
She saw the gusty shadow sway.
But when the moon was very low
And wild winds bound within their cell,
The shadow of the poplar fell
Upon her bed, across her brow.
She only said, “The night is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
All day within the dreamy house,
The doors upon their hinges creak’d;
The blue fly sung in the pane; the mouse
Behind the mouldering wainscot shriek’d,
Or from the crevice peer’d about.
Old faces glimmer’d thro’ the doors
Old footsteps trod the upper floors,
Old voices called her from without.
She only said, “My life is dreary,
He cometh not,” she said;
She said, “I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!”
The sparrow’s chirrup on the roof,
The slow clock ticking, and the sound
Which to the wooing wind aloof
The poplar made, did all confound
Her sense; but most she loathed the hour
When the thick-moted sunbeam lay
Athwart the chambers, and the day
Was sloping toward his western bower.
Then said she, “I am very dreary,
He will not come,” she said;
She wept, “I am aweary, aweary,
Oh God, that I were dead!”
Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Mariana and her moated grange first appear in Measure for Measure. She waits, like Tennyson’s Mariana. But Shakespeare’s Mariana ends up with her man, Angelo – it’s that breed of Shakespearean relationship that features a strong adult woman and a more morally fickle boyish man, the one Germaine Greer thinks mimics Shakespeare’s relationship with Anne Hathaway. No one is quite sure what Tennyson is on about. I’m not. Love it but. The painting is by Millias.
The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Stella Vine. Incredible, isn’t it? What a stunner he is. But why youthful, handsome Dorian, I wonder, and not his distasteful, ageing mask? I’ve got a crush on Stella. Were I to live in Oxford, I’d be hotfooting it to this exhibition.
In other news, everything about this story fascinates me. I want to make a telemovie of it.
The Guardian, Wednesday July 4, 2007
by Helen PiddHe was the eccentric German aristocrat with a penchant for fishnet stockings and lederhosen whose debauched parties had twice ended in death.
The first time was at Oxford University in 1989, when the daughter of a Conservative minister overdosed in his bed. The second was last year, when a man plunged 60ft to the ground from the roof terrace of the 44-year-old count’s luxury apartment in Chelsea, west London.
This week, a third and final tragedy struck Gottfried Alexander von Bismarck – his body was discovered by paramedics at his flat.
The great-great-grandson of the Iron Chancellor, who united 19th century Germany, had apparently died of a heroin overdose.
The paramedics had been called in by an estate agent who had the keys to sell the property; it is understood he had been asked by a member of the count’s family to look round because of their concern that they had been unable to raise him for several days.
Reports suggested drugs paraphernalia were found near the body. A Met spokeswoman last night would not say whether the police were treating the death as suspicious. Results of a postmortem are expected today.
The life of the flamboyant count – full name Gottfried Alexander Leopold Graf von Bismarck-Schonhausen – was marked by the highest highs and the lowest lows, often one directly following the other. At Oxford he was notorious for wild parties at which severed pigs’ heads were served and guests toasted each other in blood, while he played host dressed in fishnet stockings or lederhosen.
In 1989, at a party in the student count’s rooms at Christ Church College to celebrate the end of exams, Olivia Channon, daughter of the millionaire trade minister Paul Channon, was found dead in his bed.
She had died due to respiratory failure caused by an overdose of heroin and drink. Although von Bismarck always claimed he had not seen Ms Channon “chasing the dragon”, heating heroin on silver foil and inhaling the fumes – and was never implicated in her death other than to be charged separately for possessing drugs – the incident haunted him for the remainder of his life.
In 1991 he said: “There are still people who will not speak to my parents because of it, who said to my mother, ‘What a rotten son you have, he has disgraced the name of Bismarck’.”
After time in rehab, then a spell back in Germany working as an actor, and in a job helping firms in the former GDR on the road to privatisation after the fall of the Berlin Wall, he resettled in London some years ago.
He kept out of the headlines until last August, when a man fell from the roof terrace of his London home during a wild party. Anthony Casey, 38, had a “substantial” amount of cocaine in his body when he plunged 60ft, an inquest heard in October. Mr Casey had been feeling unwell when he asked the count for the key to the roof terrace.
The coroner, Paul Knapman, said that a room in the flat contained what most people would consider “unusual” and “bizarre” items, including buckets of sex toys, a butane gas canister and a box of dozens of syringes.
He added: “In common parlance, in the early hours of the morning, there was a gay orgy going on.” Dr Knapman recorded a verdict of misadventure.
Hedonism ran in the von Bismarck family. His great-great-grandfather was made prime minister of Prussia in 1862, and is credited with engineering modern Germany by defeating France in 1870-71 and uniting the various German states into an empire. He also loved food and drink and was a famed raconteur at parties.
Guardian Unlimited © Guardian News and Media Limited 2007
Cranach
Cranach floors me. His women all look about 16. Look at Eve here, for example. She’s looks way too young for Adam, who bears a similarity to the Joy of Sex model.
Should you live in London, you can go see Temptation in Eden: Lucas Cranach’s Adam and Eve at the Courtauld Institute of Art Gallery until 23 September. Soviet spy Anthony Blunt was the director at Courtauld for years.
Venus looks amused by Cupid’s distress.
Lucretia looks despairing enough to do herself in, but her body doens’t look violated enough for my liking.
But I love Cranach. There were two Cranachs, father and son. This one is Cranach the elder.
