As I pass by Ruskin Park, I am reminded of a poem I wrote about John Ruskin, Euphemia Chalmers and John Everett Millais (click here to read their story).
Acute Victorian Love Triangle
Galatea came from void or rather came from stone long gestating in the womb of earth
Undifferentiated from her siblings, one smooth whitness in the dark she covered vast swathes underneath ancient feet in a warm climate where men dreamed of the gods.
She was not nothing.
She was all, until he dreamed her, not a god but a companion
The absence of all that was marred, the fullness of all he dreamed; she was ideal
He cut her from her mother's breast, from her siblings divided, until she stood alone and naked
Ready for his love; a love that was and could not be a surprise. She like Athene was born from a mind, she fully birthed whole. But she would not fight, nor make, nor reason.
She was Aphrodite's gift; the gift of love, but truly the love of a man for himself,
with nothing strange.
Effie Gray, a muse for poets, a girl watched over by a lawyer and a critic, a girl who
must leave prizes and schoolbooks to care for deathly ailing siblings, whose youthful
face was canvas for the critic, whose body was cocooned in in wool and cotton
a mysterious Victorian.
Ruskin with his Pygmalion dreaming, lost in the Arcardy of marble bodies, seeing nymphs in dull London fountains, longing for the cool, cool Goddess, watched a girl grow up from childhood. Face as white as Proserpina, still dancing in a field of flowers
as yet unaware of Hades' glances.
When he drew back the wool and cotton, as Pygmalion drew 'side the marble curtain
No Aphrodite's gift for him, and none for her. An Arcadian ruin would suit him better
Then a wild Celtic woodland with luxurious bracken, ferny-sweet and humid.
No pleasure for the senses.
Prosperpina must stay in Hades, and visit Ceres but in season; and once some time in Hades past, Effie found her way to light - to share some time and light and fields and flower with
gentle Millais, to see herself immortalized in beauty, to know she was indeed ideal
and not a stranger.
And then return to darkened Hades bed, cold to the degree that Hades is hot, she made her cycles from dark to light. A Victorian triangle, acute for the distance she must travel, obtuse for the seemingly endless darkness, until they broke the binds that bound them.
Something of a scandal.
The made a home in Arcady, a blissful life of love and children. She his muse and also Hestia evermore his Aphrodite. Peace Concluded, life best lived, to love a woman not a statue;
to love a woman, not a dream. To see the real and love it wholly -
he found her perfect.
