Bells and Marigolds success in The Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition

The richness and beauty of this painting by William Holman Hunt (1827-1910) belie its subject matter. It is entitled ‘The Awakening Conscience’. The young woman in the picture has been sitting on her lover’s lap singing Thomas Moore’s Oft, in the Stilly Night, when she has a moment of spiritual revelation.

My poem ‘Bells and Marigolds’ re-enacts the moment of revelation, when, whilst singing, the young woman decides to break away from the man who is her keeper. Both Holman’s painting and Moore’s poem are rich in symbolism, and in ‘Bells and Marigolds’ I’ve tried to refer to these. The painting is riddled with symbols: the cat toying with the broken-winged bird under the table symbolises the woman’s plight; a man’s discarded glove warns that the likely fate of a cast-off mistress was prostitution; a tangled skein of yarn on the floor symbolises the web in which the girl is entrapped. The frame of the painting is decorated with a pattern of bells and marigolds – symbols of warning, and of cruel love. The frame also includes a star, symbolic, in this case, of seeing the light.

These lines, I particularly love in Oft, in the Stilly Night and they seem particularly relevant to the painting:

I feel like one

Who treads alone

Some banquet-hall deserted,

Whose lights are fled,

Whose garlands dead,

And all but he departed!    (Thomas Moore 1779-1852)

Ironically, the model in the painting is Hunt’s girlfriend Annie Miller, a barmaid whom he met in 1850 when she was fifteen.

I am thrilled that the poem gained second place in The Pre-Raphaelite Society’s poetry competition and it will be published in The Pre-Raphaelite Review quite soon. I’ll add the link when it’s available, meanwhile here’s their announcement.

Update: the same poem has now been published in the Pre-Raphaelite Society’s anthology, ‘The Presence and the Dream’. Fantastic! Many thanks to them.