The Political Forum

I SEE YOU JULIET and ON THE SHORTNESS OF TIME
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt (1840 - 1922)

I love reading Will Shakespeare. I especially love his histories of the English kings, each of which I have read many times, always with great pleasure and a sense of wonder at his remarkable command of the language and his insights into the human condition. But when it comes to love sonnets, I prefer Wilfrid Scawen Blunt's to those of the great Bard, even though I am well aware that this is like favoring sandlot baseball over the Yankees.

While the critics are generally kind to Blunt, none place him high in the ranks of English poets. But I have always thought that there was something very personal and endearing about his sonnets, as demonstrated in the two that follow, which appeared in 1881 in what is still Blunt's best-known literary work, The Love Sonnets of Proteus.

It should come as no surprise that Blunt's sonnets are full of energy, for his was a life of travel, adventure, love affairs, and political action. Among other things, he traveled extensively as a diplomat, married Byron's granddaughter, raised Arabian horses, was jailed for his anti-imperialist political campaigning, and had love affairs with numerous famous and infamous women of his day, including Jane Burden Morris, the wife of William Morris as well as a model for and lover of Dante Gabriel Rossetti.

Space does not permit a complete biography of Blunt, but the following paragraph from an article dated November 15, 2001 in The Guardian (about a distant nephew, the infamous Anthony Blunt, who spied on England for the Soviet Union in the early 1950s) provides some insight into his active life, and, of course, his poetry.

Notorious as an atheist, libertine, Lothario, anti-imperialist, adventurer, and not a bad poet. During the 1860s he had seduced his way across Europe, before destroying a budding diplomatic career by running off with the most celebrated prostitute in Paris (Catherine Walters, aka 'Skittles'). He had married Byron's granddaughter, to whom he was systematically and publicly unfaithful. During his travels he had become militantly anti-imperialist and virulently anti-British. He encouraged dissent among the natives in Egypt, and stood in Ireland as a Home Ruler, going to prison in 1889 for inciting Irish tenants to resist eviction. In 1906 . . . he published Atrocities of Justice under British Rule in Egypt. He called the First World War 'The White Man's Suicide', and corresponded with Roger Casement as he awaited execution as a traitor in 1916 . . .

I See You, Juliet

I see you, Juliet, still, with your straw hat
Loaded with vines, and with your dear pale face,
On which those thirty years so lightly sat,
And the white outline of your muslin dress.
You wore a little fichu trimmed with lace
And crossed in the front, as was the fashion then,
Bound at your waist with a broad band or sash,
All white and fresh and virginally plain.
There was a sound of shouting far away
Down in the valley, as they called to us,
And you, with hands clasped seeming still to pray
Patience of fate, stood listening to me thus
With heaving bosom. There a rose lay curled.
It was the reddest rose in all the world.

On The Shortness Of Time

If I could live without the thought of death,
Forgetful of Time's waste, the soul's decay,
I would not ask for other joy than breath,
With light and sound of birds and the sun's ray.
I could sit on untroubled day by day
Watching the grass grow, and the wild flowers range
From blue to yellow and from red to grey
In natural sequence as the seasons change.
I could afford to wait, but for the hurt
Of this dull tick of time which chides my ear.
But now I dare not sit with loins ungirt
And staff unlifted, for death stands too near.
I must be up and doing--ay, each minute.
The grave gives time for rest when we are in it.

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