“Shut Out: Addendum” by me, The Velveteen Victorian

A poem, by me, The Velveteen Victorian!

Dedicated to female Victorian poets, namely, Christina Rossetti and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. This poem is an across-the-ages response to Rossetti's "Shut Out," so reading that first is essential. 

To me, inheriting poetry as a reader is an invitation to engage and step beyond the confines of passive absorption. In the vein of Victorian graveyard picnickers and post-mortem corpse-caretakers (usually family members of the deceased), I enjoy the memorialization and tending of ancestral memory in everyday ways (in this case, through poetry responses). In this sense, a conversation between (or continuation of) the original work/poet and modern life can continue, even as social contexts shift. The intention is to foster a dialogue between me and the original author(s), where it is appropriate to evoke such an atmospheric experience, and to challenge the limitations of time by responding to the fears, comments, and beliefs of people bygone. Truly, there is much satisfaction in looking at a ghostly historical figure in the literary eye and saying, "You were right... but what if...?" Erecting a memorial in the mind is as good as leaving a flower at the grave, so the following Elegy is a love letter and coin in the fountain of the Victorian poets I have long deified and admired.

Bequeath me every silvering word

A shroud of glaciated sage

At the peak of Barrett's cresting waves

And Chrissy's frosted garden plaints

And where each icy feather strokes

Past the ream of mottled mind

I'll lend a plot and Saint's bouquet 

For each poppied, parchment Valentine

Across the sea of frigid beds

I'll sketch the stones in dusty lime

And blanket moss across the heads

With memory-sprigs and mortared sky

To bridge the shrine from worlds away

A kiss of blue-lipped Highland Pine

Whose spectre spans the endless days

And braids their heart-worn threads to mine

And where each speaker gently lay

I'll grace the brittle, pearly neck

Of every hope and little death

And cradle them like baby's breath

Until each fragrant, velvet verse

And nested, sonnet-singing bird

Scrawls the script of woven lives

Through every interred prison room

With gasps of votive, violet rhyme-

Soft liturgies of brumal blooms-

A lark wheels past the gated tombs

And drops its twig near greening vines