‘St Simeon Stylites’

Burges’s illustration of ‘St Simeon Stylites’, first exhibited in 1861 and then a second time at the Paris Exhibition in 1875, is a pen and ink sketch reminiscent of the work of Albrecht Dürer, whose work Burges collected (Fig. 1).⁹ It depicts the mystic as a diminutive, bony figure with a long flowing beard that dominates his otherwise small face, shown in profile as he kneels atop his pillar, reaching towards the angel who appears surrounded by a host of disembodied angelic heads and who holds out a crown. To a certain extent the illustration offers a faithful visual representation of Tennyson’s Simeon, who spends a good deal of his monologue harping on his ‘feeble’ and ‘weather-beaten’ body (ll. 35, 19), which he describes at various points as ‘half deaf’ (l. 36), ‘almost blind’ (l. 38), detailing his ‘thighs […] rotted with the dew’ (l. 40), his ‘stiff spine’, and his ‘weary head’ (l. 42). One of the poem’s many dramatic ironies is Simeon’s monstrous physical vanity: his obsession with his body that is comically at odds with his search for spiritual redemption and enlightenment. Indeed, this was an aspect of the poem that Tennyson himself greatly enjoyed. Edward FitzGerald recalled that ‘this is one of the Poems A. T. would read with grotesque Grimness, especially at such passages such as “Coughs, Aches, Stitches, etc.”, laughing aloud at all times’.¹⁰ Perhaps Tennyson enjoyed contemplating Simeon’s much-abused body more than Burges, for Burges spares Simeon some of the more extreme physical indignities that Tennyson describes. He does not include the ‘undressed goatskin’ that Simeon wears on his back (l. 114); and, whereas in the poem Simeon wears ‘a grazing iron collar’ that ‘grinds’ his neck (l. 115), the illustration places a chain around Simeon’s waist. Compared with the Simeon of Tennyson’s text, then, Burges’s Simeon appears frail and elderly: a figure to be pitied rather than an object of grimly comic disgust. Beyond the practical challenge of including the physical details listed over two hundred-odd lines of poetry, some of which recall past physical suffering, in a single image, there are at least a couple of ways to interpret Burges’s relative restraint in his depiction of suffering of the would-be saint. Firstly, and in contrast to Millais’s painting of ‘Mariana’, Burges’s Simeon draws attention to the bodily materiality of Tennyson’s poem. If the richly detailed, tactile realism of Millais’s painting reveals that Tennyson’s Mariana is a symbolic rather than a flesh-and-blood woman, Burges’s sketch makes the reader doubly conscious of the poem’s blazon of physical malady in all its excess. His decision to refrain from depicting, for example, Simeon’s thighs, ‘rotted with the dew’, demonstrates Simeon’s, or Tennyson’s, lack of restraint. ‘Simeon or Tennyson’ is key here, because the difference between the Simeon we see in Burges’s illustration and the Simeon we read about in Tennyson’s poem also reminds us of the ultimate subjectivity of both accounts. Burges reminds us that, just as Burges is giving us his version of Simeon, so Simeon is giving his own account of himself to the reader. Who, we might ask, is the more reliable witness? In other words, as well as drawing attention to the materiality of Tennyson’s text, Burges perhaps also expresses a measure of scepticism about the account he reads, providing a competing version that vies for authority with Simeon’s monologue and invites the reader to share in its distrust. As such, Burges shows himself to be an intelligent reader of the dramatic monologue. His interpretation shows us how Tennyson’s Simeon is at once substantially and horrifyingly material, and also merely the airy figment of his own egotistical imagination.

Fig. 1: William Burges, St Simeon Stylites (1861), drawing. Reproduced with the permission of the Victoria and Albert Museum.

Further evidence for Burges’s appreciation of the poem’s dramatic irony is the (lack of) space that Simeon’s body takes up in his illustration. Whereas the Simeon of the poem looms large, figuring as the subject of almost every sentence that he utters, Burges’s Simeon is confined within a small section of the illustration. His kneeling figure is barely a quarter as tall or as wide as the image’s length and width and, although he and his pillar occupy the foreground of the picture, he is positioned above and left of centre. If we compare the final illustration with a preliminary sketch of St Simeon, completed by Burges in 1854 (Fig. 2), we can see the effect of this choice more clearly. In the earlier version Simeon adopts a more upright kneeling posture than the crouched figure in the final version. He is also significantly larger, measuring over a third of the sketch’s overall height. In the preliminary sketch Simeon is larger than the figure of the angel holding the crown and about the same size as the pillar on which he kneels. In the final version Simeon’s size and the curvature of his posture mirrors the circle of angelic hosts in both size and shape, while the pillar dominates the image so that Simeon almost appears as an extension of it, reminiscent of a medieval gargoyle. By de-emphasizing Simeon and granting greater emphasis to other elements of the scene when he revised the original sketch nearly a decade later, Burges once again exposed Simeon, suggesting him as a sort of Great High Oz of his own invention and undercutting the grandiosity of his rhetoric.

Fig. 2: William Burges, Preliminary sketch for St Simeon Stylites (1854), pen and ink over preliminary pencil, 15.2 × 9.2 cm. Reproduced with the permission of the Royal Academy of Arts.

These decisions also ask us to pay more attention to those two other elements from the poem that gain greater prominence in Burges’s illustration. The poem only details the height of the column (40 cubits, or around 60 feet), offering no further information. It is not surprising that Burges the architect provides a fuller picture. He renders the pillar in expert detail, choosing an unfluted Corinthian column with ornate carved foliage decorating the capital. This was a style of column that Burges employed in his own work, including similar versions in his designs for Lille Cathedral (1856), Brisbane Cathedral (1859), and St Fin Barre’s Cathedral, Cork (1870), similarities that suggest Burges read Tennyson’s poem with a professional eye. Burges the architect is also evident in his detailed sketches of the buildings that surround Simeon and his column. Following Tennyson, who confessed that ‘when he wrote [the poem] he did not know that the story was a Syrian one, and had accordingly given it a Northern colouring’,¹¹ Burges brings a distinctly European flavour to his illustration, drawing the spires and castellated turrets of a medieval Gothic town. A church or cathedral dominates the bottom right of the frame; its spire and flying buttresses resemble the east end of Notre Dame in Paris. In Tennyson’s poem, aside from the claims that Simeon makes about his ability to perform miracles on the people who live beneath him and the offerings they bring him, the mystic spends only a few lines imagining the life of his fellow men:

                Men on earth
House in the shade of comfortable roofs,
Sit with their wives by fires, eat wholesome food,
And wear warm clothes, and even beasts have stalls (ll. 104–07)

He only offers this short description in order to emphasize his own state of deprivation, continuing,

I, ’tween the spring and downfall of the light,
Bow down one thousand and two hundred times,
To Christ, the Virgin Mother and the saints (ll. 108–10)

By contrast, Burges’s illustration renders these ‘comfortable roofs’ with care. His scene does not include any human figures other than Simeon, but the crowded rooftop cityscape implies the energetic bustle of human life taking place within and around the buildings. Whereas Burges’s depiction of Simeon points out the material excesses of Simeon’s account of himself, his depiction of the pillar and surrounding buildings point out a marked absence in the text. It directs our attention towards those things that Simeon refuses or fails to see and suggests the value of the world that Simeon seeks to escape as he pursues his self-destructive, self-aggrandizing quest for sainthood. Again, Burges’s visual interpretation takes seriously the poem’s dramatic irony. By showing us those things from which Simeon averts his gaze, Burges makes the point that Simeon’s version of events is flawed and unreliable, (mis)guided by his over-investment in a metaphysical realm. He also locates Tennyson’s poem firmly in the physical realm. Underlining the distance between Simeon’s vision and Tennyson’s own, he tacitly lays claim to Tennyson’s poetry as belonging to a material world, the world where Burges’s own art also resides.

But this is not the whole story. Besides the column and the cityscape, the other detail that vies for our attention in Burges’s illustration is the angel that appears to Simeon in a vision in the closing moments of the poem. ‘Appears’ is too definitive, however, for in Tennyson’s text even Simeon doubts his own eyes:

                   What’s here? a shape, a shade,
A flash of light. Is that the angel there
That holds a crown? Come blessèd brother, come.
I know thy glittering face. I waited long;
My brows are ready. What! deny it now?
Nay, draw, draw, draw nigh. So I clutch it. Christ!
’Tis gone: ’tis here again; the crown! the crown! (ll. 199–205)

As Ricks notes, the crown alludes to Revelation2. 7–10: ‘To him that overcometh will I give to eat the tree of life […] and I will give thee a crown of life’ (p. 134), an allusion that perhaps shows Simeon to be a rather prosaic reader of biblical scripture, unable to discriminate between the literal and the metaphorical. Simeon cannot quite hold his vision steady: it remains couched around with questions as it appears, disappears, and appears again, before the crown is finally ‘fitted’ to Simeon, making him ‘whole, and clean, and meet for Heaven’ (l. 210). It is tempting to read this redemptive moment as the final delusion of a dying man. The way that the rhythms of Simeon’s speech, broken up by a sequence of erratic questions and exclamations, loses touch with the steady pentameter of Tennyson’s verse suggests an amplification of ironic distance between poet and speaker and encourages us to err on the side of doubt. But Burges makes a different choice, realizing Simeon’s vision and amplifying it, showing us not just one angel, but a whole host of angelic faces. As with the pillar and cityscape, the vision increases in prominence in the revisions from preliminary sketch to final illustration. The earlier sketch features a single angel, much smaller than Simeon, its face barely visible, descending from the top right-hand corner of the page. In the final version the central angel’s face is clearly visible; we can see him meeting and returning Simeon’s gaze as he holds out the crown. Burges’s apparent faith in Simeon’s vision complicates a sense of his investment in the materiality of Tennyson’s text. Although it is still true that Burges queries the reliability of Simeon’s sense of himself and draws attention to the self-aggrandizing tenor of his rhetoric, it is also the case that, by realizing Simeon’s vision and allowing us to see what Simeon sees, Burges offers a reading of the poem that prefers faith over disillusionment. It is worth noting that this distinguishes Burges’s illustration of ‘St Simeon Stylites’ from works by other artists. Illustrations by E. J. Sullivan (1900) and Raymond McGrath (1925) both exclude any visionary elements; and a third, by W. E. F. Britten includes representations of the two evil spirits, Abaddon and Asmodeus, that assault Simeon earlier in the poem, but no redemptive angel. But Burges’s faith in Simeon’s vision does not undermine the materiality of his own. Instead, the final effect of the illustration is a kind of inclusive materiality that allows dream and vision to take physical shape alongside the bricks and mortar of column and rooftop.

‘The Sleeping Beauty’

Whereas Burges’s ‘St Simeon Stylites’ interprets Tennyson’s poem for public consumption, his ‘Sleeping Beauty’ occupies a more private, intimate place in his life. It forms part of the Red Bed, the centrepiece of Burges’s bedroom at the Tower House in Kensington, the home he designed for himself between 1875 and 1878, and the place he lived for the final three years of his life (Fig. 3). Indeed, the bed was where Burges died in April 1881, after succumbing to a sudden illness. It predates the house and was designed by Burges between 1865 and 1867; Burges commissioned the genre painter, Henry Holiday, to create a painted panel for the headboard in 1866 (Fig. 4). Mordaunt Crook provides the following description:

Burges’s bed (1865–7) encapsulates his elaborate dream-world. It is built of mahogany, painted blood red, carved with lions and bulbous finials, stencilled and gilded and inset with paintings on glass and inlays of shell and tinsel. The bedstead itself glows with Holiday’s Sleeping Beauty panel (1866). (p. 326)

Fig. 3: William Burges, ‘The Red Bed’ (1865–67). Reproduced with the permission of the Higgins Museum and Art Gallery, Bedford.

Fig. 4: William Burges, Detail of the headboard of ‘The Red Bed’, painting by Henry Holiday (1866). Reproduced with the permission of the Higgins Museum and Art Gallery, Bedford.

Crook observes that Holiday ‘follows closely a marginal illustration in Burges’s own illustrated copy of Tennyson’s Poems’ (p. 326), suggesting that, although this piece is a collaborative effort between Burges and Holiday, Burges’s reading of Tennyson remains key. Crook also points out that Burges’s sketch is done in the margins of ‘The Day-Dream’, the title Tennyson gave to the later iteration of the poem (published in 1842), in which he expanded the original three-stanza lyric into a six-part narrative describing the arrival of the prince and his rescue of the princess. The fact that it is this later version that inspires Burges makes sense of the inclusion of the prince in Holiday’s painting. It perhaps does not account, however, for the extent that the prince dominates the image. He takes up the majority of the left-hand foreground, his figure shown in profile, standing in front of the bed where the princess sleeps. The shape of his stooping figure as he leans forward to take his kiss echoes the arch that frames the painting and he is dressed in medieval costume, wearing a gold-coloured tunic and cap, red stockings, and a red cloak, picked out in shades that precisely match the colours of the bed frame. Behind him, on a bed not dissimilar from the bed that the painting decorates, lies the princess. Her figure is arguably less distinct: her colouring is more muted and lacking the high contrast of red and gold that clothes the prince. This is in part because the princess is unclothed. Her coverlet is drawn up to her hips, leaving her naked torso exposed to the viewer’s gaze. She holds her arm above her head on the pillow so that her head rests in the crook of her elbow. Her long wavy hair, her skin, and the pillow and coverlet are all similar shades of muted pale gold. Whereas the harmony between the prince in the painting and the shapes and colours of the bed frame invite us to consider the way Tennyson likewise surrounds his Sleeping Beauty with a sequence of overlapping frames, Burges’s princess, who barely resembles the princess in Tennyson’s poem, provides a contrast that reframes our interpretation of the feminine form at the centre of text and image, both rendering it more distinct and drawing it into conversation with other female archetypes.

Burges and Holiday’s painting of the prince in all his detailed finery first draws our attention to the marked absence of this kind of physical detail in Tennyson’s text. Tennyson devotes only four lines to his description of the prince:

He travels far from other skies —
   His mantle glitters on the rocks —
A fairy Prince, with joyful eyes,
   And lighter-footed than the fox.12

Even in these lines the prince does not quite come into focus. He is glimpsed in motion, a fox on his way to disturb a sleeping henhouse. His prominence in Holiday’s painting is therefore doubly striking. Whereas in Tennyson’s poem the prince occupies the subject position, imposing his gaze on the scene and then acting within it, Holiday’s painting fixes the prince within its frame so that he becomes a frozen object within the sleeping scene, rather than the agent of its awakening. This works to undo the effect of Tennyson’s later additions to his poem, performing a kind of re-enchantment that captures prince and princess together in the slumber of the penultimate. By making the prince a visible, static object within the scene of the painting, inviting our gaze to rest on him as much as it does on his princess, Holiday transforms him into a legible text, encouraging us to consider the import of his dress and posture.

The prince’s stooping form and the red and gold of his costume challenge the distinction between frame and image and invite us to view the frame as part of the work. Taken on its own, this might be interpreted as an example of the challenge to the distinction between the fine and applied arts discussed by Ribeyrol: it becomes difficult to identify where the frame ends and the painting begins. Taken as an interpretation of Tennyson’s poem, it makes the reader alert to similar overlaps and echoes between the different parts of the text. In a framing Prologue a poet-lover tells the story of the sleeping princess to ‘Lady Flora’ in a contemporary setting:

O Lady Flora, let me speak:
   A pleasant hour has passed away
While, dreaming on your damask cheek,
   The dewy sister-eyelids lay.
As by the lattice you reclined,
   I went through many wayward moods
To see you dreaming — and, behind,
   A summer crisp with shining woods.
And I too dreamed, until at last
   Across my fancy, brooding warm,
The reflex of a legend past,
   And loosely settled into form.
And would you have the thought I had,
   And see the vision that I saw,
Then take the broidery-frame, and add
   A crimson to the quaint Macaw,
And I will tell it.13

Here, too, the boundaries of the frame appear permeable. The Prologue describes multiple dreamers with overlapping dreams, amplifying the dreamworld that its apparently real-world setting might seek to contain. The poet begins by waking Flora from her dream and telling her that, while watching her dream, he fell into a daydream of a dreaming princess. The poet then proceeds to tell Flora, and the reader, his dream. It is striking that Flora, who never speaks, keeps the details of her own dream to herself; the ‘thought’ and ‘vision’ of the male speaker supplants or colonizes her dreamscape, so that she is not given the opportunity to translate it into art. Instead, the poet-speaker instructs her to ‘take the broidery-frame, and add | A crimson to the quaint Macaw’. This incidental detail shows us a gendered power dynamic transposed onto the hierarchy that separates the applied from the fine arts: Flora embroiders while the poet recites.¹⁴ It also introduces a further frame into the framing Prologue, offering Flora’s ‘broidery-frame’ as an analogue of the framing poem that describes it. This implies that, whereas Tennyson’s speaker maintains a clear separation between embroidery and poetry, Tennyson himself is interested in observing points of connection between the two kinds of work and perhaps acknowledging the materiality of the lines of verse that frame and form his dreams. In the brief Epilogue, the poet dedicates his poem to Flora:

So, Lady Flora, take my lay,
   And, if you find a meaning there,
O whisper to your glass and say,
   ‘What wonder if he thinks me fair?’
What wonder I was all unwise,
   To shape the song for your delight
Like long-tailed birds of Paradise
   That float through Heaven and cannot light?15

Comparing his ‘lay’ to a bird of paradise that, according to legend, never alights on land, Tennyson makes fun of his own apparent reluctance to finish the poem. But the bird of paradise also recalls the ‘quaint Macaw’ that Flora has perhaps been embroidering all the while. In these, the poem’s final lines, Tennyson allows for the possibility that Flora is also a kind of poet and that dreaming in silks might not be so different from dreaming in verse.

The overlaps and slippages between the different roles performed by the different genders that take place in the framing narrative of ‘The Day-Dream’ point back towards a similar kind of play that takes place on, or in, the Red Bed. By designing the bed where he slept around the theme of Sleeping Beauty, Burges draws attention to his own sleeping body and asks us to consider which of Tennyson’s dreamers he resembles. The most obvious comparison is between Burges and Tennyson’s poet-speaker, who, as we have seen, dreams up the legend of the fairy prince and princess who are depicted above Burges’s own dreaming head. According to this reading, Burges’s bed and Tennyson’s poem are both presented as the stuff of dreams: the mahogany frame and the printed word both lend form to the creative vision of designer and poet. However, it is hard not to see a second, more playful comparison: one between the sleeping forms of Burges and the fairy-tale princess depicted above his head. Such a comparison is encouraged by Holiday’s depiction of the bed where the princess sleeps, which, though by no means an exact match, is similar in style to the Red Bed itself. If a comparison of Burges and the dreaming poet draws a flattering likeness between the two, any comparison between Burges and the princess makes a joke out of contrasts and, as such, tends to reinscribe gender difference, rather than to challenge it. In this case, then, the subtle gender play of Prologue and Epilogue proves to hold more (quietly) radical potential than the broader humour of the inlaid image.

The painted image of the sleeping princess invites more straightforward comparison with Tennyson’s description of that same character, which he gives in the poem’s original three stanzas, first published without the frame and extended narrative sequence in 1830. The first two of these three dwell on the princess’s body in detail:

Year after year unto her feet,
   She lying on her couch alone,
Across the purple coverlet,
   The maiden’s jet-back hair has grown,
On either side her trancèd form
   Forth streaming from a braid of pearl:
The slumbrous light is rich and warm,
   And moves not on the rounded curl.

The silk star-broidered coverlid
   Unto her limbs itself doth mould
Languidly ever; and, amid
   Her full black ringlets downward rolled,
Glows forth each softly-shadowed arm
   With bracelets of the diamond bright:
Her constant beauty doth inform
   Stillness with love, and day with light. (‘The Sleeping Beauty’, ll. 1–16)

Unlike in the case of Millais’s ‘Mariana’, which identifies a lack of physical detail in Tennyson’s poem, Tennyson’s ‘Sleeping Beauty’ gives Holiday more to work with. The poem’s opening stanzas measure the length of the princess’s slumber by describing her ‘jet-back’ hair, which, ‘streaming from a braid of pearl’ has grown ‘year after year unto her feet’. Her hair frames her body; her arms, nestled ‘amid’ her ‘full black ringlets’, are decorated with diamond bracelets. The lines are rich with texture and colour and with contrasts of light against dark: the pearl braid and the bright diamonds against the black hair, the purple silk coverlet embroidered with stars. It is easy to imagine that they might have appealed to Burges’s imagination. All the more surprising, then, that Holiday’s painting differs so much from its source text. Holiday’s Sleeping Beauty has yellow hair, which only falls to her shoulders. The coverlet that covers her lower half is not purple, but gold, nor does it appear to be embroidered with stars. Taken together, the effect is one of visual harmony that draws attention to the high contrasts of Tennyson’s version and asks us to consider the import of each, perhaps understanding the light and dark that Tennyson’s sleeping woman embodies to be integral to what he describes in the poem’s final line as ‘a perfect form’. In turn, we might think of the three-stanza form of the original lyric as similarly perfect, enlivened by the interplay of light and dark, undisturbed by narrative action. Holiday introduces contrast in the figure of the prince with his bright red cloak and tunic. Here, perhaps, there is a sense that the princess is only half the story and that her golden body is rendered complete by its contrasting other.

The posture of Holiday’s ‘beauty’ suggests that he is drawing his inspiration from elsewhere. Her naked torso and the arm that she rests on the pillow above her head, further exposing her bare breasts to the viewer’s gaze, places her within the tradition of the reclining female nude. She resembles Gorgione’s Sleeping Venus (1510) or Titian’s Pardo Venus (1551), intertextual allusions that make a connection between Victorian poetry and Renaissance painting and between the heroine of Tennyson’s poem (and the French fairy tale that inspired it) and the female archetypes of classical mythology. A connection between the sleeping princess and Venus, the goddess of sexual love, raises the question of sexual desire, allowing us to interpret the sleep, the kiss, and the awakening of the fairy tale as metaphors for burgeoning female sexuality. In Tennyson’s poem the poet seeks to contain the potentially libidinous subtext of his story in ‘L’Envoi’, which invites Flora to awaken into marriage:

For since the time when Adam first
   Embraced his Eve in happy hour,
And every bird of Eden burst
   In carol, every bud to flower,
What eyes, like thine, have wakened hopes,
   What lips, like thine, so sweetly joined?
Where on the double rosebud droops
   The fulness of the pensive mind;
Which all too dearly self-involved,
   Yet sleeps a dreamless sleep to me;
A sleep by kisses undissolved,
   That lets three neither hear nor see:
But break it. In the name of wife,
   And in the rights that name may give,
Are clasped the moral of thy life,
   And that for which I care to live.16

The poet chooses a biblical, rather than a classical, intertext, suggesting that his love for Flora is characterized by a prelapsarian innocence. He then claims that Flora sleeps ‘a dreamless sleep to me’ (l. 50, emphasis added), employing an awkward construction to imply Flora’s blindness to his potential as a suitor, a condition that will be cured by marriage, which will restore her senses and give her life moral purpose. Holiday’s firm rejection of this framing in favour of allusions to the classical revival of Renaissance Italy brings Tennyson’s Christian moral framing into sharper focus and offers an alternative interpretation of the tale the poet has told. We might therefore read his painting as critique: its overt sexual overtones point out the bloodless quality of the poem’s conclusion. But, like St Simeon, the poet-speaker who delivers the moral of the story as part of his suit to Lady Flora is a dramatized voice and so his interpretation of his tale is not the whole story. By offering a very different interpretation, Holiday and Burges imply that neither the poet-speaker’s moral framing, nor their own material framing is definitive; and they extend an invitation to the reader/viewer to devise their own framing interpretation of Tennyson’s dream.

Conclusion

I have argued that Burges’s Red Bed and his illustration of ‘St Simeon Stylites’ enter into a dialogue with their source texts that draws out the complex materiality of Tennyson’s poetry. In the case of Simeon’s pillar and the town that he sits above, and the solid mahogany bed frame, Burges brings Tennyson down to earth, observing the way his poems insist and rely on a physical reality that their speaking protagonists often cannot see. In the case of Simeon’s frail body and the erotic body of the sleeping princess, Burges alerts the reader to the subjective physicality of Tennyson’s bodies and the way they are constructed and interpreted both within and beyond the texts, according to a sequence of shifting cultural and ideological frameworks. In the case of Simeon’s vision of the angel holding out the crown and of the Holiday panel in its entirety, Burges blurs the line between the material and the metaphysical, granting vision and dream a material substance that echoes and augments a like effect in Tennyson’s poetry, which accommodates flights of fancy and representations of contemporary reality side by side on the printed page. In each of these aspects of Burges’s interpretation of Tennyson, the designer and architect employs what might be described as faithful departures from his Tennysonian source: employing artistic licence in ways that illuminate the poetry and show Burges to be an astute and sympathetic reader of his fellow Victorian dreamer.

In the example of the Red Bed, Burges takes interpretation one step further, designing a piece of furniture that allows him to inhabit and act within Tennyson’s text, to live (and die) within Tennyson’s daydream. One last small example of this kind of collaborative dreaming can be found in a goblet that Burges designed for his own use in 1862. The exterior of the goblet is studded with gemstones and fashioned in silver and enamel. Inside the cup are engravings of a row of birds, a row of animals, and, at the base of the cup, a row of sea creatures. Nestled among the sea creatures, and labelled in engraved letters that circle around its bulbous body, is Tennyson’s Kraken:

There hath he lain for ages and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.17

‘The Kraken’ is an early example of Tennyson’s ‘art of the penultimate’. Its use of the future tense ensures that the apocalyptic action it describes is forestalled and the Kraken remains, like the original version of the ‘Sleeping Beauty’, in a ‘dreamless sleep’. However, Burges’s goblet collapses present and future in the repeatable action of drinking. Each time the goblet is drained, the Kraken ‘rises’ from beneath the liquid’s surface, allowing the drinker to see what Tennyson’s poem only dreams of. The effect is one of bathos. Burges’s Kraken is a cartoonish, rather friendly-looking creature, scarcely a portent of the end of days. Here, as we have seen elsewhere in Burges’s work, there is a levity to his material readings of Tennyson’s poetry, one that acknowledges the difficulty of giving physical form to what we see in our mind’s eye and makes a play of failure. In so doing, Burges recognizes the particular force of the penultimate in Tennyson’s poetry, which balances on the brink of the material and reaches into the wordless, invisible space beyond.

Competing Interests

The author has no competing interests to declare.