Someone Else
Chopin had known Maria as a child;
Now she was a black-eyed beauty who painted
And played piano; they were reacquainted
In Dresden, where he briefly domiciled
While the sixteen-year-old became his student.
They fell in love, were privily engaged
But, finding out, her mother was enraged,
Judging the fellow sickly and imprudent,
And imposing a year’s hiatus. Back
In Paris, bound by separation’s fetters
He was buoyed by regular, loving letters
For weeks, until a sudden month-long lack
Gave way to his dismissal, bluntly stated,
Which, he was sure, someone else had dictated.
[Years later, Chopin, still resentful of his unexplained rejection, described Maria
Wodzińska’s mother as, ‘Shallow, un-scrupulous and heartless’. By this time,
Maria had been married to, and divorced from, a count’s son who was ugly and
stupid but happened to be rich.]
Rossetti’s Lover
Lizzie, Rossetti’s lover, was his model
(Pallid-skinned, her hair a coppery torrent),
Though freewheeling-he thought marriage abhorrent,
Monogamy puritanical twaddle.
Irked by serfdom, ten years later she fled
To study art; her health was on the wane
And laudanum, to mollify the pain,
Followed, like an assassin, in her tread.
Told that she was ailing, gutted by shame
At having, for a decade, loathly dallied,
He hurried to her side and, when she rallied,
Married her. With child, how blithe she became,
Till the babe was stillborn. Desolate-eyed,
She double-dosed, and fell asleep, and died.
[Elizabeth Siddal was 33 when she died. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the leading
light of the English art movement named The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.]
Virginia
When Virginia walked into the river,
Too loaded down by cobbles to have floated
Her suicide note was grossly misquoted
By Time Magazine. ‘I cannot forgive her
For surrendering to wartime malaise,’
Responded a self-satisfied archdeacon:
‘Shall we follow suit and helplessly weaken,
Step, arms raised, into the Hadean blaze?
‘Not so…!’ Time, Leonard shot back, had distorted
Terror at the approach of insanity
Into purely onanistic vanity:
Were they proud at having thus misreported…?
Further deepening the article’s stain,
Next week, unmended, it appeared again.
[Virginia Woolf took her life in March. It was her note addressed to her
husband Leonard that Time Magazine egregiously misquoted. It is now thought
that she suffered from bipolar disorder. Among her antecedents and relatives,
mental illness was common.]
Berlioz in Love
When Harriet Smithson acted the role
Of Ophelia, Hector Berlioz,
Smitten, felt the frantic need to compose
A symphony, laying open his soul
In its agonizing longing. The premiere,
She – whom he’d opened his heart to, backstage –
Wasn’t there for. Overtaken by rage,
He fell into a ruinous affair….
At a later performance, she attended
And, conquered by his music, answered, ‘Yes!’;
A joyous wedding gave way, nonetheless,
To a vocation by motherhood ended,
Followed, hard on heel, by a bitter schism
And her descent into alcoholism.
[Smithson died after a series of strokes in 1853.
Berlioz lived till 1869, suffering for his last decade from intestinal neuralgia, compounded
by spiritual isolation, having lost two sisters and two wives. His wish for Smithson to be
reburied, next to him, was honoured.]
Ingrid
Falsely accused of infidelity,
From the horn-mad head of the household shorn,
Ingrid Jonker’s mother slid into beggary
And madness, before her daughter was born.
He, a pro-apartheid M.P., once more
Inflamed when Ingrid, grown, denounced his views,
Got to his feet in the chamber and swore
She wasn’t his, snatching the front-page news.
Prize-winning poet now, unreconciled
To her father’s corundum-hearted curse,
She saw the shooting death of a black child,
Spewed it out in incendiary verse
And, seeing no way on but self-remotion,
Walked on resolute legs into the ocean.
[Ingrid Jonker, winner of the Afrikaans Press-Booksellers literary prize, in 1963,
died two years later, at the age of thirty-one. Remotion means removal.]
Peter Austin is a retired professor of English who spends his time writing stage plays for young people and poems for adults. Of his second collection, X. J. Kennedy (winner of the Robert Frost award for lifetime contribution to poetry) said, ‘He must be one of the best living exponents of the fine old art of rhyming and scanning in English.’