Bitter crying, a song which is not sweet,
bleak sighs, a disquieted voice: I’ll boast
not of my style but of my suffering.
— Vittoria’s riposte opener to Dante, Petrarch
Dear friends and readers,
As I wrote the other day, quite by coincidence I’ve returned to the life and poetry of Vittoria Colonna, am reading a new literary study of her by Maria Musiol, and at the same time re-reading through my translations of Colonna’s large oeuvre. For the first time I find myself more truly asking the question, how do these poems express her specific condition of widowhood (since now I am a widow who lost someone beloved, irreplaceable). I know many are angry, scornful, she breaks taboos, especially one which says one should grieve only so long and so much and one must remarry, especially the daughter of a well-connected influential rich family, even more especially if she has not yet had children. I know her stances of bliss obscure the reality of an arranged marriage where the couple soon did not sleep together, he was continually sexually unfaithful, and the their real common ground (pride in self and family). But why these images and not those? To the modern sensibility her use of general not-specifically autobiographical imagery (except in 2 cases) may have a dulling, distancing effect.
Still I do find she is expressing a few intense intense narrowly-conceived state of minds repeatedly which are really what one can feel. Her desperateness strikes me now. This one is justly famous:
Among hard rocks and savage winds I try
this life’s currents in a frail wooden boat
I no longer have the art or mind for:
how slow they all are to come to my aid.
It took death but a moment to put out
my star, linch-pin, faithful support, my light:
now in the murky waters, swollen air,
there’s no help, black tempest, everywhere fear–
not of the pitiless Siren’s sweet song,
falling broken mangled down these cliffs, by
shifting sands overwhelmed, sinking, buried–
only of sailing forever alone
where I’ve sailed too often, now hopelessly,
for death has hidden my sanctuary.
Some women on this blog have told me they dream, to dream away:
Gone the gentle colors of the earth’s spring,
gone from her new-born flowers and green leaves,
the lovely scarlet dawn pale, faded, leaves
the serene star-filled sky faintly glimmering …
and yet a sense of noble dreams still stirs
my soul, roused by his memory, still rich
with the light and grace of my beloved
I feel his warmth hour after hour.
I want to paint on this page what is carved
into my heart to awaken thousands
of lovers with the flame that is within me.
But who can tell of sparkles deep-strewn in
the flesh, of breathless anticipation,
in me he is warm, strong, alive, all is light.
While reading her as a widow alertly for the first time, I also catch for the first time dimissal of her because she’s that suddenly marginal (alone, superfluous, perhaps sex-starved, useless) woman, the widow who if she has money is resented. Bullock, her heroic editor, disparages veins in her poetry as “widow-parlando.” And it’s not a case of love or ecstatic poems versus religious ones. She looks on life before and after her husband’s death from many angles. Her religion is also not complacent devotional (taken at random), but doubting, ravaged (this one connects to her rejection of her mourning much later in life), a state of inner emptiness.
And she’s alive to art:
A mosaic high on a wall, flakes of
fire, winged, alive, a snake of love,
pictures of people vying, offering
gifts to each other, cupped hands of pure light.
I find myself remembering familiar caricatures of widows, a few of which Austen favors. A friend sent me this unusually frank article in the New York Times: No husband, no friends. Older women alone. Who would listen? Who would want to fuck them? Lilian Hellman after Dashiell Hammett died (I’m now also reading her several volume unconventionally structured memoir.) Whole cultures once burnt them to death.
Reading gothic and ghost stories on Trollope19thCStudies with others, particularly in Through a Glass Darkly and the story of the man who is hauntd, and finally taken possession of a vengeful ghost in order to retaliate cruel usage and injustice inflicted on that ghost when he lived a person: we thus have a victim-anti-hero taken out, and his friend (our narrator) left alone. I react very personally and the word “bereft” comes to mind and suddenly I recall Wharton’s Afterward (see film too), where the wife is left to be alone for the rest of her life, in a sumptuous country house the husband bankrupted others for, with whose ruthless business practices she was willing to be complicit in (ignored but was willing to profit). Wharton is cruel to her, the full impact of that final scene in the film hits me. I used to bond with her in what I knew was a wife’s nightmare, but not the way I feel it tonight. Wreaked, visited upon her:
No, she would never know what had become of him — no one would ever know. But the house knew; the library in which she spent her long, lonely evenings knew. For it was here that the last scene had been enacted, here that the stranger had come, and spoken the word which had caused Boyne to rise and follow him. The floor she trod had felt his tread; the books on the shelves had seen his face; and there were moments when the intense consciousness of the old, dusky walls seemed about to break out into some audible revelation of their secret. But the revelation never came, and she knew it would never come. Lyng was not one of the garrulous old houses that betray the secrets intrusted to them. Its very legend proved that it had always been the mute accomplice, the incorruptible custodian of the mysteries it had surprised. And Mary Boyne, sitting face to face with its portentous silence, felt the futility of seeking to break it by any human means.
You cannot break through that wall of silence, of not there-ness.
The picture at the top of this blog could just conceivably be Colonna. On the semi-broken state of one of her eyes and part of her face: Colonna did flagellate herself. Of all the pictures associated with Colonna I’ve seen thus far, this is my favorite. After Pescara’s death, Vittoria became bone thin, later in life would not dress up at all (it was remarked upon at courts), showed on her face what she felt. She does not mention pets: I am not sure it was common enough in the Renaissance to reach the level of easy allusion, but have seen pictures of older women with a cat as companion. But she does love to ride, had a favorite horse, traveled this rough way, with Prudentia, herlong-time maid, who rode alongside her. This woman looks athletic, wiry. At any rate we see in her face the woman knew well the pain of heart-break and did not forget it.
Yes I translated all Colonna’s poetry and wrote a chapter of a biography and much else about her over a period of 20 years, some of it now on the Net, originally mostly due to the Admiral. When we went to Italy, we visited Marino, the place where the convent she lived in was (now a post office), and Ischia. When I’m fixing the stuff there online it feels as if it has some point because he was proud of it. Other things I take notes on and wonder why on earth I’m doing this.
My heart is broken when I remember some of what happened (really bad moments with him too) and cannot cope with what is (the terror of forms about money). Never mind what’s to be.
And sometimes I do forget the Admiral is not back there, half-sleeping, waiting for me to finish the film and come to bed, oh how I wish he were
Sylvia
Ian yesterday afternoon
Under the Sign of Sylvia II 
Ian is looking good, very calm and comfy. Did you read all the comments to the “No Husband, No Friends” thing? I thought many of them were very good. I related to the one about the man who never nurtured friendships and found when his wife was gone he didn’t have any. That is exactly my father in law.
I did read it at the time — a few days ago. Naturally I noticed all the comments sympathetic to the widow/widower. I’ll say this about people not cultivating (not so positive a word) friendships with others beyond the husband or wife: particularly in the case of a wife who often does take the more dependent role, the issue of time comes up immediately: the wife’s time is taken up by as a primary duty what the husband wants to do. It was spot on that the writer of this column should be a woman not a man, not just because there are so many more widows, but because the dependent in the relationship (and that means the less free person) is most often the woman. That is fostered by society which gives me the greater salary and makes it a test of successful honorable good manhood to be a man protective (which means controlling too) of his wife.
It does fit the wife in Afterward who moved with her husband where he worked. It does not fit Colonna who had a powerful extensive family network which trumped or husband’s and where he died so young. How old the widow/widower is at the time of loss is important. However in her case at the time since women were unfree, she was not the free agent a widow could be in the 19th century: after what was thought acceptable grieving her family tried to coerce her into another arranged marriage. Her continual moving about (by which I mean literally living in different places) was a way of avoiding this pressure and lots of the poems are declarations and justifications of why she does not intend to remarry. I think she did fall in love or like a couple of the poet-courtiers who surrounded her, but she would not have been permitted to marry them; had she, as in The Duchess of Malfi, only not so murderously, the husband she chose would have been at risk. The violent basis of our society kept out of sight was perfectly visible in the Renaissance. Hence Michelangelo’s care in sustaining his very polite relationship with the Colonna woman.
TMI
Sylvia
I miss him most when I finish a phase of work. I turn round in the expectation of someone there to somehow give it all meaning or I’ll do something else, tell someone. And he’s not there. I don’t think he’s there, but the whole emotional trajectory occurs anyway. So it’s like losing a leg or arm. You know you lost it but you move to walk.
Hi Ellen, wishing you comfort at this time. I read the article No Husband, No Friends and just wanted to say that is also true for single divorcees like me…if I was in the area I would come over and take you to a movie. Carolyn