'Romance'

'Romance'

Alice Werner (1859-1935), castle, chivalry, ‘Creeve Roe’, Gothic medievalism, knight, L. D. (1859-1935), Lucia Di Valle Rojana (1859-1935), melancholia, poetry, romance, tournament, Victor Daley (1858-1905)

The long-vanished past is briefly reconfigured in this sad and poignant poem. It allows us a fleeting glimpse of what has (or may have) been, even though we find ourselves standing in the waking world “Under blue skies in a fair land.” True Romance, it suggests, has gone the way of stately knights in armour, beautiful ‘maidens forlorn,’ castles, and all the accoutrements and trappings of the chivalric medieval past. In gothic literary fashion the buildings, mores and customs have all crumbled, decayed, and vanished, and the poem “lament[s] the irredeemable loss of this world, which ‘Ages ago [...] faded out and died’” (Louise D'Arcens, Old Songs in the Timeless Land: Medievalism in Australian Literature 1840-1910 Turnhout, Brepols, 2011, p.139). While these verses do convey sadness and melancholia, Australia was a new land, at least in terms of European settlement and influence, and so it can be concluded, as Louise D’Arcens suggests, that that, “this melancholy poem is not coupled with any attempt to reanimate the spirit of nostalgia in the present” (D’Arcens, p.139).

L. D. (Alice Werner aka Lucia Di Valle Rojana)

The Bulletin

The Bulletin

15 August 1885 (p. 22)

Public Domain

Journal (microfilm)

English

Journal (microfilm)