Each month, we publish an original poem, written in response to a work of contemporary art. This month, Camille Ralphs chose works from The Romance of the Rose (2024) by Ella Walker.
Walker’s paintings feature a cast of female characters apparently gathered up from farflung epochs and then transplanted to a raucous stage set, sitting curiously outside time. Titled after Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun’s thirteenth-century French poem, in which an amorous youth goes on a quest to ‘pluck’ the ‘perfect rosebud’ – that is, to seduce and deflower a virgin – The Romance of the Rose turns the tables: Walker’s women are rendered unconstrained by the patriarchal imagination.
The Romance of the Risen
after Ella Walker
Many men say the dream is unreal:
The canvassed world, as inconstant as beauty,
Feeling’s alchemical pigments reveal
Is on loan from night and the mind’s blue root,
And our capable wanting and stealing
Between the crosswise boughs and suffering fruit.
Madonna, this dream is not mistaken.
I was what I know, I am what I did.
If I slept to walk your way, I dream to wake
With you allayed, alive, among, amid
All this muddling of buds and stigmata
With sunrise’s unstemmable rose,
Which becomes you – you, who give the lie to every art;
And the wounds of sight draw to a close.
Camille Ralphs is poetry editor at the TLS. Her latest book is After You Were, I Am (Faber, 2024).
