The Faery Wood
The Faery Wood
“The twilight sank around me, and infolded me with sleep… I rose as from the death that wipes out the sadness of life, and then dies itself in the new morrow.”
—George MacDonald, Phantastes
My heart aches, and I seek oblivion
In a Lethean sleep, to drink
Bewitcheries nepenthean and sink
Deep beneath perilous seas, cease to be,
And forget what could never be unseen —
To fall from the sleepless nightmare
Into the nightingale’s love-dream:
Trillings rich with love-sick ecstasies
Are both heard and seen, glamouried
With lush blues by mid-May’s Sapphire Queen
Drowsily I open my eyes, sublimed
By the ungathering darkness that opens
Doorways into the unconscious mind,
And what I find are wonders
Of the other side: a faery wood
Otherworlded by perpetual twilight,
Melting skies of violet Tyrian
Bleed white-fire like liquid lightning
Touched by volcanian red, spellbinding
The darkest, lushest bluebell bed
Lured by the faintly far away abloom
In full azurean glow, splintered light
Wet with spell-craft that falls like shadow,
Drips like will-o’-wisps, leading me home
Ghost-eyed, heart-sore, idealised like Endymion
In the Queen-Moon’s dream of eternal sleep —
But I awoke, I rose, and as I wandered darkly
As one who longs for death, smiles as one fey,
I followed my aching heart
And took the faery wood’s violet way
Like a lithe spirit in lunary limbo
I float beyond the veil of sleep —
Betwixt and between death and ecstasy
The nightingale no longer sings,
Spring’s bluebells die, and this violet sky
Melts to the silence of my own twilight:
A winter’s sunset, quiet, cold, alone,
And my eyes, still ravished by moonglow,
Watch as my soul of souls, opaled and pearled,
Glides in hyacinthine skies of another world.
I was honored to discover that my poem “The Faery Wood” won the Highly Commended Award, one of two prizes given for 2024’s Brian Nisbet Poetry Award. And I am especially honored that this year’s theme was in commemoration of the bicentenary of George MacDonald’s birth in Huntly, Scotland, where the award is based. MacDonald, considered one of the founders of modern fantasy literature who influenced writers such as C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, is a favorite author of mine, and his wonderfully brilliant fantasy novel Phantastes (1858) was a major influence on me while writing “The Faery Wood”. I wrote briefly about that inspiration here.
The painting is The Fairy Wood (1903) by Henry Meynell Rheam, whose bluebell imagery and fairy “spell-craft” was also in mind whilst writing my poem — as was particular “Bluebell Woods” in both Scotland and England which I had visited in May. I first became interested in Rheam after viewing his paintings inspired by John Keats’s poem “La Belle Dame sans Merci”. One such painting can be seen in my essay on the subject of “Gothic Faerie”.