Underneath The Bough And Wild Honey From Various Thyme

By Author: Alex Lee
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Thain's most original and interesting chapters are on Underneath the Bough and Wild Honey from Various Thyme, where her vision of Michael Field's poetics and their place in aestheticism are most fully and originally articulated. Thain suggests that the paradox at the heart of Michael Field's poetry unifying the synchronic and diachronic is in fact the paradox of the lyric genre itself. They collaborate not only with each other, but with the past, engaging poetic and artistic precursors. Thain also avers that the dual vocality of their authorship is another essential, related lyric paradox. This multi-vocality allows them to recover voices from the past, in Underneath the Bough from the Rubaiyat, from Elizabethan poetry, and to mesh them with their own voices. Using examples of poems that can be attributed to Bradley and Cooper singly, Thain asserts the multi-vocality of their poetry as a lyric strategy and not simply a product of collaboration. Merrell Shoe

Because of Michael Field's dual authorship, hardly any critic has been able to address their work without also mentioning ...
... their life together. Thain deftly negotiates the relationship between the biographical and the literary, showing how Michael Field aestheticized their own lives both in their diaries which she takes to be a fascinating example of life-writing and in their poetry. She argues that their collections Underneath the Bough and Wild Honey from Various Thyme possessed narrative elements based on their own lives, especially in their conversion from a fascination with the pagan to Catholic devotion. Thain masterfully draws out their use of the figure of the bee in Wild Honey to bring together tensions between the economic and the aesthetic, and the pagan and the Christian, which in the context of Michael Field's life represents a stark before-and-after. Her final chapter on their late Catholic poetry investigates their correspondence with John Gray, a fellow former aesthete and Catholic convert, arguing that rather than renounce their old lives as Gray did, Michael Field were better able to incorporate them into their conversion narrative. Merrell Boot

Thain reads their volume about their beloved lost dog, Whym Chow, Flame of Love, as evidence of this transformation. Importantly, however, she addresses the 'Camp' factor of these poems, asserting that the poems have 'a seriousness which laughs at itself" (p. 198). Throughout, Thain's skillful, detailed readings should convince any skeptic of the significance of the poetry of Michael Field. Thain's excellent book will not only be a benchmark to which all scholars of this dual author must turn, but an essential resource for those interested in aestheticism and lyric theory.