'Armed with Madness': A sequence of poems after Leonora Carrington

It was my visit to Tate Liverpool in 2015 to see the comprehensive exhibition of art across several media by the celebrated surrealist Leonora Carrington that made me want to write a sequence of poems about her.  

I set about reading a lot of her stories and autobiographical pieces, as well as the novel based on her life by Elena Poniatowska, and the more I learnt about her resilience and her drive to be true to herself, the more I saw in paintings I'd thought I already knew quite well. Eventually I wrote a sequence of four ekphrastic poems exploring aspects of her extraordinary life through four portraits she painted at key points:

Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-38), painted at the time of her elopement to Paris with Max Ernst, when she left behind her family's suffocating expectations of her.

Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst (1939), painted while the couple were living in the South of France, prior to Ernst's periods of internment at the hands of the French authorities, and then the invading Germans.

The Artist Travelling Incognito (1949), painted after her escape to Mexico, following a brutal stay in a mental hospital in Spain and her parents' attempt to force her back to England (by sending her nanny in a submarine to abduct her!)

The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c1947-50), which I construed as a mythical depiction of her arrival in Mexico, where she was to live out the rest of her long and fascinating life. 

These poems have now been published in issue 18 of the fabulous journal of creative arts Riggwelter, and can be read here, but if you'd like to see the poems alongside the paintings, they're also below. (But do visit Riggwelter, because there's great stuff in it.) 

‘Armed with madness for a long voyage’ *

After four paintings by Leonora Carrington

I   Self-Portrait: Inn of the Dawn Horse (1937-38)

It’s lost its mane and tail

but she’s set that old rocking horse rocking

so hard it is lifting, hovering in the air

as if it might follow its living self

the one that has leapt through the frame

and is cantering into freedom.

And yes, it’s a dawning

Leonora, seated on a satin tongue

her demon hyena at her feet,

will soon be gone

as desire materialises beside her

casts a shadow, erases lines

that would confine her.

II   Bird Superior: Portrait of Max Ernst (1939)

Far away

in a gilded country

where the forests are deep and dark

she paints maestro Max

all flounced out in feathers and fish tail,

his stinging stripy socks,

Leonora’s shaman.

He paints her

tangled in briars and vines

she paints herself

frozen in the background

              watching him walking out of shot

                             helpless to stop him.

Even before war is declared

she knows

                      he’s leaving

taking her light

trapped in his lantern,

the egg he will hide in the ice

of this barren lifeless mountain. 

   

III   The Artist Travelling Incognito (1949)

Why so paranoid?

asks the Spanish psychiatrist

She straightens the citadel on her head,

rearranges the extra eyes she’s borrowed

from her cat’s remaining lives

They’re coming to get me, she explains

In a submarine

Lord Candlestick with his strictures

Mother painting biscuit tins

punishing nuns, suitors, the spies of the Gestapo

entitled artists who would use me

as their muse

I’m sticking my necks out

my real head’s the decoy

                                      it will parrot

what you expect   I’ve kept

my umbrella in case it rains

                     I don’t know why

I’m in disguise

         none of them see me.

IV   The Giantess (The Guardian of the Egg) (c1947-50)

No foam-born Venus blown ashore on a shell

She crawled straight from the mouth

of the whale

turned her back on the map of her journey

freed the geese that led her

to her unknown home.

As for the terror

that overwhelmed her

she’s put it behind her

so let waves rise, mound themselves into hillocks

miniscule men fight monsters

saplings sputter flame.

She is brooding mysteries in her head,

her unhatched visions sprout strange

feathers in their egg.

© Deborah Harvey 2019

* Paraphrased by Leonora Carrington from the inscription in Mary Butt’s novel, ‘Armed with Madness’

This sequence of poems will also be published in my poetry collection, The Shadow Factory, due to be published by Indigo Dreams later this year.