Photographer & Stylist: Linda Marina Portman
Written by the Brilliant David Barrie
The May Queen
“You must wake and call me early, call me early, mother dear; To-morrow ‘ill be the happiest time of all the glad New-year; Of all the glad New-year, mother, the maddest merriest day; For I’m the Queen o’ the May, mother, I’m to be Queen o’ the May.”
Beautiful and excited, the girl at the center of the Victorian poem
The May Queen is the glorious expression of a woman emerging in to a new season.
But don’t get carried away by all of the romance, joy and blooming valleys of Tennyson’s writing, at a time when visual culture is awash with the floral prints of Mary Katrantzou and cities full of blossoming trees.
The May Queen may be lit by the optimism of a new season but she is cold, calculating, a narcissist and crazy daisy kook.
Lord Alfred Tennyson wrote
The May Queen in 1833. The defining poet of Victorian England, he is best known for his poem
The Charge of the Light Brigade.
The verse centers on a girl, taken to wearing white and at times mistaken for a ghost, who urges her mother to wake her up early in the day to celebrate Spring.
The May Queen is a blend of the real and the literary and almost a dream song, full of lush green, knots of flowers and wild, golden plants that shine
like fire in swamps and hollows gray.
As ever with Tennyson, the poem shares a meaningful contrast. It revels in trite, bright, almost silly, optimism but also hints at a world that is polluted by the vain, the selfish and the cruel.
The girl in
The May Queen sees a young man who loves her, on a bridge near to where she lives, and simply runs past him saying nothing:
They call me cruel hearted, but I care not what they say.
The girl is utterly indifferent to the his feelings and just can’t wait to flirt with farm workers on the village green:
They say his heart is breaking, mother – what is that to me?
Tennyson was a writer finely tuned to the spiritual and symbolic. He was also a troubled man. The son of a violent, alcoholic priest, he wrote
The May Queen in the same year as his best male friend, often thought to be his lover, fell ill and died.
The May Queen may appear to be full of the joys of Spring but she is superficial and manipulative and by dismissing the young man, she denies the union of souls in love and this is a symbol of human relations with God.
Photographer & Stylist: Linda Marina Portman
Written by David Barrie
Assistant Stylist: Mafalda Silva
Model: Vikky Ivie
Thanks to John Alan Flowers
