In reply, Venus promises that some day the lady will have what she desires, though she must wait patiently, and that meanwhile the man will be made to love her devotedly (lines 370–453). The lady then praises the goddess for her beneficence (lines 461–502). Venus bestows on her a green and white hawthorn chaplet along with instructions about constancy in love (lines 503–23). The first part of the poem ends with great promise. Walhalla was inspired by Valhöll (in English usually Valhalla), the hall of the slain where heroes who had died in battle would join the god Odin according to Norse mythology. However, in the modern Walhalla, inductees need neither be military heroes nor have died in battle. The First Epistle Of The Second Book of Horace, Imitated ["To Augustus"] (London: Printed for T. Cooper, 1737).

But if the dreamer seems to unveil everything, important elements remain unknown and untold. Who, for example, is the lady? Her clothing is green and white, decorated with scrolls, and emblazoned with the motto De Mieulx en Mieulx (line 310), as though she were some specific and identifiable person. The dreamer goes on to report her complaint to Venus, inviting further speculation about her identity: The degree aims to provide students with the knowledge and skills to embark on a career in historic preservation. John Paul Russo, Alexander Pope: Tradition and Identity (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972).

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Later, the Eagle offers to tell Chaucer more about the stars, but Chaucer declines, saying he is too old. Reminiscent of Chaucer when he apologizes at the end of Troilus and Criseyde, the poet finally vows to write a little treatise in praise of women; and then he dedicates his book to “my lady.” The reader is left speculating, again, about what all this means. Has the poet dis­covered love through the dream? Or, is the dream a wish-fulfilment fantasy relating to a prior affair? Is his paramour merely dreamt up, or does she have a real existence outside the text? Is she the poet’s female patron cast flatteringly as a beloved? And what might she find enchanting in the work? Lynch, Geoffrey Chaucer; edited by Kathryn L. (2007). Dream visions and other poems. New York: W. W. Norton. ISBN 9780393925883. {{ cite book}}: |first1= has generic name ( help) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) Benson, general editor, Larry D. (1987). The Riverside Chaucer (3rded.). Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Co. ISBN 0395290317. {{ cite book}}: |first1= has generic name ( help) CS1 maint: multiple names: authors list ( link) Embedded in West’s depiction of Emmeline Pankhurst is the biography Purvis has now extrapolated. Every line in the first paragraph of “A Reed of Steel” is calculated to redeem the suffragette movement and its leader’s role in it. That Emmeline Pankhurst was beautiful—as were many of her female followers—put the lie to the charge that suffragettes tended to be ugly old maids and somehow unfeminine—what the parlance of the day termed “unwomanly women.” Her pale face suggested what West later made explicit: Mrs. Pankhurst was a frail woman, a reed, but a “reed of steel”—the square jaw might be set in a delicate frame but it bespoke an honorable, sturdy, and (this was often not observed) conservative sensibility. Though inspired by the French revolution and enamored of French ideas and fashions (she spent her formative teenage years in Paris absorbing Thomas Carlyle’s heroic vision of historical change), Pankhurst’s revolution and West’s was a conservation of democratic rights for men and women. There was no need of another revolution, except in so far as Englishmen had to be challenged to continue the quest for liberty, equality, and fraternity. As West put it, Emmeline Pankhurst was “the last popular leader to act on inspiration derived from the principles of the French Revolution.” As a result, Mrs. Pankhurst has become the most misconstrued conservative revolutionary—or as Purvis calls her, “patriotic feminist”—in the 20thcentury.

An Epistle To The Right Honourable Richard Earl of Burlington. Occasion'd by his Publishing Palladio's Designs of the Baths, Arches, Theatres, &c. of Ancient Rome (London: Printed for L. Gilliver, 1731); enlarged as Of False Taste ... (London: Printed for L. Gilliver, 1731 [i.e., 1732]).Critics usually assume adultery or marriage; the notion of a clandestine marriage was put forward by Kelly, Love and Marriage, pp. 291–93, and is accepted by Tinkle, Medieval Venuses and Cupids, pp. 154–59. The first book begins when, on the night of the tenth of December, Chaucer has a dream in which he is inside a temple made of glass, filled with beautiful art and shows of wealth. After seeing an image of Venus, Vulcan, and Cupid, he deduces that it is a temple to Venus. Chaucer explores the temple until he finds a brass tablet recounting the Aeneid. For similar complaints in Middle English poetry, see Court of Love, lines 1095–1136, and James I’s Kingis Quair, lines 624–30. On the practice of “child oblation” and its decline in the later medieval period, see de Jong, In Samuel’s Image, pp. 44–45, 294, 297, et passim. Readers can be forgiven for speculating about a monk who gives expression to wayward sexual desire in agreeable verse. Often men­tioned but seldom discussed, the paradox of a celibate cleric indulging in romantic fantasies exerts an irresistible tug. There are other examples (e.g., Douglas, Dunbar, Skelton) of celibate love poets, and Lydgate may have been writing for commission or even “on spec.” Still, Lydgate’s autobiographical questions (long out of favor in modern literary scholarship) will not go away.

Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, pp. 375–76. The Prince of Wales, future Henry V, would go on to develop an important patronage relation with the poet: he commissioned Troy Book (c. 1412–20). The extraordinary erasure of Emmeline Pankhurst is superbly documented in Emmeline Pankhurst: A Biography (Routledge 2002) by June Purvis, the first full-fledged treatment in nearly 70 years of “that weapon of will-power by which British women freed themselves from being classed with children and idiots in the matter of exercising the franchise,” wrote the London Evening Standard, and the “most remarkable political and social agitator of the early part of the twentieth century,” The New York Herald Tribune declared. Purvis not only takes her cue from West, her biography goes well beyond West’s essay by repudiating much of the left-controlled historiography on the votes for women movement. Both in her narrative and in her notes, Purvis shows just how elaborately Mrs. Pankhurst’s trajectory from Labor Party supporter to Conservative candidate for Parliament has been misunderstood anddiminished. Leo von Klenze designed the white marble temple based on the appearance of the Parthenon in Athens. At the center of the temple is the Hall of Fame (Ehrenhalle) where the busts (Büsten) of famous Germans are placed as well as nameplates (Gedenktafeln) of especially early historic and mythical figures. Inductees in the German Hall of Fame in Walhalla A wide range of people is honored in the German Hall of Fame. Kings and other nobles are well represented, as are several military leaders. However, many scientists, artists, and poets are also included. Although Ludwig I specifically insisted that women should also be considered, only around a dozen females have ever been included at any given time. Seducing readers with possibilities remains what The Temple of Glas does best, and that special magnetism speaks not only to the provenance and textual history of Lydgate’s poem but also to its literary qualities. For indeed, if The Temple of Glas appears to “go public” with private matters we can no longer identify, there is a way in which fresh documentary evidence (should it ever come to light) would not be enough to settle the text’s meaning. Lydgate’s poem is not reducible to the literal or referential level, for what it offers is a mystifying and alluring aesthetic experience. 14 Designed to seduce its audience with a spectacle of a secret and illicit love affair, The Temple of Glas is contrived to capture and concentrate attention. I will return to consider the implied or hypothetical audience of the work whose good favor the poet attempts to court (i.e., “my lady,” who is the poet’s fictional paramour), but it may be equally important to recognize that the poem has designs on us (or any actual audience). Critics agree that it is charmingly obscure and faintly, delectably taboo. Something of the poem’s sex appeal lies in the way it is curiously reticent and secre­tive about its purposes while remaining extremely suggestive, puzzling, provoking, even scandalous. How it man­ages to turn its relatively limited resources to advantage is worth considering. The following discussion attempts to highlight the “strategies of the text” around which the reader’s aesthetic experience is structured and through which the mean­ing of The Temple of Glas is gradually realized. 15 Principally, these strategies include the careful modulation and juxtaposition of contrastive elements brought together in original and absorbing ways, making the poem itself a secret and seductive affair — which may, in fact, be the main point.

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One Thousand Seven Hundred and Thirty Eight. A Dialogue Something like Horace (London: Printed for T. Cooper, 1738). See also John Lydgate: Poems, ed. Norton-Smith, p. 176; Renoir and Benson, “John Lydgate.” p. 2160; Pearsall, John Lydgate (1997), p. 79. The fragments are found in the first four folia of British Library MS Sloane 1212, on which see Seaton, Sir Richard Roos, p. 376, and Pearsall, John Lydgate (1970), p. 18; and in National Library of Scotland Advocates 1.1.6.