READINGS OF THE WORK BY PHILIP HARVEY

  Image: ‘The Falls of the Rhine at Schaffhausen’ by J. M. W. Turner.  Undated. Pencil, red ink, and watercolour on paper. “Once as we descended a mountain side by side with the mountain torrent, my companion saw, while I missed seeing, a foambow.” A what?, I asked the page, a foambow? Clearly Christina Rossetti knows about foambows, even if she has never seen a foambow. The OED lists its first use in ‘Oenone’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson in 1832: “And his cheek brighten'd as the foam-bow brightens.” While Rossetti uses the word in the entry in her daily devotional ‘Time Flies’ (published 1885) for September 16, continuing: “In all my life I do not recollect to have seen one, except perhaps in artificial fountains; but such general omission seems a matter of course, and therefore simply a matter of indifference. That single natural foambow which I might have beheld and espied not, is the one to which may attach a tinge of regret; because, in a certain sense, it depended upon myself to l

  Reading Christina Rossetti widely for next month’s Poets and the Faith paper at St. Peter’s, I rediscover her ‘reading diary’ of 365 daily reflections, published in 1885 in London under the title ‘Time Flies’. Wondering what she has to say in this daily devotional about the coming week, I turn to her entry for July 22, Feast of St. Mary Magdalene, of whom she notes in her terse manner: “The date of her death is unknown.”   Rossetti writes: “A record of this Saint is a record of love. She ministered to the Lord of her substance, she stood by the Cross, she sat over against the Sepulchre, she sought Christ in the empty grave, and found Him and was found of Him in the contiguous garden.”   Contiguous here means the touching or adjoining garden, but also especially surely a place of meeting, where one meets another without touching. This is a place where death meets life. The relationship, listed by the poet with such rhythm and concision, is brought into stronger focus in the next s

  The 31 st annual Bloomsday in Melbourne staged a play at St Martin’s Theatre in South Yarra exploring the encounter between Samuel Beckett and the Joyce family in 1920s Paris. Review by Philip Harvey The symbiotic relationship between an artist and their work is notorious in the case of James Joyce. Himself, his family and friends make major character appearances in his great fictions, albeit oblique, typified, parodied, and exaggerated to serve the author’s purposes. Similarly, his family and acquaintances are caught up in the creative act itself, for good or ill. This relationship, and its real-life consequences, are the driver of this year’s Bloomsday in Melbourne play, an informed drama about Joyce’s daughter Lucia (Mary Agnes O’Loughlin) and the unknown young turk fresh from Dublin, Samuel Beckett (Jeremy Harland). Steve Carey’s play employs varied modes to dramatize the conjunction between the everyday and high art. A comic café dialogue between litterateurs using a cornuc

Modernised transport and increased access to Jerusalem in the mid-19 th century gave rise to what this excellent history (‘Under Jerusalem : the Buried History of the World’s Most Contested City’ by Andrew Lawler. Doubleday, 2023) depicts as an imperial ‘race’ for the secrets in stone and artifacts either submerged or in plain sight of the Holy City. France, then Britain, Germany and Russia are amongst the nations that expend money, material, and personnel in their different bids to lay claim to the truth about the religious past. The truth itself proves elusive over many decades, as excavators offer up contradictory theories about the exact site of the Prophet’s Dream, the Passion narratives, Solomon’s and then Herod’s Temple, and other major facts of shared interest. Results are mixed. General Gordon, for example, he of Khartoum fame, engages in his own military-style survey, with definitively expressed ideas that a French scholar of the time described as “wonderfully weird.” The ca