The Provence poems of 1931 are love poems to Evelyn Irons, the editor of the women’s page of the Daily Mail. Vita had been interviewed by Irons and then invited her to Sissinghurst; they fell in love. Sometime after Evelyn’s March 6 visit, Vita wrote what she called a “diary poem,” a spontaneous poem not intended for publication. In contrast to the formal lyricism of her other poems, it reads in part:
This is pain.
I recognize it.
I feared I had forgotten how to feel it.
I feared, that I was so lapped in happiness and security,
That I had forgotten the sting of pain, of sensation;
But here is the familiar turmoil, the stinging.
I welcome it; I fear it; I welcome my own fear of it.
I am glad to find that I can still be afraid of my own sensations.
I am glad to find that I can still be swept by a sensation I cannot logically explain to others;
That I am still capable of an irrational passion,
I who had grown so ordered, rational,
I have established my contact with irrational humanity.…
In the fall of 1931, Vita went with Evelyn to Provence, a trip that she led Harold to believe she was taking alone. They walked from Tarascon to Les Baux, and then visited Arles and Nîmes. Later, Vita wrote “Egypt, Egypt, Egypt” over her diary entries about the episode and changed the “we” to “I,” in case Harold should see the diary. All Passion Spent, about which Vita was less enthusiastic than the public, appeared at the time of her deepest involvement with Evelyn Irons, who lends her name to the heroine of Family History, the next of Vita’s novels.
After Vita’s involvement with Violet Trefusis, clearly the most important of her lesbian affairs, that with Evelyn Irons seems to many the most interesting. Evelyn and Vita had worked out their complex relationship as being deliciously many-sided, each of them sharing two genders. Evelyn lived with Olive Rinder, who became understandably jealous, fell ill, and gave up her job. (Vita would support her in later years.) In exasperation, Evelyn wrote Vita, “Damn my married life, as well as yours.”1 Predictably, since it had happened so many times that Vita was at the center of a triangular affair, Olive in her turn fell in love with Vita, causing yet another of what Harold and Vita called Vita’s “muddles” or “scrapes.”2
Surly, the generations sent him out,
Climbing a path as stony as his life,
Through valleys aromatic in the drought
With thyme and lavender among the boulders;
The fierce sun dried his shirt upon his shoulders,
And in his pocket warmed the clasped knife.
But in the quarries underneath the hill
The shadow bent its knee across the portal;
The sun died instantly in sudden chill,
And in the catacombs of tunnelled stone
The candid chips lay strewn as fleshless bone,
And candid shelves awaited urns immortal.
He dumped his saw, his mattock, and his pick;
He dumped his bundle on a handy ledge;
And then by his prepared arithmetic
Spat on his palms and fell to work begun
On similar mornings when the thwarted sun
Into the shadowed pylon drove its wedge.
He laboured, never raising eye from line;
One block completed cost him twenty days;
He gave his life to an unseen design,
Sculptor of mountains while he thought to carve
A living, that his children should not starve,
And with the sunset clattered down his ways.
He laboured at his subterranean craft,
Not seeing that the while, square temple rose,
Roofed over by a mountain, apse and shaft,
Deep-driven, pillared into ivory halls,
Luminous galleries and virgin walls,
Unfinished altars, white as drifted snows.
Through the soft limestone hissed the rhythmic saw;
The stone was hard without, but soft within,
As he, whose hard exterior hid the flaw
Of softness prey to ignorance and doubt;
How grey, how beaten by the years without,
How white, how tender when the tests begin!
New shapes, new planes, undreamed by architect;
An accidental beauty, born of need;
Beauty of angles, vertical, erect,
And monolithic as a sea-cut cave
Where the withdrawal of the millionth wave
Leaves the smooth surface when the tides recede.
To what new god he left it dedicate,
This straight new temple lit by crooked day,
The smokeless altars, and the height elate,
The slabs for sacrifice, the mounting stairs,
The naves and transepts risen unawares,
The sunlight and the shadow, who shall say?
1931
“THE TEMPLE OF LOVE (LES BAUX)”
To put a circle round the courts of Love,
I need but slip a ring upon your finger,
And swear—brown earth beneath, blue skies above,
In vineyards where the latened clusters linger—
That I will love you till this you, this I,
Give our dear flesh to worm or else to ash,
Rotting in earth or smoking to the sky,
When Death, at last, brings down his scarlet slash.
Such easy uses whispered in your ear
Reach you as lovers’ threadbare vows perhaps,
And yet, perennial as the vintage here,
They hold their truth beyond such brief collapse,
Lifting me to the realms where constant are
The dark companion and uncertain star.
—1931
What archer shot that arrow through my panes?
A huntress moon that flees the hunter day,
Or hunter day that masculine arraigns
His right above his Cynthia’s soft affray?
An arrow in my heart; I am transfixed;
A bow in heaven snapped; the arrow sticks;
My window widens; Phoebus in pursuit
Chases a Cynthia wan and dissolute.
—1931