Jane Austen
“A fine Sunday in Bath empties every house of its inhabitants, and all the world appears on such an occasion to walk about and tell their acquaintance what a charming day it is.” —northanger abbey
I awoke from the tunnel
to the fields of yellow rape,
seventeenth-century buildings, and cobbled
streets as she would have seen them.
It was rainy; the rain came and went,
came and went so that you could not escape
its dampness. I understood the need for tea
and the luxury of cremes and pastries
and why the ladies longed for a strong shoulder
to see them through the winter.
The seagulls cried overhead,
though there was no sea, only a muddy river
from Bath to Bristol. The scavengers
lived on the rooftops and if desperate
enough would swoop down and take
a sandwich from your hand.
I secured my room at the Royal Bath Hotel.
It was a hovel, really, with a carpet
as old as the early century.
Walking through the hotel,
I sensed something lurid
in the air, every eye upon me as if they knew
I was a foreigner in a strange land.
Over the bed, a burgundy bedspread
dusty and faded as vintage wine,
made me long for the bright color of red.
In the next room, sleepless, I heard
through thin walls the sounds
of an un-tender coupling.
I looked in the warped mirror
and found myself ugly
and when I turned from it,
could not escape the vision.
It lingered. The rain came and went,
came and went. I took an umbrella
and began my walk, hoping to come upon
her quarters. I passed the Roman Baths,
the statues not beautiful,
but puckered and fossilled
and the Pump Room where her protagonist,
other self, doppelgänger,
good, strong, loyal Catherine,
longing for companionship, fell
under the seduction of Isabella
and her reprehensible brother.
Even then her coming out
seemed less magisterial,
and Bath a representation of the emptiness
and evils of society where a woman’s dowry
might confine her forever,
than a reprieve from country life.
I gave up my search.
Images were everywhere.
And my mind had been made up.
I perceived no romance
in the wind, no comfort in the hard
glances of strangers, girls with chipped nail polish,
lads unkempt as if there were no hope of glory.
The next morning I boarded the train
to the modern world and it wasn’t until a sheet
of blue slipped out like a love letter
from its envelope of dark gray sky
that I knew the journey had ended
and, like Catherine, I was finally safe.
Copyright Credit: "Jane Austen" from The Players: Poems by Jill Bialosky, compilation copyright © 2015 by Jill Bialosky. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf, an imprint of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. All rights reserved.
Source: The Players (Alfred A. Knopf, 2015)