Rossetti's The House of Life and Kate Bush's The Tour of Life...KB: "And the cover was terribly important because I do feel with home taping, etc., happening, you have to give people as much as you can on an album... And you hold the cover and you think "oh, this is it!," you know, and you sorta plow through it for any little bit of information. And so that's what I've tried to do and we've got the most incredible artists..."
gaffa.org/reaching/ir80_r1.htmlThe
Kate Bush Hounds Of Love cover and sleeve show KB with two Weimaraner Hounds. A hound is a type of dog that assists hunters by tracking or chasing the animal being hunted.
Is Kate Bush photographed as the hunter with her hounds, or as the courted quarry?IMHO, the photographs are strikingly pre-Raphaelite, reminiscent of Dante Gabriel Rossetti and his muse, Elizabeth Siddal.
www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/rossetti/works/beauties.asp#aThe
Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, which developed around 1848, were greatly influenced by Goethe's work on the theme of
Lilith. In 1863, Dante Gabriel Rossetti of the Brotherhood began painting what would be his first rendition of "Lady Lilith", a painting he expected to be his "best picture hitherto". The original model was Rossetti's lover Fanny Cornforth. Symbols appearing in the painting allude to the "femme fatale" reputation of the Romantic Lilith. The sultry figure combs her golden hair and gazes at a mirror; her dressing gown has slipped off one shoulder. Adding a hint of menace, Rossetti garnished the scene with poisonous foxglove and an opium poppy (whose narcotic, it was widely known, had killed his own wife a few years before).
Lady Lilith by Dante Gabriel Rossetti. 1868.www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/rossetti/graphics/large/lady-Lilith.jpgThe floral paraphernalia include a semi-coronal of white roses, which appear to signify cold sensuous love (according to legend, roses gained their red coloring only when Eve was created, at which point the rose blushed at the sight of her beauty); a crown of poppies on Lilith's lap (signifying sleep and forgetfulness); and a spray of foxglove on the bureau (signifying insincerity). Rossetti draws a relation between hair as a sign of erotic power and as a figure of entrapment.
Obviously on one level
The Ninth Wave is about somebody nearly drowning. But I was struck by images which suggested that there could be drugs involved...
KB: "Definitely there is the connection, with the poppies."
Then in The Ice Song [sic; the interviewer is thinking of Under Ice] there is the reference to 'making [sic] lines, little lines,' which can obviously be interpreted in those terms...
KB: "Yes, absolutely. But really it wasn't conscious when I was writing it... I had really not consciously considered that at all... But you are right..."
"The Private Kate Bush"gaffa.org/reaching/i85_hp.html Rossetti was aware that this modern view on Lilith was in complete contrast to her Jewish lore; he wrote in 1870:
"Lady [Lilith]...represents a Modern Lilith combing out her abundant golden hair and gazing on herself in the glass with that self-absorption by whose strange fascination such natures draw others within their own circle." In Mesopotamian mythology, 'Lilith' is a female wind and storm demon.
So could the JCB images of Kate Bush on the cover of Hounds Of Love represent a Pre-Raphaelite Rossettian rendition of "Lady Lilith" bearing The Ninth Wave?Accompanying his
Lady Lilith painting from 1863, Rossetti wrote a sonnet entitled Lilith:
LILITHby Dante Gabriel Rossetti OF Adam's first wife, Lilith, it is told
(The witch he loved before the gift of Eve,)
That, ere the snake's, her sweet tongue could deceive,
And her enchanted hair was the first gold.
And still she sits, young while the earth is old,
And, subtly of herself contemplative,
Draws men to watch the bright net she can weave,
Till heart and body and life are in its hold.
The rose and poppy are her flowers; for where
Is he not found, O Lilith, whom shed scent
And soft-shed kisses and soft sleep shall snare?
Lo! as that youth's eyes burned at thine, so went
Thy spell through him, and left his straight neck bent,
And round his heart one strangling golden hair.
The poem and the picture appeared together alongside Rossetti's painting
Sibylla Palmifera and the sonnet
Soul's Beauty. In 1881, the
Lilith sonnet was renamed "
Body's Beauty" in order to contrast it and
Soul's Beauty. The two were placed sequentially in
The House of Life collection (sonnets number 77 and 78)...
Rossetti's The House of Life and Kate Bush's The Tour of Life...SOUL'S BEAUTYby Dante Gabriel Rossetti Under the arch of Life, where love and death,
Terror and mystery, guard her shrine, I saw
Beauty enthroned; and though her gaze struck awe,
I drew it in as simply as my breath.
Hers are the eyes which, over and beneath,
The sky and sea bend on thee,— which can draw,
By sea or sky or woman, to one law,
The allotted bondman of her palm and wreath.
This is that Lady Beauty, in whose praise
Thy voice and hand shake still,— long known to thee
By flying hair and fluttering hem,— the beat
Following her daily of thy heart and feet,
How passionately and irretrievably,
In what fond flight, how many ways and days!
Soul's Beauty by Dante Gabriel Rossetti: The House of Life. 1881.[/b][/color]
www.textetc.com/workshop/wa-sonnet-1.htmlDante Gabriel Rossetti. Sibylla Palmifera. 1866-1870.www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/walker/exhibitions/rossetti/graphics/large/Sibylla-palmifera.jpgIn 1850, Rossetti met Elizabeth Siddal, who became an important model for the Pre-Raphaelite painters. They were married in 1860. In 1861, Siddal became pregnant. She was overjoyed about this, but the pregnancy ended in a stillborn daughter. Siddal overdosed on laudanum shortly after becoming pregnant for a second time. Although her death was ruled accidental by the coroner, there are suggestions that Rossetti found a suicide note. Overcome with grief, Rossetti enclosed in Elizabeth's coffin a small journal containing the only copies he had of his many poems. He slid the book into Elizabeth's flowing red hair. By 1869, Rossetti was chronically addicted to drugs and alcohol. He became obsessed with retrieving the poems he had slipped into Elizabeth's hair. Rossetti applied to the Home Secretary for an order to have her coffin exhumed to retrieve the manuscript.
Her hair was said to have continued to grow after death so that the coffin was filled with her coppery hair. Rossetti was haunted by the exhumation through the rest of his life.
On Easter Sunday, 1882, he died at the country house of a friend.
Dante Gabriel Rossetti is buried at Birchington-on-Sea, Kent, England. His grave is visited regularly by admirers of his life's work and achievements and this can be seen by fresh flowers placed there regularly.
Birchington-on-Sea is thought to be the village in which the Bush family has long owned seaside property:
Birchington, Jeremy
A semi-imaginary character whose name has made ephemeral appearances in Kate-related spheres over the years. The character is possibly connected to or based on one Jeremy Cartland, a literary friend of Kate's brother John Carder Bush and his partner in the Salatticum Poets group; it should also be noted that Birchington-on-Sea is thought to be the village in which the Bush family has long owned seaside property. Trivia buffs might also note the nearby village of St. Nicholas-on-the-Wade, and the curious disappearance, after several early issues, of the Kate Bush Club Newsletter's first Editor-in-Chief, Nicholas Wade, who was very probably Kate Bush herself. gaffa.org/diction/b.html#birchVictorian artist and associate of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, William Morris built Red House at
Bexleyheath in Kent in 1859. The house was Morris's wedding gift to Jane Burden. Jane Burden became the embodiment of the Pre-Raphaelite ideal of beauty, and served as the model for
Proserpine. Rossetti tried to seduce Jane, and she took part in an affair with him because she was very unhappy with her marriage.
Catherine Bush was born on July 30 1958, in Bexleyheath, Kent.Kate Bush and OpheliaElizabeth Siddal was Dante Gabriel Rossetti's model
par excellence; almost all of his early paintings of women are portraits of her. Siddal was often sick; she was most likely anorexic. Her condition was worsened by depression and an addiction to laudanum, an opiate. In 1852, she posed in a bathtub for Millais' masterpiece,
Ophelia. After visiting Rossetti's studio in 1854, Ford Madox Brown wrote in his diary that Lizzie, as she was known, looked "thinner & more deathlike & more beautiful & more ragged than ever."
"The image of a beautiful young Englishwoman floating on her back in a cold, deathly state, dressed in a white lace nightie and set adrift amid exotic and colourful flowers has, since the seventeenth-century premiere of Hamlet, been inextricably connected with the fate of Ophelia... This image, in fact, was reproduced precisely by Kate herself in what was virtually her debut on video, the so-called Eftelink films, specifically the last of the six, a setting of "The Kick Inside"...
"During that conversation [at East Wickham Farm in 1985] IED and JCB discussed the connection of the "Lakeside" images (photographs taken by Jay of his sister sitting and stretching by the banks of the river or lake which appears in the Eftelink videos) with Pre-Raphaelite imagery...
"IED has been purposelessly musing on all of this, mulling over also Kate's own comments about the influence of Pre-Raphaelitism on her own artistic vocabulary as well as the large painting, called "The Hogsmill Ophelia", which hangs in her studio."
Gaffa, The Ninth Wave, General Thoughts-
gaffa.org/dreaming/tnw_gen.htmlThe Hogsmill Ophelia: a painting which Kate keeps on her wall.gaffa.org/passing/ophelia.gifAt one end of the studio is a huge painting of a drowned, cracked doll floating face up past a sewer. For some reason this painting, which might be described as macabre-kitsch, seems to say a lot about its owner. Kate returns and sees me examining it. "That's called The Hogsmill Ophelia. A lot of people find it disturbing but I don't I've lived with it for ages. Looked at it every day. That picture cost me all the money I had once. Paintings are a great inspiration. One of my favourites is by Millais, The Huguenot. It's of a man going off to the wars being hugged to the breast of his lover. She's holding him to her by a scarf around his arm. It's very beautiful."
"What Kate Did Next"gaffa.org/reaching/i85_what.htmlThe reverse photograph on
The Ninth Wave sleeve shows Kate Bush as
The Ninth Wave Ophelia. In Shakespeare's
Hamlet, Ophelia will sing some "mad" little songs about death and a maiden losing her virginity. She will say "good night", exit and later be found drowned (TNW).
In the 'Kate Bush Efteling Gardens Special' (1978), Kate gives a carefully worked out video treatment to
The Kick Inside: "It features Kate as the doomed heroine of The Kick Inside, dressed in black and veiled. She lip-synchs the vocal while lying in a coffin--more properly, a death-barge--and at the end of the song, she sails slowly down a placid river, evoking images of Elaine and The Lady of Shalott, classic poetical figures of Arthurian legend. Kate is memorably made-up in this video: her hair has been painted white (or perhaps platinum-blond). The result is striking."
gaffa.org/passing/v78_may.htmlThe Efteling Elaine...
Kate Bush - The Kick Insidewww.youtube.com/watch?v=-76x06vfCtksee more:
KATE BUSH and THE LADY OF SHALOTTkatebush.proboards6.com/index.cgi?board=kickinside&action=display&thread=1678&page=2