ABSTRACT
In the years 1856 and 1857, following the publication of ‘A Tomb in Ghent’ at the end of 1855, Procter’s poetic output decreased. Ten poems were published in Household Words in 1856 but only one in 1857. An increased sense of the power of women’s voices and the changes women might effect existed simultaneously with an awareness of continuing inequalities under the law. It was in this climate that Procter’s poems became increasingly concerned with love and relationships, and with the risks women faced on entering into marriage. The life which is trodden on in the form of the resilient rose-leaf finds an echo in the speaking silence of the White Maiden’s Tomb which suggests both a deathliness and a potentially powerful expressiveness. The choice of death is unconscious, he states, and reflects an ‘ancient ambivalence’ which is associated with a primeval identity whereby Mother goddesses, ‘The great Mother-goddesses of the oriental peoples’, were both creators and destroyers.
