Dame Edith Sitwell

 

 

 

Aubade

JANE, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again;

Comb your cockscomb-ragged hair,
Jane, Jane, come down the stair.

Each dull blunt wooden stalactite
Of rain creaks, hardened by the light,

Sounding like an overtone
From some lonely world unknown.

But the creaking empty light
Will never harden into sight,

Will never penetrate your brain
With overtones like the blunt rain.

The light would show (if it could harden)
Eternities of kitchen garden,

Cockscomb flowers that none will pluck,
And wooden flowers that 'gin to cluck.

In the kitchen you must light
Flames as staring, red and white,

As carrots or as turnips shining
Where the cold dawn light lies whining.

Cockscomb hair on the cold wind
Hangs limp, turns the milk's weak mind...

Jane, Jane,
Tall as a crane,
The morning light creaks down again!


                                              Edith Sitwell

 

Disillusionment and loss of faith

In her poem Aubade, which originally was published in October 1920, Edith Sitwell presents a somber and haunting vision of dawn as experienced by a young woman named Jane, whose awakening reflects the emptiness and monotony of modern existence. The morning light, described through striking imagery such as "overtones" from an unknown world and lifeless "wooden flowers" in a "kitchen garden" evokes a sense of disconnection between the inner self and the external environment. She transforms the traditional morning love song into a bleak meditation on isolation, time, and the search for meaning in a desolate, postwar world. The cold, mechanical dawn replaces natural renewal with artificial sounds and spiritual emptiness, while Jane — a fragile, weeping figure — symbolizes innocence and humanity trapped in a dehumanized, fragmented society. Through her vivid imagery, musical rhythm, and modernist experimentation, Sitwell captures the disillusionment and loss of faith that followed World War I, revealing the struggle to find beauty and significance in a world that has forgotten both.


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Edith Sitwell, painted by Roger Fry in 1915.

 

Dame Edith Louisa Sitwell (1887-1964) was a British author, poet, biographer and literary critic, who began her writing career with a poem published in the Daily Mirror in 1913. An innovator in poetry at the beginning of the 20th century, she both gave and received harsh criticism of other contemporary poets. Eclectic, even odd, in her life style and dress perhaps as complaint against her aristocratic lineage, she gave many public readings of her poetry, including those with music by her colleague of that time, William Walton. She did not marry, though she made poet Dylan Thomas her protégé. She received a Royal Society of Literature medal in 1933 and DBE in 1954. In 1955 she converted to Roman Catholicism.