30 Paintings in 30 Days: He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead (Day 9)

Despite studying Yeats for several weeks in college, I had never read Yeats' "He Wishes His Beloved Were Dead" until yesterday, when a Facebook friend asked if I had any plans to do a canvas inspired by it.  I fell in love with the poem instantly.  The basic gist if it is this: "I wish you were dead, because then you would forgive me and stay still, never to storm away from me again."  It's awful and wonderful and altogether human.  What I most love is that it indicts that impulse we have (as human beings) to have our way, to get what we want, no matter the cost to someone else, up to and including death.

The actual text is this:

WERE you but lying cold and dead,

And lights were paling out of the West,

You would come hither, and bend your head,

And I would lay my head on your breast;

And you would murmur tender words,

Forgiving me, because you were dead:

Nor would you rise and hasten away,

Though you have the will of wild birds,

But know your hair was bound and wound

About the stars and moon and sun:

O would, beloved, that you lay

Under the dock-leaves in the ground,

While lights were paling one by one. 

 

I particularly loved the image of her hair being "bound and wound / About the stars and moon and sun."  In my depiction, the sun is "off-screen," as it were, its light reflecting in the red glow emanating from the left side of the painting.  I dressed her in a Victorian burial gown, and I swapped out her hands for "dock-leaves," which is an awful notion, by the way.  In the speaker's imagining, he doesn't see her in a tomb, with a headstone; he simply sees her in the ground, covered by "dock-leaves," which suggests to me that he has (mentally, at least) buried her himself.  

 

I also wanted to make her face blushed and filled with blood and life, to emphasize, of course, that she should not be dead - that this impulse is not love.