Ophelia's Head is Finished by Olga Dermott-Bond
Ophelia Reclaimed: Olga Dermott-Bond and the Quiet Violence of Art
I am getting on slowly, but I hope surely, Ophelia’s head is finished…
- Millais’ letter to Martha Coombe, March 6th 1852
A body lit by oil lamp cannot last. Another
day of wintery bathwater contracts each breath,
her blood-tide shallower than it should be.
She knows that he drew the riverbank first-
studied dogwood, willow root, grass-tilt;
knows she’s unready to be arranged in the lake.
He has learnt the lines of her neck like prayer.
Slack-jawed, on her back, she studies distant
stars on the ceiling, feels the clasp of her dress
turning to rust on her spine, each seam nettling
her skin. Her body is a book, stained satin folding
and fretting chapters between her thighs.
An agony of stillness. Her wrists are mottled stiff
holding her palms upwards; she can't imagine
these half-wilted peonies once belonged to her.
She longs to be resurrected, wants to fill an empty
space with her own flowers, tries to stop shaking,
her hands holding nothing but creaking, cutting air.
Hello and welcome to Words That Burn, the podcast taking a closer look at poetry. This episode’s poem is Ophelia’s Head is Finished by Olga Dermott-Bond.
Before we take a look at this and the poem itself it’s important to note that there is an epigraph at the very beginning of the poem and that it’s key in unlocking some of the poem's meaning. The epigraph reads:
I am getting on slowly, but I hope surely, Ophelia’s head is finished…
It’s an excerpt from a letter by Pre-Raphaelite painter John Everett Millais to Martha Coombe in 1852(Victorian Artists At Home). Without context, it seems a macabre statement: Ophelia's head is finished , something not out of place in the gothic obsessed Victorian era that Millais rose to prominence in. Whilst he is only describing the process of completing a painting, I’d imagine that unintended macabreness helped to fuel this poem’s tone.
Indeed, there is a creeping discomfort that permeates the poem, a discomfort that is sure to mimic that which is felt by a woman put in this actual position.
But what position is that? I’ve mentioned already that Millais was a painter. I’ve also stated the strange circumstances of the woman being described in the poem. Orla Dermott-Bond has created a strange to Millais’ Ophelia; a depiction of the death by drowning of the character in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. It is also considered to be one of the finest examples of the Pre-Raphaelite movement in existence, at least with time (Richman 2020).
For your convenience, dear listener, I’ve included a link to that painting below in the description.
Dermott-Bond’s dark tone is in good company as the way in which the character originally dies all the way back in the original Hamlet is also a grim affair. Never actually seen on, the account, delivered by Hamlet’s mother, is nonetheless disquieting:
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull’d the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death. (Shakespeare 2015)Looking at this description the clothes spread wide we can see that haunting quality carried from the stage to Millais’s work and in turn , to Dermott- Bond’s poem too.
Those echoes of influence make up this poem and place it firmly in the genre of ekphrasis. Ekphrasis, which I’ve spoken about a few times on the podcast, is a sort of poetic love letter written to a work of art, cinema or music. It is most commonly found to be an expression of admiration for the visual arts. Ekphrasis can take a variety of forms, focusing on a single aspect of a work of art to interpreting the tale played out in said work of art. Olga Dermott- Bond creates a work of ekphrasis that is quite unique imagining the awful conditions of the paintings as though she were watching a real life scene unfold rather than a still painting. She depicts a scene which, at first, I took to be a look at the suffering of the model as Everett Millais formed his painting. The painstaking hours of holding a single position, not daring to move lest the artist lose his moment. In Dermott Bond’s words; an agony of stillness,
That reading is in itself interesting but does a disservice to the poem. As it moves from tercet to tercet ( a stanza made up of 3 lines of poetry, the poem is entirely composed of them), the scene slips suddenly from the world of the studio to the scene of literary imagination and our model takes on the actual mantle of Ophelia.
This subtle bleeding from reality to imagination is a testament to Olga Dermott- Bond’s skill as poet. This poem is taken from her 2023 collection Frieze. In her own words Dermott- Bond states; Women without haloes are the heroes in my new collection Frieze (Dermott-Bond 2023). This is true, the entrie collections is a kind of altar to the overlooked wormen of fiction, folklore, art and beyond although I think the blurb of the collection does it more justice than I do:
Goddesses, saints, dead girls, creatures, mothers, and muses all gather in this collection to confide their secret histories and desires. Voices are recovered from canvas, from behind museum glass, from the pages of literature and the tales of Irish folklore, to explore what can be recaptured and what remains still out of reach. (Nine Arches Press 2023)
This collection is a labyrinth of Ekphrasis, one not written through some fawning admiration but rather a need to understand the story of so many women found to be the subject of masterpieces and never forgotten stories, whose real names and stories have been lost to time.
This poem I think does a wonderful job of exploring all the implications of ekphrasis both the story behind a work of art and an appreciation for the technique that goes into them. Again using Olga Dermott Bond’s own words:
When I write an ekphrastic poem I really enjoy looking closely at the painting, spending time with it and ‘studying’ it (Dermott-Bond 2023)
That love of looking closely and studying is reinforced by the epigraph heading the poem, unearthed I’m sure with painstaking research. The epigraph which, with this new understanding in mind, the epigraph with Everett Millais words takes on an almost dismissive air towards the tragic figure of Ophelia, his complaints of I’m getting there slowly seem to pale in comparison to what the woman herself has been forced to endure
The need for endurance is made very clear from the very first lines in stanza one:
A body lit by oil lamp cannot last. Another
day of wintery bathwater contracts each breath,
her blood-tide shallower than it should be.
This is a portrait of pain and the awful conditions that some models were forced to endure. The oil lamp, which Evertt Millais is using to capture a very particular kind of light, would be a poor substitute and the body failing to last as it were would be the model themselves.
We feel the chill as Dermott-Bond evokes the constricting cold of the bathwater Everett Millais has placed his model in. The mention of the blood tide has stumped me a touch, but I've taken it to mean that the water level of the bath is shallower than that of the lake water that took Ophelia's life. On another level, it means that her own blood pressure, her blood tide is low due to the chill of the bath water.
In short, the first stanza is a brief glimpse into what some models or muses had to put up with for the sake of an artists ‘art’. This glimpse is given a little more edge when you learn the real story behind the painting.
The woman in Everett-Millais’s Ophelia is Elizabeth Siddal, who was 19 at the time (Richman 2020). Elizabeth Siddal was a Pre-Raphaelite painting movement. That might sound like hyperbole, but it simply isn’t (Hawksley 2008).
You’ve heard me mention the Pre-Raphaelites a few times now. Technically, it was a brotherhood and like many artistic movements, it was multidisciplinary. Painters poets and academics came together and in an attempt at rebellion began to seek ways to challenge the academic and aesthetic conventions of their time. The Brotherhood itself was founded in 1848 and its key tenet was truth through observation. (Barringer et al. 2012)
Romantic scenes with tragic figures gilded by meticulous detail, particularly of nature and science are how you know you’re looking at a Pre-Raphaelite work. As author Robert de la Sizeranne put it:
no imitation of the masters, no generalisation, each figure reproduced from a model and from one single model, outlines as original and individual
as possible, painting on an unprepared white canvas, and fastidious attention to detail. In a word, earnestness. (Sizeranne 2014)
The other thing that marks out a Pre-Raphaelite painting is Elizabeth Siddal’s face. She was the muse of that movement. She would pose for many of the key painters and the time and eventually marry one of them (Hawksley 2008).
That does not mean she was afforded enough care as a model for Everett Millais. In fact the opening stanza of this poem may as well be a first hand account of the evening. As journalist Kelly Richman recounts:
Siddal posed in a bath full of water. During one sitting, the oil lamps responsible for keeping the water warm went out, and Siddal grew severely ill as a result. (Millais famously paid her medical bills at her father's demand.) (Richman 2020)
Richmnan’s article on the story behind the famous painting is wonderfully written and I’ve linked it below in the description, in case you’d like to read it yourself.
As the illness takes hold, Dermott-Bond’s version of events has the Siddall pondering how long her torture will continue in stanza 2:
She knows that he drew the riverbank first-
studied dogwood, willow root, grass-tilt;
knows she’s unready to be arranged in the lake.
In this stanza it feels as though the worn out Siddal feels a sort of contempt for the care Everett Millais has shown to the natural and botanical aspects of his work. His study seemingly done with care, the kind that is nowhere to be found in the cold, lamp lit room.
It’s also a gorgeous nod to the actual process of the painting by Dermott-Bond. Everett Millais and his contemporaries would often paint plein air for the backgrounds and environments of their artworks, turning only to live models when the setting was done. As the quote earlier in the episode stated, the level of detail for those objects and surroundings was meticulous in the extreme. Siddal is certain of this and is certain of something else- she knows she’s unready to be arranged in the lake. It is here that a beautiful blurring of the lines between historical fiction and actual near myth takes place. In one sense, Siddal is sure that this damp soaked room is a preferable option to an actual lake. With this in mind she opts not to complain. In another sense though, Shakespeare's Ophelia is manifesting, she is also not ready for the lake and the death it represents for her.
It’s a subtle but clear examination by Dermott-Bond of the way in which women in fiction and the pursuit of art are too often deemed collateral, suffering actual illness or becoming tragic plot points being a far too common occurrence.
This subtle examination goes deeper in the third stanza:
He has learnt the lines of her neck like prayer.
Slack-jawed, on her back, she studies distant
stars on the ceiling, feels the clasp of her dress
Siddal is more object than woman in the first line of this stanza. She has been reduced to a series of angles and points. The fervour and passion Everett Millais feels for his craft as his devotion is compared to prayer.
More life is drained from Siddal, as she is described as slack-jawed, a mimicry of death itself. Her dehumanisation continues.
As the process drags on, she dissociates in a sense. More of Ophelia’s natural world bleeds in as she studies distant stars on the ceiling of the studio; a pure impossibility.
The final section of the third line and is feels the clasp of her dress.
It moves us fluidly into the fourth stanza using enjambment the intentional poetic technique of sliding one line into another, abandoning grammar or punctuation in favour of a more mercurial rhythm. It’s often done to increase the pace of the poem and it’s not different in this poem. As Ophelia’s almost folkloric fate continues to influence the poem, the pace of the poem increases to signify that shift.
Stanza 4 continues smoothly:
turning to rust on her spine, each seam nettling
her skin. Her body is a book, stained satin folding
and fretting chapters between her thighs.
The tone has shifted to something almost morbid. The actual effects of nature on man-made structures, like the clasp, are laid. The dress, as Ophelia dies in the water, is rusting, decaying like the rest of her. She is fusing with it in a sense, mirroring the blending of Everett Millais and Shakespeare’s Ophelia but with Siddal as a casualty in it all. The gothic turn of the poem is something I really appreciate. It feels almost like a stand against the over romanticisation of a violent moment for this woman. There is the rebelling against the romantic tragedy of Shakespeare. The one in which Ophelia’s death takes place off stage, relayed only in the laced Iambic Pentameter of the time. Phrasing that is almost too poetic for a moment that would, in reality, be filled with horror. This is not to say that horror and discomfort were beyond Shakespeare, but rather that the beauty of his words often overshadowed the reality of what was being described.
The Pre-Raphaelite movement was obsessed with the romantic, despite not every having experienced the movement first hand. As journalist Germaine Greer put it succinctly:
All the genuine Romantics, except Wordsworth, were dead before any of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood was born. (Greer 2009)
This did not hamper their obsession with the perceived nobility and purity of Medieval aesthetics. This focus on the aesthetic much like Shakespeare’s prose, detracts from the reality of what is being depicted in Everett- Millais’s painting; A woman is drowning.
The true unnerving quality of that depiction was given a brand new look when a sculpture in the river Stour was unveiled in 2024 (Addley and Taylor 2024). Named Alluvia It depicts Ophelia who can be glimpsed below the surface of the river in Canterbury in England. It is all at once ethereal and unsettling (I’ve once again included a link below).
It draws inspiration directly from Everett Millais’ interpretation (Sienra 2024), and has divided public opinion right down the middle. Some admire it’s beauty, while others condemn it as grotesque and macabre.
Olga-Dermott bond never flinches in depicting the grim reality of what that death scene must have felt like, with each scene nettling her skin. The somewhat distasteful literary depiction is skewered again in the final part of the stanza:
Her body is a book, stained satin folding
and fretting chapters between her thighs.
This is Dermott-Bond’s close study of the painting brought to the fore with her use of language deftly conveying the intricate and muted stylings of the dress in Everett Millais depiction. We imagine the stained old, damp pages of a book, mottled and moulding, seeming to evoke Shakespeare’s description of a muddy death near perfectly. Gorgeous, layered and metatextual poetry from Dermott-Bond.
The true pain of this moment for Ophelia is frozen in time, and the indignity of this is captured perfectly in the fifth stanza:
An agony of stillness. Her wrists are mottled stiff
holding her palms upwards; she can't imagine
These half-wilted peonies once belonged to her.
An agony of stillness might be one of the most perfect ways to describe Everett-Millais painting. There is a strange stiffness to his work. A real sense of being held in place, perpetually in discomfort. Olga Dermott-Bond spends much of her poem crystalising this notion, very successfully.
We as an audience, can almost feel a cold spreading through ourselves. Our own wrists become oddly rigid. She is describing the painting exactly but revealing the reality that would replace its romanticism if given the chance.
This feels like a winter, there is not much romanticism or hope left in the scene. Ophelia certainly can’t recognise it. The abundance of carefully studied flowers that surround her, feel false and empty. She can hardly imagine she ever placed faith in them. That they ever belonged to her.
The description of them as half-wilted peonies is important. It pulls back the curtain on the so-called realism of the Pre-Raphaelites relentless study. In the end they are not living but instead an image of half life, once again an agony of stillness.
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As we move into the sixth and final stanza, Ophelia seems to embody the verse fully:
She longs to be resurrected, wants to fill an empty
space with her own flowers, tries to stop shaking,
her hands holding nothing but creaking, cutting air.
The fusion is complete, and like a pendulum we have swung from Elizabeth Siddal to Ophelia and back again. Ophelia wants to come back to escape the tragedy that has so come to define who she was and what is thought of her. She wants to stand for something more than just senseless death. She would step away from the half wilted peonies, another man’s symbol for her. She would fill her own space with flowers she chose. In a sense she would wrestle her agency back from time.
In that same stanza, we hear the echoes of Elizabeth Siddal’s desire as well. She wants to stop shaking, she wishes to drop the pretence of her long held, artificial pose, she is holding nothing in the bathtub as she slips into illness. Everett Millais will paint something in her frigid grasp later. It is a hollow moment, she is left hold the creaking, bitterly cold cutting air. It is impossible to tell where Ophelia begins and Siddal ends because both women share the same story. They are forced to hold up an uncaring man's art. It is a cruel and an unusual legacy to hold but Olga Dermott-Bond will not let it be forgotten.
If you can’t tell I’m a little bit obsessed with Ophelia’s Head is Finished. Olga -Dermott has a gift for descriptive language and scene setting. It is one that is perfectly suited to ekphrasis. I cannot get over the level of nuanced symbolism and layering at work here. Ekphrasis is one of my favourite ways to explore art. I think it is quite something to see a poet’s take on a work of art. Olga Dermott- Bond takes this even further though and creates a story that is hidden from Art History. She takes an idyllic scene and exposes the blood, sweat and effort that went into it, not much of it shed by the artist.
There are so many layers operating within the poem, each one blended together seamlessly by Olga Dermott-Bond like brushstrokes on a canvas. It is a poem dedicated to women who have been overlooked or condemned to be viewed in singular light by history. It never directly bashed it’s audience over the head, letting the interpretation of the painting deliver that with ease. The epigraph chosen by Olga Dermott-Bond is the perfect frame, it embodies the calculating, bordering on dismissive, nature sometimes adopted by great artists. It informs the reading of the poem easily.
Olga Dermott-Bond breathes into the static image a living want, one that aches and trembles and protests. In doing so, she resists the quiet romanticism that has varnished this figure over time, stripping back layers of oil paint, verse, and myth to uncover the flesh-and-blood woman beneath.
In the stillness of the painting, we hear the quiet violence of expectation, the cost of beauty, and the ghostly whisper of a woman who was expected to endure. Through Dermott-Bond’s lens, Ophelia—and Elizabeth Siddal—are no longer passive muses but powerful, if spectral, presences. They do not rest peacefully, nor should they.
What did you think of the poem? As always this is my interpretation and I’d love to hear yours. If you’d like to get in touch with me there are a few ways to do so.
Citations
Addley, Esther, and Jason D. Taylor. 2024. “River Stour sculpture commemorates 16th century drowning that inspired Shakespeare.” The Guardian, September 16, 2024. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2024/sep/15/river-stour-sculpture-commemorates-16th-century-drowning-that-inspired-shakespeare.
Barringer, T. J., Jason Rosenfeld, Alison Smith, Tate Britain (Gallery), and National Gallery of Art (U.S.). 2012. Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Avant Garde. Edited by Tim Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld and Alison Smith. Edited by T. J. Barringer, Jason Rosenfeld, and Alison Smith. N.p.: Tate.
Dermott-Bond, Olga. 2023. “In Conversation - Olga Dermott-Bond.” Nine Arches Press. https://ninearchespress.blogspot.com/2023/09/in-conversation-olga-dermott-bond.html.
Greer, Germaine. 2009. “Desperate Romantics? The only desperate thing about the pre-Raphaelites was their truly bad art | Art.” The Guardian, August 16, 2009. https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2009/aug/16/pre-raphaelite-brotherhood-germaine-greer.
Hawksley, Lucinda. 2008. Lizzie Siddal: The Tragedy of a Pre-Raphaelite Supermodel. N.p.: Andre Deutsch.
Nine Arches Press. 2023. “Frieze.” Nine Arches Press. https://ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/frieze.
Richman, Kelly. 2020. “The Story Behind 'Ophelia,' a Treasured Pre-Raphaelite Painting.” My Modern Met. https://mymodernmet.com/john-everett-millais-ophelia/.
Shakespeare, William. 2015. Hamlet. Edited by Terence John B. Spencer and Alan Sinfield. N.p.: Penguin UK.
Sienra, Regina. 2024. “Submerged Sculpture of a Slumbering Woman Lights Up From Within in an English River.” My Modern Met. https://mymodernmet.com/alluvia-jason-decaires-taylor/.
Sizeranne, Robert de l. 2014. Pre-Raphaelites. N.p.: Parkstone International.
Victorian Artists At Home. n.d. “Millais's Letters 1850-1859.” Victorian Artists At Home. https://artistsathome.emorydomains.org/exhibits/show/victorian-correspondence/millais-s-letters.