My bedraggled heronie! – a poem and artwork by Rose Chaplin

A single falling drop 

Silken through air and chrome 

You sever the locks world ravished 

There is nothing left now

Not a lot to grasp on to

Scraps of stunted girlhood fall into shrub 

You must find new forms of enchantment 

There is shelter in that patch of green 

The merciless landscape 

Eavesdropping branches 

Grub encrusted girl crouches beneath 

No condition is permanent – she too will be taken over seasonally 

A tribute to her being 

The sea foam she remembers, the end and beginning

The solitary predator above her humble home, a companion

A witch who reduced her love to bone 

Whose remains laid tender on a mossy plain

Spindly hedgerow caresses 

She: castleless, steedless 

Has revoked her beautiful fate 

And the kingdom floated into the forest 

Adorned in a bloodcape 

The land has warmed to her ways – 

Grasses dance about her fingertips, bug nurse, forager of love

The pesky goblins tremble with fear 

As her silver blade glints.

‘My Bedraggled Heroine!’ is influenced by my fascination with female identity in folk and fairy tales, especially ideas around selfhood in nature. In these classic tales the protagonist often has to compromise herself and there is a great sense of loss, for example when the sea witch takes the little mermaid’s voice and the symbolic severing of Rapunzel’s hair – the snatching of a piece of her soul. It is interesting to consider how the heroine in isolation is able to craft a sense of individual womanhood outside of her kingdom without the pressures of the conventional fairytale, whose protagonists strive for beauty and true love. Wordsworth’s ‘The Female Vagrant’ also investigates the mind of the ostracised woman wanderer and the ‘inner spirit’ that arises through vulnerability. I will similarly always be in awe of this sense of returning to oneself that the resilient female protagonists of Angela Carter display.