Juno’s Cream: Aurora Leigh and Victorian Sage Discourse

Abstract

‘A dropped star / Makes bitter waters, says a Book I’ve read’ (5: 917–18), Aurora Leigh comments midway through the text in which she writes her identity as both woman and poet. The ‘Book’ Aurora alludes to in this pivotal passage is Revelation, the Biblical book most frequently invoked in Aurora Leigh as in Emily Dickinson’s poetry and H.D.’s Trilogy. The ‘dropped star’ is the ‘great star from heaven’ called Wormwood that flames down ‘burning as it were a lamp’ to embitter a third part of the earth’s waters in the final Judgment (Revelation 8). In Aurora’s book, however, this ominous star primarily signifies not God’s wrath, but the destructive power of the woman artist who abandons her vocation for the material security of marriage.