Bosch’s Hell : Baby faces in the violet light

378. THE LONG-HAIRED WOMAN, fiddling whisper music on her hair, can be compared to the hyacinth girl, found with “arms full, and ...hair wet” (line 38); the woman on talking walls whose “hair / Spread out in fiery points / Glowed into words” (line 108); the woman who walked the street with “hair down” (line 133); and the woman who “smoothes her hair with automatic hand, / And puts a record on the gramophone” (line 255). See also hair’s tie to fertility in both Frazer**, The Golden Bough 3:5.6, and Weston**, From Ritual to Romance  4.

380. THE VIOLET HOUR, previously introduced at lines 215 and 220 as the evening hour at the end of the workday (see note 221), also alludes to the liturgical color of repentance and baptism; see Brooks (note 330).  See also note 68 and Luke* 23:44 for the noon darkness that fell over the earth on Good Friday.  Elsewhere, violet or purple, appearing here as light, describes air (line 373), sails (note 77) and trenches (note 331).  See also Shakespeare*, Hamlet 4.5.177 (Ophelia’s violets withered when her father died) and 5.1.229 (Laertes wishing violets would spring from Ophelia’s grave).  See also the “violet and purple morn” in Whitman†, Memories  12.  Violet also relates to Phoenicia, the “land of purple”; see note 312.

BATS WITH BABY FACES: See Pierre Leyris, Poémes, 1910-1930, 155 (1947), relating this passage to Hieronymus Bosch paintings, perhaps alluding to the baby faced bat in Bosch, Hell (1504).

                                             Hieronymus Bosch, Hell (detail) (1504)


382. CRAWLING DOWN A WALL: See Bram Stoker, Dracula 3 (1897): “I saw the whole man... begin to crawl down the castle wall over the dreadful abyss, face down, with his cloak spreading out around him like great wings.”

384. TOLLING BELLS: See note 291 for the peal of bells in general, and see line 67, “where St. Mary Woolnoth kept the hours.” See also Whitman†, Memories 6:

“With the tolling tolling bells’ perpetual clang.”

385. VOICES OUT OF EMPTY CISTERNS recalls the “children’s voices in the dome” at line 202.  See also Jeremiah* 2:13,14:

“For my people have committed two evils; they have forsaken me the fountain of living waters, and hewed them out cisterns, broken cisterns, that can hold no water. ...The young lions roared upon him, and yelled, and they made his land waste...”

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* see note 0.1 **see note 0.2    †see note 2