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    The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx
    The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx
    The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx
    Ebook92 pages30 minutes

    The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

    By Tara Bergin

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    About this ebook

    Following her 2013 debut This is Yarrow (winner of the Seamus Heaney Prize and the Shine / Strong Award), Tara Bergin returns with her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx. The poems draw on folksong, fairytale and theatrical monologue as Bergin explores the alluring and sometimes tragic consequences of translation. When she committed suicide in 1898, Eleanor Marx (daughter of Karl Marx, pioneering sociologist, and translator of Flaubert's Madame Bovary) imitated Flaubert's heroine, Emma. Both women, in their own ways, died passionate deaths, and Bergin's poems are concerned with intense love, intense grief. With a sing-song rhythm and dark humor, they play off the natural theatricality of great lovers, great writers and great readers who, like the fancy-dressed children in Mask', are both themselves and strangers'. That's all they wanted.'
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCarcanet Press Ltd.
    Release dateDec 19, 2017
    ISBN9781784103811
    The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx
    Author

    Tara Bergin

    Tara Bergin is an Irish poet. Her first collection, This is Yarrow (2013), won the Seamus Heaney Prize for Poetry, and the Shine/Strong Award for best first collection by an Irish author. She received an Arts Council Ireland Literature Bursary to write her second collection, The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx (2017), which was shortlisted for the T.S. Eliot and Forward Prizes, and chosen as Best Poetry Book of the year by The Times and The Irish Times. She now lives in the North of England.

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      Book preview

      The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx - Tara Bergin

      The

      Tragic Death

      of Eleanor Marx

      TARA BERGIN

      for my parents and my brother

      What is more precise than precision? Illusion.

      Marianne Moore

      Contents

      Title Page

      Dedication

      Epigraph

      The True Story of Eleanor Marx

      The True Story of Eleanor Marx in Ten Parts

      The Giving Away of Emma Bovary by Several Hands

      Who is He?

      Are You Looking?

      In Memory of My Lack of Feelings

      Answer to a Questionnaire

      To Dream of Horses

      The Hairdresser

      Expensive Sweetheart

      The Workmen

      Ode to the Microphone

      Strange Courtship

      Strange Commute

      The Hospital Porter

      A Rented Room above the Registry Office

      Joseph’s Palms

      Notes from the Arboretum

      The Stenographer

      Faithful Henry

      Susie’s Secret

      Tamer and Lion

      Renting Emily Dickinson’s Bedroom by the Hour

      Lorraine

      Dying

      ‘If I Love One I Can’t Love Two’

      Painter My Valentine

      Bachmann’s Warbler

      Sweet Isis

      Making Robert Learn Like Susan

      Portrait of a Writer

      Drama Lessons for Young Girls

      Tamer and Hawk

      Talking to Anne-Marie after the American Election

      Diary Entry, Easter Monday, Suicide Day

      Appointment with Jane Austen

      The Hunchback in Golden Swan Park

      Mask

      Poem in Which I Am Samson and Also Delilah

      Nine Footnotes

      On Not Picking Mushrooms with a Famous Writer

      Insomnia

      The Method

      Rehearsing Strindberg

      The Sad Tale of Hansel and Gretel

      Wedding Cake Decorations

      Secret Resignation

      If / Then

      Notes from the Sanatorium

      ‘Oh my little Eleanor…’

      Karl Marx’s Daughters Play on the Ouija Board

      The Tragic Death of Eleanor Marx

      Bride and Moth

      Notes

      Acknowledgements

      Also by Tara Bergin from Carcanet Press

      Copyright

      The True Story of Eleanor Marx

      I’m not going to tell you anything

      That my psychoanalyst wouldn’t tell you.

      He too speaks in riddles.

      He too proclaims we are all victims

      Of our insurrections.

      I will not stand up to him.

      There are ten parts to the story…

      The True Story of Eleanor Marx in Ten Parts

      1.

      Eleanor of the eight-hour day

      Gets betrayed by Edward of the two faces.

      She orders: chloroform, with just some traces

      Of prussic acid – blue – a beautiful imitation.

      2.

      She says it’s for the dog but she is the dog.

      3.

      The Housekeeper finds her dressed in white.

      It’s not her bridal dress, she’s not a bride.

      It’s from her childhood. She lies as if asleep.

      She has strangely purple cheeks.

      4.

      In her ‘white muslin dress’ she is laid out.

      5.

      The Coroner is exasperated with feeble Edward.

      CORONER

      Was the deceased your wife?

      EDWARD

      Legally?

      CORONER

      Were you married to the deceased?

      EDWARD

      Not legally.

      CORONER

      What was her age?

      EDWARD

      Forty.

      (She was forty-three.)

      6.

      On Tuesday:

      Fire –

      But the Phoenix,

      God of Suicide,

      Doesn’t rise.

      And Edward doesn’t claim her

      Because now he has a real wife.

      7.

      So

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