The Pre-Raphaelites: On Abc1tv In June 2011 Poem by Ron Price

It was a wet and cold Sunday afternoon as Tasmania and Australia moved closer this weekend to the winter solstice just two days away. My wife usually watches Aussie rules and I write in my study. I often go downstairs to make a cup-of-coffee, have a snack, see how she is doing, wash a few dishes and have a break from my writing and reading. As I walked across the lounge-room I chanced upon the ABC1’s half hour program entitled: The Pre-Raphaelites: Victorian Revolutionaries.1 I did not get to see all of it, but my whistle was whetted and the result is this prose-poem.-Ron Price with thanks to (1) ABC1,4: 30 to 5: 00 p.m.19 June 2011.

The name John Ruskin caught my ear
as this focus on the individual artist
determining his own ideas & methods
of depiction with freedom-responsibility
being inseparable and the essentially
spiritual character of art, and all this
happening in those transforming 1840s.
That was a decade, mirabile dictu.(1)

I will not list all the events of that incredible
decade....but it is not surprising that this art
movement began, especially in 1848, the year
of the revolutions throughout Europe and that
main event, hardly known, in Tabarsi when 313
men withstood the forces of 1000s of the Shah’s
men under the black standard unbeknownst to the
wider-western-world2 and as it still is mostly, mostly;
as is the pre-Raphaelite movement: such is life.

1 A Latin expression I first came across while studying Latin in high school: 1958 to 1963, and meaning ‘marvellous to relate.’
2 Nabil, The Dawn-Breakers, Wilmette, Illinois, Baha’i Publishing Trust,1974(1932) .

Ron Price
19 June 2011