SOURCE: Ower, John. “Isabella Valancy Crawford and ‘The Fleshly School of Poetry’.” Studies in Scottish Literature 13, (1978): 275-81.

In the following essay, Ower argues that “The Lily Bed” is an ironic reaction to the essay “The Fleshly School of Poetry: Mr. D. G. Rossetti” by Robert Buchanan.

The sexual symbolism in “The Lily Bed,” one of the best-known poems by the Canadian writer Isabella Valancy Crawford (1850-1887), has been noted by several of the writer's more recent critics. Thus, James Reaney suggests that the thrusting of a “cedar paddle, scented, red” into a bed of water lilies is a figure that “Solomon might have borrowed for his canticles.”¹ Reaney also comments upon the fusion of “eros and cosmos”² in the piece, indicating the mythological and metaphysical significance of Crawford's erotic imagery:

… at the age of twenty I pencilled m and f [by] … [two lines of “The Lily Bed”]: by...