The Fairy Melusine

Most imagined poems in novels are a stanza and a wink. Byatt sat down and wrote the thing.

The Fairy Melusine is the work Christabel LaMotte was for, the way Shade’s Pale Fire is the work Kinbote is not for. A knight marries a fairy on the usual terms — do not look on Saturdays — and looks. From the waist down she is a serpent, or a fish, or something the commentators cannot agree on. She leaves. She haunts. The castle keeps her cry. The Victorian public received a Breton legend in Pre-Raphaelite English. The woman who wrote it had already made the bargain and already paid.

That is why the poem has to be present in Possession, not reported. Roland and Maud are scholars of documents; the novel is a pile of documents; the epic has to be one of them, or the whole romance is a bluff. Byatt’s ventriloquism is the catalogue’s kind of honesty. She could have told you LaMotte wrote a great poem about a monster-wife. Instead she put the monster on the page and let you decide whether the author was writing about a fairy, or about the price of being seen.

Ash has his Ragnarök. LaMotte has this. The letters between them are the plot. The poems are the evidence that the letters were written by people who made things, not by a novelist arranging a coincidence.

On the readability rating. Long passages of the poem appear in the novel. Enough to know the voice. Not the epic as a bound Victorian volume — there is no such object, only Byatt’s.