Snakeshead & Honeysuckle

Published in Issue 62.4: Fall 2023

Fall 2023 | Amy Sailer Reads “Snakeshead & Honeysuckle” – MQR Sound

A note from Amy Sailer for MQR's Fall 2023 issue "Transversions": I started writing about William and Jane Morris just before getting engaged. Their marriage has given me a rich vocabulary to imagine my own. They built a beautiful home together, Red House, which they intended as an artist’s utopia, where they, their family, and their community of friends could create the home’s medieval-inspired interior decoration, but the experiment fell apart within a few years, in part because Jane fell in love with their friend and fellow Pre-Raphaelite, Dante Gabriel Rossetti. When I visited Red House, the tour guide called it “a house of indecision.” They had so many unfulfilled projects—I could feel their high expectations and the stress it must have caused them. I had the opportunity to work on the project at Winterthur Museum, Garden & Library, where I learned that Morris & Company revolutionized nineteenth-century embroidery. The first half of the century was dominated by Berlin crewel work, a style that employs cross-stitch to fill out predetermined grid patterns. Morris & Company popularized “art embroidery,” a more creative technique, using a variety of stitches to create more organic designs. Both styles of embroidery lead to repetition and redundancy, but to my eyes, repetitive cross-stitches look monotonous and mechanical, while the repetitive patterns in a piece of art embroidery like Jane and Jenny Morris’s “Honeysuckle” look joyful. John Ruskin argues in his essay “The Nature of the Gothic” that redundancy is a sign of pleasure—when we enjoy our work, we keep making more of it. Although we don’t know the names of the women who created so much embroidery, I like to think that redundancy serves as a kind of signature.

Why We Chose It: Michigan Quarterly Review reader Diepreye Amanah on why she recommended “Snakeshead & Honeysuckle” by Amy Sailer for the Fall 2023 issue. You can purchase the issue here.

With “Snakeshead & Honeysuckle”, Sailer weaves a tapestry of wonder. Fluent with her threads of music, and with distinct voices for needles, she bridges times and people as she laces together legacy, dedication, marriage, danger, joy, infirmity, erotism, and the art of embroidery. The worlds of the speaker and the subject, two women from different eras, intertwine undeniably when they experience similar pleasures in different forms from embroidery. Jane speciates “under her hands” a world she may call her own. More than a century later, the speaker spreads Jane’s pattern across her marital bed and both bodies “teach each other to want it again” as they sew an “invisible garden” to “enjoy & to forget.” To forget, just as history forgets to credit Jane for her own creative work, her legacy. By the close of the poem, Sailer spotlights the precarity that marriage can subject a woman’s identity to—even in modern times. Like the speaker defiantly admits, “I tend / to bristle when I go unsung,” we see Jane bristle (however quietly) when she speaks her last words in the poem, “I am still alive and uncanonised.” Once more, both women hold hands across the page, and this time, in resistance. 

Amy Sailer finishes her own intricate piece of embroidery with this poem, inviting readers to her “dance floor.” Now, who wouldn’t want to dance on a “chequered flower, a Lazarus bell, a leper lily?”

Jane & Jenny Morris, Honeysuckle, William Morris Gallery

Author’s Note

In “Snakeshead & Honeysuckle,” I try to recover and acknowledge Jane Morris’s creative work, which has been subsumed into her husband’s legacy. Many thanks to the William Morris Gallery in Walthamstow, which houses Jane and Jenny’s embroidery “Honeysuckle”; John Ruskin’s essay “The Nature of the Gothic,” for the notion that redundancy can be a visible trace of pleasure; and The Collected Letters of Jane Morris, edited by Frank C. Sharp and Jan Marsh, for the italicized lines in Jane’s voice. This poem is part of a larger sequence on William and Jane Morris and their utopian aspirations for marriage.

Amy Sailer’s poetry can be found in The Cincinnati Review, Hotel Amerika, Quarterly West, Meridian, and Sycamore Review, where it won the 2020 Wabash Poetry Prize. Her work has received support from Willapa Bay Artist-in-Residence program, Kimmel Harding Nelson Center for the Arts, and Winterthur Museum, Garden, and Library. She is a Ph.D. candidate in Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Utah.