Poems
The Bubble
See the pretty planet!
Floating sphere!
Faintest breeze will fan it
Far or near;
World as light as feather;
Moonshine rays,
Rainbow tints together,
As it plays.
Drooping, sinking, failing,
Nigh to earth,
Mounting, whirling, sailing,
Full of mirth;
Life there, welling, flowing,
Waving round;
Pictures coming, going,
Without sound.
Quick now, be this airy
Globe repelled!
Never can the fairy
Star be held.
Touched–it in a twinkle
Disappears!
Leaving but a sprinkle,
As of tears.
Floating sphere!
Faintest breeze will fan it
Far or near;
World as light as feather;
Moonshine rays,
Rainbow tints together,
As it plays.
Drooping, sinking, failing,
Nigh to earth,
Mounting, whirling, sailing,
Full of mirth;
Life there, welling, flowing,
Waving round;
Pictures coming, going,
Without sound.
Quick now, be this airy
Globe repelled!
Never can the fairy
Star be held.
Touched–it in a twinkle
Disappears!
Leaving but a sprinkle,
As of tears.
Analysis (ai): The poem portrays a soap bubble as a metaphor for transient beauty and fleeting existence, contrasting its delicate motion and iridescence with its inevitable dissolution, suggesting impermanence of joy and life.
- Symbolism and Structure: The bubble symbolizes illusion and fragility, with each stanza capturing a phase of its brief lifespan, structured chronologically from ascent to burst, reinforcing the inevitability of decline.
- Tone and Language: The tone shifts from whimsical to melancholic, using simple diction and rhythmic couplets that mimic the bubble’s playful rise and abrupt end, avoiding sentimentality while maintaining light lyricism.
- Place in Author’s Oeuvre: Compared to Allingham’s folk-inspired ballads and narrative works, this poem is more abstract and meditative, standing out for its minimal narrative and emphasis on visual metaphor over story.
- Relation to Victorian Context: While contemporaneous poems often moralized or allegorized nature, this piece resists didacticism, aligning more with aestheticism’s focus on momentary beauty, though without overt philosophical framing.
- Formal Approach: The quatrains with consistent rhyme and meter reflect Victorian conventions, but the compression and focus on sensory detail hint at a move toward later symbolic brevity, albeit without formal disruption.
- Modern Relevance: Though pre-1900, the poem prefigures modern concerns with impermanence and illusion, resonating with later preoccupations in modernist poetry about the unreliability of perception and ephemeral experience.
- Less-Discussed Angle: Rather than merely mourning fragility, the poem quietly critiques the desire to grasp beauty, suggesting that the act of reaching destroys the very thing it seeks, a subtle commentary on human longing.
William Allingham (19 March 1824 – 18 November 1889) was an Irish poet, diarist and editor. He wrote several volumes of lyric verse, and his poem “The Faeries” was much anthologised. But he is better known for his posthumously published Diary, in which he records his lively encounters with Tennyson, Carlyle and other writers and artists. His wife, Helen Allingham, was a well-known artist, watercolourist and illustrator.
