For example, John Keats opens his "Ode on a Grecian Urn" with these lines: "Thou still
unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster child of silence and slow time." The academics strew some "richness" and "texture" across our path as early as the second word, "still." One meaning comes immediately to mind, "as yet": so the sense runs, Thou as-yet-unravished bride of quietness, Thou foster child of silence and slow time ...
It "is a thought to be going on with," if only because it keeps the
unravished bride and her pursuing bridegroom (i.e., Edenic Adam and Eve, the lightly clad couple in the window, the poet and the poem) one full step ahead of aftermath for good.
The use of the quality to suggest the emotional core of Vermeer images seems to owe more to an English-speaking collective memory of Keats's famous Ode to a Grecian Urn (1819)--'Thou still
unravished bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time'--than to anything tangible in Dutch art.
See Daniel Rancour-Laferriere, "Pugkin's Still
Unravished Bride: A Psychoanalytic Study of Tat'jana's Dream," Russian, Croatian and Serbian, Czech and Slovak, Polish Literature 25:2 (1989): 215-58, esp.
As Miller points out, by 1820 Keats would address that "still
unravished bride of quietness" as the "foster-child of silence and slow time," quite certain that no amount of antiquarian activity would reveal the original subject of his Grecian Urn.
Keynote speakers include Jungian analyst Marion Woodman, author of Addiction to Perfection: The Still
Unravished Bride; psychology professor Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience; and dance critic Deborah Jowitt.
The poem proliferates subjects--I, while not an altar, is a "bride," which grows, and with the seeds of the tree, is the Keatsian "
unravished bride" of pure art, never completed but alive through perpetual remaking of origins.
Childs herself remains timeless, centered, as ever the
unravished bride of quietness.
These are not
unravished brides, and they seem happy with that (one of them is, in fact, Kurland's mother).