Michael Field Straying From the Path

Michael Field, penname of Katherine Bradley and Edith Cooper, wrote many poems in a romantic style with the cover a heterosexual male writer, but rather it was created by the two lesbian poets. In their poem "My Darling," we see a kind of detailed homophobia message. Primarily in the first stanza, the poem speaks of straying from the "rushy bed," which might indicate the heterosexual bed that many people might have rushed to the conclusion of when the poem was originally written under the penname disguise. This "rushy bed" continues in the stanza indicating that the lover had "great fear and passion shook...as if a soul were drawn away." These lines in conjunction with the first line speaking of the bed, might be an indication of the reaction to the fear of either straying back to the "main path" of heterosexuality or that same path happening to find them. This might be because of the homophobia that many heterosexuals have on the gay community and their many negative, sometimes violent, reactions to it. Therefore, this fear of the "beaten path" intersecting their lives the way it was would be a justifiable reason for fear in the poem and for creating a pseudonym in order to write poetry as such during the time period of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century.