The Myth of the Lion and the Unicorn Once upon a glassy moor, the wind stirring the silver sand into a current, the sun was golden and still. A pale hush arose over the vast land, and on into the night, the horse traveled. Weakened from exhaustion, she rode, her red hair streaming like the moon kything through realms of gold. Upon reaching the tower, a wizard at the portal of the sky beheld her, a bond slave to his silent ship. A tapestry inlaid with azure in his upper chamber beckoned her toward the light. Half faint, half dead, she fell upon the bed to sleep, and the doorkeeper wove his tiniest jewels by firelight into the emerald tapestry. “Once I have dwelled, shall I die?” she said, an opal her crown. They waited by the sea as the stars rose and faded. Her song was a primrose at sunrise. The horses, upon the morning, trod over the fields, over the moat, and over the drawbridge into the castle of My Eternal Rose. Passing there, from dawn to dusk, they viewed its ramparts and its stones: one upon another. Under the count, through the countryside, they brought her fruits, flowers, and loaves of barley; enclosed in his chambers, she paced the floor. Alarmed at Opheus’s long absence, fearing foul play, she loathed her twilight chains. Finally, she opened his message: “Though absent, I am with thee, fair Aurias, remain.” The twilight knight, imprisoned in an evil castle, fought with the hag for his release. The doorkeeper finally bore her out from the parapet under the constant galaxy, forming her escape from the count’s evil wrath. She floated down the river to Avalon by night, in a dory under the doorkeeper’s tapestry of The Lion and The Unicorn. A simple cottage, a young garden, and the fruit trees swelled next to winter. The villager Blithe and her husband, fair and golden in hops and birch, kept her in the attic room, their son afar in a neighboring country. Distilling the fragrance of the Bethlehem flower, they anointed the ill with the oils of the noble path. From her early days, when she posed as a muse for the painter Waterhouse, the shadows held her captive, loomed beneath the silent sky. Her mother, Etany, had been murdered at last haste, before her brother Opheus in the market place. “Oh, injury, I shall never outlive thine eyes of gold, my heart now enfolds thee in a secret flower, O sacred Aurias.” And then she died. A masked crusader to avenge, the noble son a steady knight, the half moon o’er the tower held no timing of his motive. A cloak in an old chest held its plume. Upon his return, the young Ethan swung his sword, melting the countryside from the grip of its enchantment, and won the bright-haired Aurias. They married in the garden under the lilac at sunset, and then sweeping onto the jeweled horse, he struck out to build the Golden Castle of Avalon. As the painter stroked his canvas, as the fiddler wove his song, as the young poet strung his verse, The Lion and The Unicorn bowed to each other in six voices, a cantata and fugue guarding their fortress: their children, Winter, Summer, Autumn, Spring. “In each new enchantment there remains a separation.”
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The Lion and the Unicorn Tapestry Series
This website showcases a series of 8 websites designed and owned by The Emily Isaacson Institute.
Feel free to browse these sites on the Tapestry page.
