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In one of Dorothy Hewett's later poems, 'Lines to the Dark Tower', a girl moves into an empty wheat silo.' There she lives alone, entranced by the view of blowing grass and flowing river and spinning windmills, and weaving what she sees into a magical web, like a twentieth-century West Australian Lady of Shalott. But unlike Tennyson's Lady, she does not pretend to be indifferent to the passing parade. The moment a knight rides by — or, rather, 'some talker / ...his helmet / hanging on the back of his head', or 'one of the silent watchers / ill met by moonlight / his eyes flaming underneath his visor' — she runs from her sanctuary, irresistibly drawn by the promise and the possibility, the drama and the pleasure, of love. was always ready to be inveigled / out of the tower', she confesses. She is a figure for Hewett herself, who at 16 was as excited by the possibilities of her future as a lover as she was by those of her future as an artist. At that age, indeed, she saw no distinction between them.' (Introduction)
