Chapter 6 begins with ballad talk (the ballad convention of narration through conversation) as it was adopted by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English poets in verses both popular and literary in response to revived interest in the print mediation of traditional Anglo-Scottish ballads. The chapter pays particular attention to Christina Rossetti’s and Hardy’s ironic reworkings of ballad conventions. Their reliance on the expectations aroused by traditional ballads, the chapter argues, especially in the much harder cases of imagining intimate conversational relations with the silent dead or with God, prepares the depictions of failed intimacy in Hardy’s elegies for his wife Emma and in Rossetti’s devotional colloquies and roundels. There talking with ghosts or with God becomes all too often a disappointed hope of resuming conversations that failed in life (Hardy) or painfully anticipating a silent harmony with God and the saints in paradise through the imperfect approximations of poetry (Rossetti).

The 1880s inaugurated the movement from analogue to digital communication as the global possibilities of electronic communications became visible for the first time. This chapter considers the effects of what Paul Virilio has called ‘tele-contact’ on two painters, Evelyn de Morgan and Burne-Jones, and a poet, Swinburne. All three reinvent old forms in the context of newly imagined global distance and possibilities of transmission, communication and signal-failure and loss. Evelyn De Morgan’s The Sea Maidens (sometimes called The Sea Sisters) of 1885-6 and Burne-Jones’s The Depths of the Sea (1887) take up the ancient emblem of the mermaid to consider both the seductive and the dangerous possibilities of global connectivity. Their paintings dramatise the paradox of contactless contact. Swinburne re-makes the medieval French verse form of the rondeau in his A Century of Roundels (1883), a sequence of poems which undermines sequentiality and suggests the degeneration of meaning during transmission. All these works pose sharp questions about the relation of structure to meaning, of surface to depth, and of transmission to communication in the 1880s. These were fundamental questions for aesthetics, but they were also political questions.