White Eyes, Dark Ages is a portrait by many hands of that eminent Victorian, John Ruskin, painted by a poet writing a century after his death. Deborah Randall pictures Ruskin, the inner man, through the eyes of his women: his young wife Effie, who left him for the painter Millais; Rose La Touche, who died on him; and his indulgent cousin Joan Severn. But this isn't a biography, or a conventional portrait. Ruskin said only the broken mirror can tell you what love means. Deborah Randall's poems holds a broken mirror to a man deeply divided, his thoughts fragmented, a man 'doomed' - his father said - 'to enlighten a people by his wisdom'. Ruskin speaks in parts: - No good or lovely thing exists in this world without its correspendent darkness... - I have hardly any real warmth of feeling, except for pictures and mountains... - I want somebody to be kind to me without making me think - or feel... - Do I want to keep her from growing up? Of course I do... And he and his women answer back in poems showing the many facets of a genius tormented in his twilight years by painful joys and disappointments.