To Chloe...

To Chloe: Who wish'd herself young enough for me...

by William Cartwright (1611-1643)

Chloe, why wish that your years

Would backwards run, till they meet mine,

That perfect Likeness, which endears

Things unto things, might us Combine?

Our Ages so in date agree,

That Twins do differ more than we.

There are two Births, the one when Light

First strikes the new awak'ned sense;

The Other when two Souls unite,

And we must count our life from thence:

When you lov'd me, and I lov'd you

Then both of us were born anew.

Love then to us did new Souls give,

And in those Souls did plant new pow'rs;

Since when another life we live,

The Breath we breathe is his, not ours:

Love makes those young whom Age doth Chill,

And whom he finds young, keeps young still.

Painting: 'Daphnis and Chloe'

Baron Francoise Gerard

1770-1837

"An Almost Made Up Poem"

I see you drinking at the fountain with tiny

blue hands, no, your hands are not tiny

they are small, and the fountain is in France

where you wrote me that last letter and

I answered and never heard from you again.

you used to write insane poems about

ANGELS AND GOD, all in upper case, and you

knew famous artists and most of them

were your lovers, and I wrote back, it' all right,

go ahead, enter their lives, I' not jealous

because we' never met.  we got close once in

New Orleans, one half block, but never met, never

touched.  so you went with the famous and wrote

about the famous, and, of course, what you found out

is that the famous are worried about

their fame - not the beautiful young girl in bed

with them, who gives them that, and then awakens

in the morning to write upper case poems about

ANGELS AND GOD.  we know God is dead, they' told

us, but listening to you I wasn' sure.  maybe

it was the upper case.  you were one of the

editors, "her, print her, she' mad but she'

magic.  there' no lie in her fire."  I loved you

like a man loves a woman he never touches, only

writes to, keeps little photographs of.  I would have

loved you more if I had sat in a small room rolling a

cigarette and listened to you piss in the bathroom,

but that didn' happen.  your letters got sadder.

your lovers betrayed you.  kid, I wrote back, all

lovers betray.  it didn' help.  you said

you had a crying bench and it was by a bridge and

the bridge was over a river and you sat on the crying

bench every night and wept for the lovers who had

hurt and forgotten you.  I wrote back but never

heard again.  a friend wrote me of your suicide

3 or 4 months after it happened.  if I had met you

I would probably have been unfair to you or you

to me.  it was best like this.

Charles Bukowski 1920-1994

I'd love to know who this woman was; or was she just a figment?

The Year Without a Summer

J M W Turner 'Chichester Canal' c.1828

Artists took up their brushes after the eruption of Mt Tambora in 1815 as the high levels of ash in the atmosphere caused spectacular sunsets.  The yellow haze was the prime feature in many of Turner's paintings following the eruption.

A similar phenomenon was seen after Krakatoa erupted in 1883.  William Ashcroft painted several and made thousands of coloured sketches of the red sunsets around the world after the explosion.

William Ashcroft 'On the Banks of the River Thames' 1883

The pall of darkness inspired poet Lord Byron to write 'Darkness' the year after Tambora.  Below is an excerpt from the poem.  The writing of this poem also occurred only months after the ending of his marriage.

I had a dream, which was not all a dream.

The bright sun was extinguish'd, and the stars

did wander darkling in the eternal space,

rayless, and pathless, and the icy earth

swung blind and blackening in the moonless air;

Morn came and went - and came, and brought no day,

And men forgot their passions in the dread

of this their desolation; and all hearts

were chill'd into a selfish prayer for light...

A lovely work of art inspired by a dismal poem....

'Mariana' - Sir John Everett Millais, 1850/51

Sir John Everett Millais based Mariana (1851) upon Tennyson's poem of the same name, which derives from Shakespeare's Measure for Measure and tells of a woman who has lived alone for five years after having been rejected by her fiance, Angelo, after her dowry was lost in a shipwreck. Millais chose to illustrate the following lines:

She only said, "My life is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

Alone in her house on a grey autumn afternoon, Mariana stands up from her needlework to stretch her back and look longingly out the window. Autumn leaves are scattered about on the floor. The changing of the season from summer to fall is impending, so much so that it is overtaking the interior of Mariana's home. Just as the seasons change outside, the fertile spring and summer of Mariana's life is coming to a close as she is left alone, facing life as a lonely spinster. - victorianweb.org

Mariana (2nd stanza)
published 1830

Her tears fell with the dews at even;
Her tears fell ere the dews were dried;
She could not look on the sweet heaven,
Either at morn or eventide.
After the flitting of the bats,
When thickest dark did trance the sky,
She drew her casement-curtain by,
And glanced athwart the glooming flats.
She only said, "The night is dreary,
He cometh not," she said;
She said, "I am aweary, aweary,
I would that I were dead!"

Alfred, Lord Tennyson, 1809-1892

'The Moxon Tennyson'
Pen and Ink illustration by Millais
Wood engraving by Dalziel Brothers 1857

Scanned image by George P. Landow

Edward Moxon published "Poems" by Alfred Tennyson in 1933

So much said in so few words....

Alabaster

LIKE this alabaster box whose art

Is frail as a cassia-flower, is my heart,

Carven with delicate dreams and wrought

With many a subtle and exquisite thought.

Therein I treasure the spice and scent

Of rich and passionate memories blent

Like odours of cinnamon, sandal and clove,

Of song and sorrow and life and love.

Sarojini Naidu 1879-1949

The Opening Minutes of a Film

I look at you
like the opening minutes of a film,
when you don't yet know
what to focus on.

In the long corridor on the way to the station
you are walking away from me
against the adverts in the subway

I must be following you.
You are a long shot that never recedes.

I want you to look at me.
You look back, maybe to see
if we're going in the same direction.

You slow down so much
your hair seems liquid.

I don't know where we're going
I want to touch the side of your neck,
this slows you in the electric light.

We both know something is about to happen.
I don't want to talk.

Keep walking, but look back
So we know we are together.

Gabeba Baderoon

Photo: Matt O'Sullivan

THE FLOWER SELLER

Alexei Harlamoff, 1840-1922

All Stories Come True

The Algerian flower-seller beaten,
petals strewn on the French street -
always there is beauty to mark the blood in Paris.

She arrives at Gare du Nord on her way
somewhere else.
Before her next train, she sits
among the people in the Luxembourg gardens
in the shadow of the trees and Flaubert's bust,
eating a peach on a bench, slowly making
the afternoon hers.

She washes her hands and mouth, the hollow
of her throat and, on impulse, pours
the rest of the water over her feet.
A man comes running toward her
to make all the stories come true
and, looming, bends down.

With cool hands, he takes
the bottom of her foot and kisses
her ankle, the whole city pausing
for an instant. Then he runs away again
between the people, the gates, the trees.

Gabeba Baderoon

'THIS FRAIL BARK'

Penelope Boothby 1785-1791
The above monument, by Thomas Banks was shown at the Royal Academy in 1793 before being installed in St. Oswald's Parish Church, Ashbourne, Derbyshire (the link to Ashbourne is extremely interesting with snippets from the parish records dating back to 1539).

The white Carrara marble effigy commemorates the short life of Penelope Susanah Boothby, daughter of Sir Brooke Boothby, who died on 20th March 1791, a month short of her sixth birthday. The inscription reads, 'She was in form and intellect most exquisite. The unfortunate parents ventured their all on this frail bark and the wreck was total.' She is said to have been able to speak a little of the four languages inscribed on her tomb.

She used to play in the studio of Sir Joshua Reynolds and at age 4, was the subject of his painting "The Little Girl in the Mob-cap". Henry Fuseli, an acquaintance of Sir Joshua, also painted "The Apotheosis of Penelope Boothby" in 1792.

Her distraught parents parted after her funeral, each blaming the other for her death. Sir Brooke Boothby never got over his only child's death and wrote several Sonnets about his loss; an excerpt from Sonnet X111 follows:

Her faded form now glides before my view;

her plaintiff voice now floats upon the gale.

The hope how vain, that time should bring relief!

Time does but deeper root a real grief.

AFTER YOU

Now that you are gone, I wipe

mango juice from my table,

fold up the crinkled stories

Three potatoes on the windowsill

begin to send out roots

from their sleeping eyes

I dream that I begin to travel

but the moon stops me, flicking

its bright coins against my mirror

Poems litter the path

where we walked, and all my clothes

are stained with your laughter

Ruth Goring

Ruth was the August winner on Goodreads.

MY SLEEPING LOVED ONES

Vittore Carpaccio - c.1460-c.1526

This is no angel fallen in the noon,

But my sister asleep on the couch.

And don't mistake my stillness for awe.

It's just that I don't want to waken her,

Though I'd love to cup her chin in my palms,

Bend down to her, like a mirror, and kiss her face.

But I'll do nothing, just look a while, then leave

quietly. For this is noon,

Time of rest, hour of tenderness

And the sleeping loved ones.

From the book, 'Rose' by Li-Young Lee

'The Sleeping Loved Ones' - 1st stanza

A Noiseless Patient Spider

A noiseless patient spider,

I mark’d where on a little promontory it stood isolated,

Mark’d how to explore the vacant vast surrounding,

It launch’d forth filament, filament, filament, out of itself,

Ever unreeling them, ever tirelessly speeding them.

And you O my soul where you stand,

Surrounded, detached, in measureless oceans of space,

Ceaselessly musing, venturing, throwing,
seeking the spheres to connect them,

Till the bridge you will need be form’d, till the ductile anchor hold,

Till the gossamer thread you fling catch somewhere, O my soul.

Walt Whitman

FROM BLOSSOMS

~ from blossoms ~

From blossoms comes

this brown paper bag of peaches

we bought from the boy

at the bend in the road where we turned toward

signs painted Peaches.

From laden boughs, from hands,

from sweet fellowship in the bins,

comes nectar at the roadside, succulent

peaches we devour, dusty skin and all,

comes the familiar dust of summer, dust we eat.

O, to take what we love inside,

to carry within us an orchard, to eat

not only the skin, but the shade,

not only the sugar, but the days, to hold

the fruit in our hands, adore it, then bite into

the round jubilance of peach.

There are days we live

as if death were nowhere

in the background; from joy

to joy to joy, from wing to wing,

from blossom to blossom to

impossible blossom, to sweet impossible blossom.

~ Li-Young Lee ~

WINTER

The Darkling Thrush - Thomas Hardy, 1902

I leant upon a coppice gate

When Frost was spectre-gray,

And Winter's dregs made desolate

The weakening eye of day.

The tangled bine-stems scored the sky

Like strings of broken lyres,

And all mankind that haunted nigh

had sought their household fires.

The land's sharp features seemed to be

The Century's corpse outleant,

His crypt the cloudy canopy,

The wind his death-lament.

The ancient pulse of germ and birth

Was shrunken hard and dry,

And every spirit upon earth

Seemed fervourless as I.

At once a voice arose among

The bleak twigs overhead

In a full-hearted evensong

Of joy illimited;

An aged thrush, frail, gaunt and small,

In blast-beruffled plume,

Had chosen thus to fling his soul

Upon the growing gloom.

So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Has written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
His happy good-night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.

MAY

The sunshine seeks my little room
To tell me Paris streets are gay;
That children cry the lily bloom
All up and down the leafy way;
That half the town is mad with May,
With flame of flag and boom of bell:
For Carnival is King to-day;
So pen and page, awhile farewell.

Robert Service 1874-1958

POEM

Eildon Pondage January 2006

Here, where my breathing is the sound of Life's whisper ...

I hear the Voice of my Heart's prayer ...
I know the Reality of my truest Yearnings ...
The Longings that no one else could understand ...
Are clear to me here.

And I want to linger ... hold on to this fragile Treasure ...
Lest my senses have stolen from them an instant of Aliveness ...
And my breath be lost in the clamour of the world's noise.

Please, Life ... grant me this Place ...
for my Soul's eternal dwelling.

John-Michael
31st January 2009

GLYCINE'S SONG

by: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

A sunny shaft did I behold,

From sky to earth it slanted:

And poised therein a bird so bold -

Sweet bird, thou wert enchanted!

He sank, he rose, he twinkled, he troll'd

Within that shaft of sunny mist;

His eyes of fire, his beak of gold,

All else of amethyst!

And thus he sang: 'Adieu adieu!

Love's dreams prove seldom true.

The blossoms, they make no delay:

The sparkling dew-drops will not stay.

Sweet month of May,

We must away;

Far, far away!

To-day! to-day!'

I don't think it was an eagle in Coleridge's prose but I saw one of our wedge-tail eagles just now, hovering above, looking so tiny way up there. A couple of weeks ago we saw one coming from the smoke to safety; flying so slowly, as if it had no energy left. Our magpies were attacking it as if saying, 'go away, this is our territory'. It landed in a paddock opposite; it was huge and these little magpies, in comparison, were relentless. It took off again, travelling so slowly into the distance.....

DANTE & ELIZABETH

Beata Beatrix by Rossetti - Tate Gallery London

Silent Noon

Your hands lie open in the long fresh grass,

The finger-points look through like rosy blooms;

Your eyes smile peace. The pasture gleams and glooms

'Neath billowing skies that scatter and amass.

All round our nest, far as the eye can pass,

Are golden kingcup-fields with silver edge

Where the cow-parsley skirts the hawthorn-hedge.

'Tis visible silence, still as the hour-glass.

Deep in the sun-searched growths the dragon-fly

Hangs like a blue thread loosened from the sky;

So this wing'd hour is dropt to us from above.

Oh! clasp we to our hearts, for deathless dower,

This close-companion'd inarticulate hour

When twofold silence was the song of love.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

I came across the above painting by Dante Gabriel Rossetti, went to find out more about him and stumbled upon a tragic love story. Most of his early paintings of women are portraits of his wife, Elizabeth, an artists' model. He ultimately forbade her to model for other Pre-Raphaelite artists. Beata Beatrix, which portrays a praying Beatrice (Beatrice Portinari, Dante Alighieri's lifelong love), was painted one year after Elizabeth's death. Dante Alighieri's poetry was translated by Rossetti and included in his book, 'The Early Italian Poets', published in 1861.

Dante Gabriel Rossetti 1828-1882

Rossetti's early poetry and the only copy, was interred with Elizabeth's body, later exhumed and published in 'Poems by D.G. Rosetti'.

There is so much more to read about Dante Rosetti and Elizabeth Siddal, with thanks to Wikipedia and their references and at this link.

FACE LIFT

You bring me good news from the clinic,

Whipping off your silk scarf, exhibiting the tight white

Mummy-cloths, smiling: I'm all right.

When I was nine, a line-green anaesthetist

Fed me banana gas through a frog-mask. The nauseous vault

Boomed wild bad dreams and the Jovian voices of surgeons.

The mother swam up, holding a tin basin.

O I was sick.

They've changed all that. Travelling

Nude as Cleopatra in my well-boiled hospital shift,

Fizzy with sedatives and unusually humorous,

I roll to an anteroom where a kind man

Fists my fingers for me. He makes me feel something precious

Is leaking from the finger-vents. At the count of two

Darkness wipes me out like chalk on a blackboard...

I don't know a thing.

For five days I lie in secret,

Tapped like a cask, the years draining into my pillow.

Even my best friend thinks I'm in the country.

Skin doesn't have roots, it peels away easy as paper.

When I grin, the stitches tauten. I grow backward. I'm twenty,

Broody and in long skirts on my first husband's sofa, my fingers

Buried in the lambswool of the dead poodle;

I hadn't a cat yet.

Now she's done for, the dewlapped lady

I watched settle, line by line, in my mirror ---

Old sock-face, sagged on a darning egg.

They've trapped her in some laboratory jar.

Let her die there, or whither incessantly for the next fifty years,

Nodding and rocking and fingering her thin hair.

Mother to myself, I wake swaddled in gauze,

Pink and smooth as a baby.

Sylvia Plath

SCHOONER RETURNS

  

A 105-year-old symbol of Australia's heritage has just returned to our shores.  The nation's last surviving coastal trading ship, the Alma Doepel, sailed for 16 days from Port Macquarie, NSW and is pictured passing Point Nepean last Tuesday.  It docked at Victoria Harbour on Wednesday.

The three-masted topsail schooner, Australian-built and operated, will have a refit over the next 12 months.  It was fully restored in 1987 and operated as a youth sail training ship for more than 10 years on Port Phillip Bay.

The Alma Doepel is owned by non-profit group Sail and Adventure Ltd and was most recently exhibited at Port Macquarie.  It will return to being a tourist attraction.

THE SEA GYPSY

I am fevered with the sunset,

I am fretful with the bay,

For the wander-thirst is on me

And my soul is in Cathay.

There's a schooner in the offing,

With her topsails shot with fire,

And my heart has gone aboard her

For the Islands of Desire.

I must go forth again tomorrow!

With the sunset I must be

Hull down on the trail of rapture

In the wonder of the sea.

Richard Hovey

DELIGHTING THE SENSES

This photo was taken five minutes ago.  We have an overcast sky today but a lovely temperature.  We were sweltering two days ago; this is a nice relief.

You love the roses - so do I.  I wish

The sky would rain down roses, as they rain

From off the shaken bush.  Why will it not?

Then all the valley would be pink and white

And soft to tread on.  They would fall as light

As feathers, smelling sweet; and it would be

Like sleeping and like waking, all at once!

George Eliot 1819-1880