Ruins of Despair

NATURE/CREEK.GIF

Although audience response is not an infallible guide to the value of your poetry, if you read between the lines of what people say, their hidden feedback can be useful.

Pic: Le roman de la rose, c. 1390, MS. e Mus. 65, f. 130v, The Bodleian Library, University of Oxford.

Type 0: Bram Stoker's typewriter on display at the now defunct Vampire Museum, Paris. Stoker wrote 'Dracula' by hand & used the typewriter for letters. However Mina Harker uses one in the novel as depicted here by Winona Ryder in Coppola's 1992 version of 'Dracula.'

Lilies are moist, roses are withering

#ValentinesDay

I see a lily on thy brow,
With anguish moist and fever-dew;
And on thy cheek a fading rose
Fast withereth too.

– The sweet-talking John Keats in his 'La Belle Dame sans Merci', 1819

:O !

This specific painting is often attributed to the Florentine School and dated between 1490 and 1520. Some scholars suggest this work may be a copy of a lost portrait of Laura painted by the Sienese artist Simone Martini, who was a personal friend of Petrarch. Features: The subject is shown wearing a jeweled headdress and a double-strand necklace.

‘If no love is, O God, what fele I so? Allas! what is this wondre maladie?
For hete of cold, for cold of hete, I dye.’ ~ Petrarch (trans by Chaucer) for #BookWormSat 🩷💔❤️‍🩹🖤

🖼️ Thought to be Petrarch’s love Laura, Laura de Nove.

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was white as leprosy, The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

Roses are red, violets are blue

#ValentinesDay

S. T. Coleridge, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 1798

Henri Fantin Latour (French, 1836-1904), The reading, 1877. Oil on canvas, 97.2x130.3 cm. National Museum of Fine Arts, Lyon.

#art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

Coloured drawing of a young Arab ('Mahmas') by Edward Kennington. One of Lawrence's close Arabic friends was Salim Ahmed and the poem might be inspired by him, while also referencing the entire Arab nation, for which he advocated freedom from British rule.

"I loved you, so I drew theses tides of men into my hands
and wrote my will across the sky in stars
To earn you Freedom, the seven pillared worthy house,
That your eyes might be shining for me
When we came."

- 'S.A.' by T E Lawrence.
#BookWormSat #gaylove

It’s a varied tradition, isn't it

Berndt Lindholm (Finnish, 1841–1914)
View of the Kattegat, 1890
oil on canvas
71 cm (27.9 in) x 48 cm (18.8 in)
National Museum of Sweden

#art #painting #artist #BlueSkyArt

A piece of paper with a graphite sketch of a sleeping cat's head. Text: Lovely Puff in a sweet slumber. June 3. 1825. A.INB. Pinxit.

Addendum:

The commonplace book which contains this poem was auctioned in 2022:

www.lyonandturnbull....

Includes a drawing of Ada's cat, Mrs Puff, by her mother, Lady Byron.

Портрет Елизаветы Платоновны Ярошенко (Portrait of Elizaveta Platonovna Yaroshenko) by Nikolai Alexandrovich Yaroshenko 1880. An oil painting of a middle-aged woman wearing a dark dress, sitting in an armchair. She is gazing lovingly at the white cat that sits in her lap, its back to us. The woman also has in her lap an open book of some kind, and she is holding a folded fan.

Now that thy frolic sports must end,
Thou'lt find me too a steady friend,
Who will thine aged steps attend—"
My Pussy!

A. Ada Byron.
Christmas day. 1828.

4/4

The Ladies Waldegrave by George James, 18th century. An oil painting of three young girls wearing bonnets and pastel-coloured dresses in a park. First one of them is holding a lute, the second a basket, and the third is lifting a cat out of the basket. A pond and a castle in the background.

How often, in thy kitten days,
Companions in our childish ways,
We've fondly shar'd each others' plays,
My Pussy!

3/4

Die Angorakatze (The Angora Cat) by Jean-Honoré Fragonard and Marguerite Gérard, circa 1780s An oil painting with a young lady in a fancy yellow dress gazing down at a white cat. The woman has her hand and the cat its paw on a large silver globe. The other other paw of the cat is raised, ready to strike. An elderly servant woman is seen in the shadows, peeking from behind a door at the cat, smiling.

Tho' now thy youthful powers decline,
Thy yellow eyes less vivid shine,
Still sweetly purrs that voice of thine
My Pussy!

2/4

Avant la parade (Before the parade) by Marie Joséphine Nicolas 1874. An oil painting of a young dark-haired woman sitting in a chair holding a cat, admiring the animal. Right next to them, a moustached man is peeking from behind a curtain at the woman. All three are in Renaissance dress, including the cat who wears a little blue hat.

'Ada to her Cat' by Ada Byron (later Lovelace), aged 14, 1828:

"Dear object of my tender care,
Which neither dog nor bird may share,
Of all the feline tribe most rare,
My Pussy!

#caturday #booksky

Oh, you'll be wanting to read the rest of the poem below.

🧵 1/4

Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Mark Gatiss, and Connor Finch in an open-top car looking not at all suspicious.

We're antiquarian booksellers. Isn't that obvious?

#Bookish

Portrait of Christina Rossetti by her brother, Dante Gabriel Rossetti

"Let bygones be bygones:
Don't call me false, who owed not to be true;
I'd rather answer 'No' to fifty Johns
Than answer 'Yes' to you."
"No, Thank You, John"
Christina Rossetti
#BookWormSat for Valentine's Day

'Sweet to me, sweetest friend, are the gifts of your sweetness' <3

"Brother Anselm to Dom Gilbert, brother, friend, beloved lover. Sweet to me, sweetest friend, are the gifts of your sweetness, but they cannot begin to console my desolate heart for its want of your love."
- From a letter by Anselm, Archbishop of Canterbury (1093-1109). [Cont
#BookWormSat #gaylove

Stamm eines Baumes mit stark verdrehten, ineinander verschlungenen Rindenstrukturen. Mehrere große, knotenartige Verdickungen sind sichtbar. Im Hintergrund stehen weitere Bäume, einige mit Schnee bedeckt. Am Boden und auf Teilen des Stammes liegt Schnee.

#BlueSkyArtShow #Wood #photography #nature #trees #ArtYear #Fotografie #Natur

Heloise D'Argenteuil Forlorn by Edward H. Corbould

“..... Now learn, all you my rivals who once viewed my happiness with jealous eyes, that he you once envied me can never more be mine. I loved him; my love was his crime and the cause of his punishment."

✍️Héloïse d'Argenteuil, The Letters of Abélard and Héloïse
#BookWormSat 🎨 Edward H. Corbould

A portrait of a wistful girl in a loose white gown, with large heavy-lidded eyes, gazing into the distance, supporting her face with a hand. Julie Manet, aged sixteen, by her mother Berthe Morisot. Berthe died a year later.

‘she had been the fairy, the princess and the mysterious love of all our adolescence…’

Alain-Fournier
Le Grand Meaulnes 1913
#BookWormSat #Valentine

Julie Daydreaming
1894
Berthe Morisot

The painting is based on the 1876 opera La Gioconda by Amilcare Ponchielli, based on Victor Hugo's play 'Angelo, Tyrant of Padua'. This line is by a character who believes their love has been lost at sea. An oil painting of a woman lying on the ground, reaching over a cliff out to the moonlit sea.

Touch has a memory. O say, love, say,
What can I do to kill it and be free

– John Keats in 1819 for Fanny Brawne

#BookWormSat #ValentinesDay

#art E ancor non torna (And She Never Returned) by Alfonso Simonetti 1892

Enigma by Sir William Quiller Orchardson 1891 An oil painting depicting a man and a woman sitting in the far opposite ends of a sofa in an upper-class 19th century parlour. The man looks dejected as the woman looks away from him, unbothered.

'What's it to you if I love you?'

– Goethe, Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship 1795–1796

#BookWormSat #ValentinesDay
#art by Sir William Quiller Orchardson

An oil painting with a rocky seashore view in subdued orange light. The hues are brown, orange, and blue. Some manmade buildings and structures down on the cliffs quite far below, with a fire burning and a few people around.

Fisherman's Bay, South Farallon Island

Hermann Herzog (1832–1932)

#art #landscape

A full moon. Twin Peaks S02E07 - Lonely Souls.

Twin Peaks: A full moon.

'I can not live without my life!'

Emily Brontë, Wuthering Heights 1847

#NoShitSherlock

A dark, square aquatint print depicting railroad tracks on which lies a decapitated head of a dark-haired woman(?). Dark blots of blood, white billows of steam.

Kiskot (Rautatie)
The Tracks (The Railroad)

Akseli Gallen-Kallela 1897