The Lovers’ Chronicle 22 February – belief – art by Rembrandt Peale & Norman Lindsay – verse by Edna St. Vincent Millay

Dear Zazie, Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse. Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge. Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

damn good thing to have
“The most important”
in a person or place
for some a thing
“Yes, but that seems fleeting”
agree, i think in someone
or in a purpose is best
“My turn to agree”
gotta have somethin’
to hold on to
“Or the one to turn to”
you mean like right now
give me somethin’ to…

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

your influence upon
thoughts, dreams,
days and nights

never knew before what
could have made me feel
did not believe in it
probably afraid of it

i have been astonished
i have shuddered
i shudder no more
my words, you,
my only tenets
ravished, a power
i could resist
until you

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

the big high plains sky
above my head
here upon my back
look my fill into after all

and sure enough i see
i ‘most could touch you
reachin’ to try,
i cry to feel

the light through
that keeps us from apart
and we will come to know,
what it means to believe

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

all right, let us
bring it…

one time
to sing one song,
to write one poem,
to paint one paintin’

you tellin’ me
that is all you got
the same tune,
the same verse,
the same view

or would you
sing somethin’ different
write somethin’ that matters
paint somethin’ you felt
cuz i am tellin’ you,
that is the stuff that saves
and it ain’t got nothin’ to do
with believin’ in the Goddess
or fate, or magic, or Buddha
it has to do
with believin’
in yourself

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

your influence upon
thoughts, dreams,
days and nights,
has not cured
and has made it
so intense that i am
reduced to breathe
in a dull existence

never knew before what
could have made me feel
did not believe in it
probably afraid of it,
lest it should burn me up

i have been astonished
i have shuddered
i shudder no more
my words, you,
my only tenets
ravished, a power
i could resist
until you

ever since i have endeavoured
to reason against the reasons
i can do that no more
the sorrow, too much
without you
i should like to cast the die
for with or nothin’
i have no patience
with anything else

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

 

Rembrandt Peale *oil on canvas *48.3 x 36.8 cm *1828

Today is the birthday of Rembrandt Peale ( Bucks County Pensylvania; February 22, 1778 – October 3, 1860 Philadelphia); artist and museum keeper. A prolific portrait painter, he was especially acclaimed for his likenesses of presidents George Washington and Thomas Jefferson. Peale’s style was influenced by French Neoclassicism after a stay in Paris in his early thirties.

Gallery

Pearl of Grief » (1849)

Pearl of Grief » (1849)

The Sisters (Eleanor and Rosalba Peale) (1826)

Portrait of George Washington(1795–1823)

Portrait of Rosalba Peale (1820). Part of the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Portrait of Edward Shippen Burd of Philadelphia
Edna St. Vincent Millay
Edna St. Vincent Millay.jpg

Edna St. Vincent Millay,
photographed by Carl Van Vechten, 1933

And today is the birthday of Edna St. Vincent Millay (Rockland, Maine; February 22, 1892 – October 19, 1950 Austerlitz, New York); poet and playwright.  She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923, the third woman to win the award for poetry.  She used the pseudonym Nancy Boyd for her prose work.

After being educated at Vassar, she moved to Greenwich Village and lived a Jazz Age Bohemian life, which revolved around poetry and love affairs.  She was beautiful and alluring and many men and women fell in love with her.  Critic Edmund Wilson asked her to marry him.  She said no.  He later reflected that falling in love with her “was so common an experience, so almost inevitable a consequence of knowing her in those days.”

One of her friends described her as “a frivolous young woman, with a brand-new pair of dancing slippers and a mouth like a valentine.” She wrote to a friend, “People fall in love with me and annoy me and distress me and flatter me and excite me.”

After an affair with a French violinist didn’t end well, she married and bought a big house she called “Steepletop” in Austerlitz, New York.  She built a cabin where she could write and cultivated the gardens.  Steepletop had a spring-fed pool and Millay enjoyed swimming in the nude.

Verse

But, sure, the sky is big, I said;
Miles and miles above my head
;
So here upon my back I’ll lie
And look my fill into the sky.
And so I looked, and, after all,
The sky was not so very tall.
The sky, I said, must somewhere stop,
And — sure enough! — I see the top!
The sky, I thought, is not so grand;
I ‘most could touch it with my hand!
And reaching up my hand to try,
I screamed to feel it touch the sky.

  • “Renascence” (1912), st. 3 Renascence and Other Poems (1917)
  • The world stands out on either side
    No wider than the heart is wide
    ;
    Above the world is stretched the sky, —
    No higher than the soul is high.
    The heart can push the sea and land
    Farther away on either hand;
    The soul can split the sky in two,
    And let the face of God shine through.
    But East and West will pinch the heart
    That can not keep them pushed apart;
    And he whose soul is flat — the sky
    Will cave in on him by and by.

    • “Renascence” (1912), st. 20, Renascence and Other Poems (1917)
  • It’s little I know what’s in my heart,
    What’s in my mind it’s little I know,
    But there’s that in me must up and start,
    And it’s little I care where my feet go.

    • “Departure” (1918) from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923)
  • My candle burns at both ends;
    It will not last the night;
    But, ah, my foes, and, oh, my friends —
    It gives a lovely light.

    • “First Fig” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
  • Safe upon the solid rock the ugly houses stand;
    Come and see my shining palace built upon the sand!

    • “Second Fig” from A Few Figs from Thistles (1920)
  • Many a bard’s untimely death
    Lends unto his verses breath
    ;
    Here’s a song was never sung:
    Growing old is dying young.

    • “To a Poet Who Died Young” in Second April‎ (1921), p. 52
  • “One thing there’s no getting by—
    I’ve been a wicked girl.” said I;
    “But if I can’t be sorry, why,
    I might as well be glad!”

    • From “The Penitent”, A Few Figs from Thistles (1922)
  • But you are mobile as the veering air,
    And all your charms more changeful than the tide,
    Wherefore to be inconstant is no care:
    I have but to continue at your side.
    So wanton, light and false, my love, are you,
    I am most faithless when I most am true.

    • From Sonnet III: “Oh, Think not I am faithful to a vow!”, A Few Figs from Thistles (1922)
  • After all, my earstwhile dear,
    My no longer cherished,
    Need we say it was not love,
    Now that love is perished?

    • “Passer Mortuus Est”, st. 3, Second April, 1921
  • My heart is warm with friends I make,
    And better friends I’ll not be knowing,
    Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,
    No matter where it’s going.

    • “Travel”, st. 3, Second April, 1921
  • Euclid alone has looked on Beauty bare.
    Let all who prate of Beauty hold their peace,
    And lay them prone upon the earth and cease
    To ponder on themselves, the while they stare
    At nothing, intricately drawn nowhere.

    • Sonnet XXII from The Harp-Weaver and Other Poems (1923)
  • Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree,
    Nor knows what birds have vanished one by one,
    Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:
    I cannot say what loves have come and gone,
    I only know that summer sang in me
    A little while, that in me sings no more.

    • Sonnet XLIII: “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” (1923), Collected Poems”, 1931
  • Love is not all: it is not meat nor drink
    Nor slumber nor a roof against the rain
    ;
    Nor yet a floating spar to men that sink
    And rise and sink and rise and sink again;
    Love can not fill the thickened lung with breath,
    Nor clean the blood, nor set the fractured bone;
    Yet many a man is making friends with death
    Even as I speak, for lack of love alone.

    • Sonnet XXX from Fatal Interview (1931)

Mac Tag

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