Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

comes a still voice,
from a distance
long sought for
long thought denied

melancholy nights
yes, but as it should be,
makes it all right

earned or deserved,
not sure which
but that matters not

the only purpose
must be served

yet

comes a still voice
i will listen

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Annibale Carracci
Self-portrait (Uffizi)

Today is the birthday of Annibale Carracci (Bologna; November 3, 1560 – July 15, 1609 Rome); painter, active in Bologna and later in Rome. Along with his brothers, Annibale was one of the progenitors of a leading strand of the Baroque style.  Painters working under Annibale at the gallery of the Palazzo Farnese would be highly influential in Roman painting for decades.

Annibale was entombed, according to his wish, near Raphael in the Pantheon of Rome.  It is a measure of his achievement that artists as diverse as Bernini, Poussin, and Rubens praised his work.  Many of his assistants or pupils in projects at the Palazzo Farnese and Herrera Chapel would become among the pre-eminent artists of the next decades, including Domenichino, Francesco Albani, Giovanni Lanfranco, Domenico Viola, Guido Reni, Sisto Badalocchio, and others.

Gallery

Pietà between 1599 and 1600

Self-portrait 

Portrait of Giacomo Filippo Turrini 

Carracci’s “Domine, Quo Vadis” (Jesus and Saint Peter)

Pietà with Sts Francis and Mary Magdalen

Madonna con Bambino, santa Lucia, san Giovannino e angelo

The Mystic Marriage of St Catherine

Madonna Enthroned with Saint Matthew

• Religious subjects
• 

  Christ Wearing the Crown of Thorns, Supported by Angels

• 

  The Samaritan Woman at the Well

• 

  The silent Madonna with Saint John the Baptist

• 

  Susanna in the bath

• 

  Pietà, Kunsthistoriche Museum, Vienna

• 

  Lamentation of Christ

• 

  Madonna and Child with St John

• 

  Saint Roch and the Angel

• Portraits
• 

  Self-portrait c. 1580

• 

  The Temptation of St Anthony Abbot (detail) 1597 and 1598

• 

  Head of an Old Man

• 

  Portrait of Dr Bossi.

• Mythological subjects
• 

  Venus and Adonis circa 1595

• 

  The Judgment of Hercules, 1596, National Museum of Capodimonte

• 

  Venus with a Satyr and Cupids, 1590

• Food related paintings
• 

  Boy Drinking by Annibale Carracci, 1582–83

• 

  The Beaneater, 1580-1590, Galleria Colonna, Rome

• 

  Butcher’s Shop (1580), Christ Church Picture Gallery, Oxford

• 

  The Butcher’s Shop, 1580, Kimbell Art Museum

   

William Cullen Bryant
Cabinet card of Bryant, c. 1876

Today is the birthday of William Cullen Bryant (Cummington, Massachusetts; November 3, 1794 – June 12, 1878 New York City); romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post.

Verse 

Thanatopsis

 To him who in the love of Nature holds
Communion with her visible forms, she speaks
A various language; for his gayer hours
She has a voice of gladness, and a smile
And eloquence of beauty, and she glides
Into his darker musings, with a mild
And healing sympathy, that steals away
Their sharpness, ere he is aware. When thoughts
Of the last bitter hour come like a blight
Over thy spirit, and sad images
Of the stern agony, and shroud, and pall,
And breathless darkness, and the narrow house,
Make thee to shudder, and grow sick at heart;—
Go forth, under the open sky, and list
To Nature’s teachings, while from all around
Earth and her waters, and the depths of air—
Comes a still voice—
Yet a few days, and thee
The all-beholding sun shall see no more
In all his course; nor yet in the cold ground,
Where thy pale form was laid, with many tears,
Nor in the embrace of ocean, shall exist
Thy image. Earth, that nourished thee, shall claim
Thy growth, to be resolved to earth again,
And, lost each human trace, surrendering up
Thine individual being, shalt thou go
To mix for ever with the elements,
To be a brother to the insensible rock
And to the sluggish clod, which the rude swain
Turns with his share, and treads upon. The oak
Shall send his roots abroad, and pierce thy mould.
Yet not to thine eternal resting-place
Shalt thou retire alone, nor couldst thou wish
Couch more magnificent. Thou shalt lie down
With patriarchs of the infant world—with kings,
The powerful of the earth—the wise, the good,
Fair forms, and hoary seers of ages past,
All in one mighty sepulchre. The hills
Rock-ribbed and ancient as the sun,—the vales
Stretching in pensive quietness between;
The venerable woods—rivers that move
In majesty, and the complaining brooks
That make the meadows green; and, poured round all,
Old Ocean’s gray and melancholy waste,—
Are but the solemn decorations all
Of the great tomb of man. The golden sun,
The planets, all the infinite host of heaven,
Are shining on the sad abodes of death,
Through the still lapse of ages. All that tread
The globe are but a handful to the tribes
That slumber in its bosom.—Take the wings
Of morning, pierce the Barcan wilderness,
Or lose thyself in the continuous woods
Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound,
Save his own dashings—yet the dead are there:
And millions in those solitudes, since first
The flight of years began, have laid them down
In their last sleep—the dead reign there alone.
So shalt thou rest, and what if thou withdraw
In silence from the living, and no friend
Take note of thy departure? All that breathe
Will share thy destiny. The gay will laugh
When thou art gone, the solemn brood of care
Plod on, and each one as before will chase
His favorite phantom; yet all these shall leave
Their mirth and their employments, and shall come
And make their bed with thee. As the long train
Of ages glide away, the sons of men,
The youth in life’s green spring, and he who goes
In the full strength of years, matron and maid,
The speechless babe, and the gray-headed man—
Shall one by one be gathered to thy side,
By those, who in their turn shall follow them.
So live, that when thy summons comes to join
The innumerable caravan, which moves
To that mysterious realm, where each shall take
His chamber in the silent halls of death,
Thou go not, like the quarry-slave at night,
Scourged to his dungeon, but, sustained and soothed
By an unfaltering trust, approach thy grave,
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch
About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams.

 

Vincenzo Bellini

Today is the birthday of Vincenzo Salvatore Carmelo Francesco Bellini (Catania; 3 November 1801 – 23 September 1835 Puteaux); opera composer, known for his long-flowing melodic lines for which he was named “the Swan of Catania”.  Bellini was the quintessential composer of the Italian bel canto era of the early 19th century.

In considering which of his operas can be seen to be his greatest successes, Il pirata laid much of the groundwork in 1827.  Both I Capuleti ed i Montecchi at La Fenice in 1830 and La sonnambula in Milan in 1831 reached new triumphal heights, although initially Norma, given at La Scala in 1831 did not fare as well until later performances elsewhere. “The genuine triumph” of I puritani in January 1835 in Paris capped a significant career.

Bellini never married. 

Bellini wanted to marry Maddalena Fumaroli but her parents refused.  The success achieved by Bianca e Gernado gave Bellini fresh hope that her parents would finally relent, and a new appeal was made through a friend.  This was rejected by Maddalena’s father, who returned all the letters which she had received along with a letter from him stating that “my daughter will never marry a poor piano banger (suonatore di cembalo)”.

At some time before March 1828, after the major success of Il pirata and just as Bellini was about to leave Milan for his production of Bianca e Ferdinando in Genoa, he received a notification from his go-between with the Fumarolis family that they had withdrawn their rejection of his proposal.  But by then—with the efforts to build his career and with time and distance between him and Maddalena—his feelings had changed and, using Florimo to communicate to the family, he rejected the offer, expressing the feeling that he would be unable to support her financially.  Even Maddalena’s own pleas in three letters which followed failed to change his mind.  Good thinkin’ Bellini.

Giuditta Turina

Giuditta Turina

The one significant relationship which Bellini had after 1828 was the five-year relationship with Giuditta Turina, a young married woman with whom he began an affair when both were in Genoa in April 1828 for the production of Bianca e Fernando.  Their relationship lasted until Bellini went to Paris.  Perhaps because her marriage was irrevocable and not based on love, and because the lovers were discreet, her husband, Fernandino, and his family seem to have tacitly permitted the relationship.  Bellini’s letters to his friend Florimo indicate his satisfaction with the nature of the liaison, particularly because it kept him from having to marry—and thus becoming being distracted from his work.  Exactly!

However, in May 1833 while he was in London, a change in Bellini’s relationship with Giuditta followed from the discovery by her husband of a compromising letter from Bellini.  The result was that he decided to seek a legal separation and have her removed from his house.  For Bellini, it meant the possibility of taking on responsibility for her, and he had no interest in doing that, having cooled in his feelings for her.  When he wrote to Florimo from Paris the following year, he clearly stated that “I constantly am being threatened from Milan with Giuditta’s coming to Paris”, at which point he says he’ll leave that city if that were to happen.  Then he continues: “I no longer want to be put in the position of renewing a relationship that made me suffer great troubles”.  Ultimately, he resisted any long-term emotional commitment, and never married.  Smart man!

And today is the birthday of Walker Evans (St. Louis, Missouri; November 3, 1903 – April 10, 1975 New Haven, Connecticut); photographer and photojournalist best known for his work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA) documenting the effects of the Great Depression. Much of Evans’ work from the FSA period uses the large-format, 8×10-inch (200×250 mm) view camera. He said that his goal as a photographer was to make pictures that are “literate, authoritative, transcendent”.

Gallery

Carol Kalker. Greenwich, Connecticut. C. June 1929

 

1936 photo of then-27-year-old Allie Mae Burroughs, a symbol of the Great Depression

Thanks for readin’ y’all,

Mac Tag 

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annibale carracci, thanatopsis, the lovers almanac, vincenzo bellini, william cullen bryant

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

her realization
that she could not
live with the mind alone;
that she must also be alive physically

well, that is what
this is all about, right

and i am not convinced

is it possible…

are you still you
can we still be us

givin’ the gift
of ourselves
to each other

where the discussions
are just as stimulatin’
as the love makin’

the only certainty is this,
the experience
of body and mind
can only be had with you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

one must wrestle
this to the ground…
you gotta keep tryin’
but you gotta accept
the fact, that it may not
be meant for you

i still git blue,
blue as hell
i can still
throw down sad verse
with the best of ’em
Baudelaire, Poe
and Rimbaud
got nothin’ on me

sometimes
i pick up a book
like Chatterley
and reread
some passages
and git wistful
and the loneliness
closes in
and threatens
to take me

but sometimes
i stop myself
in my tracks
and i think,
i god
look what you did
look where you are

you jerked yourself
out of a comfortable
but harmful,
goin’ nowhere situation
and you did it

you took a hard step
you had to take
to save yourself
and you did

and now,
you can be you
and you look
in the mirror
and smile
cuz you did it
and no one
can take that

so with
or without
you are still you

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (Rue de Seine, 6th arrondissement of Paris; November 2, 1699 – December 6, 1779 Louvre, Paris); painter. He is considered a master of still life, and is also noted for his genre paintings which depict kitchen maids, children, and domestic activities. Carefully balanced composition, soft diffusion of light, and granular impasto characterize his work.

Chardin’s influence on the art of the modern era was wide-ranging and has been well-documented.  Édouard Manet’s half-length Boy Blowing Bubbles and the still lifes of Paul Cézanne are equally indebted to their predecessor.  He was one of Henri Matisse’s most admired painters; as an art student Matisse made copies of four Chardin paintings in the Louvre.  Chaïm Soutine’s still lifes looked to Chardin for inspiration, as did the paintings of Georges Braque, and later, Giorgio Morandi.  In 1999 Lucian Freud painted and etched several copies after The Young Schoolmistress (National Gallery, London).

Marcel Proust, in the chapter “How to open your eyes?” from In Search of Lost Time (À la recherche du temps perdu), describes a melancholic young man sitting at his simple breakfast table. The only comfort he finds is in the imaginary ideas of beauty depicted in the great masterpieces of the Louvre, materializing fancy palaces, rich princes, and the like. The author tells the young man to follow him to another section of the Louvre where the pictures of Jean-Baptiste Chardin are. There he would see the beauty in still life at home and in everyday activities like peeling turnips.

Gallery

Femme tirant de l’eau d’une urne

Pelage des navets

Les Osselets

Today is the birthday of James Lesesne Wells (Atlanta, Georgia; November 2, 1902 – January 20, 1993, Washington D. C.); African-American graphic artist and painter associated with the Harlem Renaissance. He was an influential art professor at Howard University from 1929 to 1968 and is considered a pioneer in modern art education.

Wells was a prominent artist in Washington D.C. for sixty years. He retired from teaching in 1968, but continued to work into his eighties. in 1973, Fisk University held a one-man show of Well’s work.  In 1980, Wells was awarded the Presidential Citation for Lifelong Contribution to American art by President Jimmy Carter.  In 1986, a retrospective exhibition of his work was held at the Washington Project for the Arts. The exhibition was titled “Sixty Years in Art”.

Gallery

Oh For A Muse Of Fire, 1930

AFRICAN NUDE

Portuguese Woman, 1940

And on this day in 1960 – Penguin Books is found not guilty of obscenity in the trial R v Penguin Books Ltd, the Lady Chatterley’s Lover case. (photo from the 1955 film L’Amant de lady Chatterley with Danielle Darrieux and Erno Crisa)

Lady Chatterley’s Lover is a novel by D. H. Lawrence, first published privately in 1928 in Italy, and in 1929 in France and Australia.  An unexpurgated edition was not published openly in the United Kingdom until 1960, when it was the subject of a watershed obscenity trial against the publisher Penguin Books.  Penguin won the case, and quickly sold 3 million copies.  The book soon became notorious for its story of the physical/emotional relationship between a working class man and an upper class woman, its explicit descriptions of sex, and its use of then-unprintable words.

The story concerns a young married woman, Constance (Lady Chatterley), whose upper class husband, Clifford Chatterley, described as a handsome, well-built man, has been paralysed from the waist down due to a Great War injury.  In addition to Clifford’s physical limitations, his emotional neglect of Constance forces distance between the couple.  Her sexual frustration leads her into an affair with the gamekeeper, Oliver Mellors.  The class difference between the couple highlights a major motif of the novel which is the unfair dominance of intellectuals over the working class.  The novel is about Constance’s realization that she cannot live with the mind alone; she must also be alive physically.  This realization stems from a heightened sexual experience Constance has only felt with Mellors, suggesting that love can only happen with the element of the body, not the mind.

• So they had given the gift of themselves, each to the youth with whom she had the most subtle and intimate arguments.  The arguments, the discussions were the great thing: the love-making and connection were only sort of primitive reversion and a bit of an anti-climax.
• Clifford Chatterley was more upper class than Connie. Connie was well-to-do intelligentsia, but he was aristocracy. Not the big sort, but still it. His father was a baronet, and his mother had been a viscount’s daughter.

British poet Philip Larkin’s poem “Annus Mirabilis” begins with a reference to the trial:

Sexual intercourse began

In nineteen sixty-three

(which was rather late for me) –

Between the end of the “Chatterley” ban

And the Beatles’ first LP.

• Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically.
• The world is supposed to be full of possibilities, but they narrow down to pretty few in most personal experience. There’s lots of good fish in the sea … maybe … but the vast masses seem to be mackerel or herring, and if you’re not mackerel or herring yourself you are likely to find very few good fish in the sea.

• And dimly she realized one of the great laws of the human soul: that when the emotional soul receives a wounding shock, which does not kill the body, the soul seems to recover as the body recovers. But this is only appearance. It is really only the mechanism of the reassumed habit. Slowly, slowly the wound to the soul begins to make itself felt, like a bruise, which only slowly deepens its terrible ache, till it fills all the psyche. And when we think we have recovered and forgotten, it is then that the terrible after-effects have to be encountered at their worst.

• Folks should do their own fuckin’, then they wouldn’t want to listen to a lot of clatfart about another man’s.

• I believe in being warm-hearted. I believe especially in being warm-hearted in love, in fucking with a warm heart. I believe if men could fuck with warm hearts, and the women take it warm-heartedly, everything would come all right. It’s all the cold-hearted fucking that is death and idiocy.

• The Italians are not passionate: passion has deep reserves. They are easily moved, and often affectionate, but they rarely have any abiding passion of any sort.

• Money poisons you when you’ve got it, and starves you when you haven’t.

Mac Tag

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d h lawrence, lady chatterleys lover, the lovers almanac

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

put on the candlelight

what voice this,
that most persuades
once more be thus,
that will be the last

you come more near than most
and that is what must be sought

there is no holdin’ back,
the verse, the words
hear them
they are for you

and imagine,
the days of us

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

thanks Karen…

“Every day
is Día de Muertos
if it’s spent without the one
who makes you feel alive.”

remember when you wrote, imagine…
i believe i wrote back,
that would be a dream come true
so far, it has been a dream
and a pleasure
and i thank you

snow yesterday
but the sun came out
and melted it all away
still chilly though,
so there is a fire
in the wood stove

now imagine a man
pourin’ dark red wine
listenin’ to Lou Reed
and writin’ verse
in solitude
a man with so much
and yet without

a man with feelin’s
as cold as the snow
waitin’ for a thaw
a man imaginin’
a day
with the one

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

On this day in 1604 – William Shakespeare’s tragedy Othello is performed for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.

Act I

• In following him, I follow but myself.
  • Iago, scene I

• Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,
  But seeming so, for my peculiar end:
  For when my outward action doth demonstrate
  The native act and figure of my heart
  In compliment extern, ’tis not long after
  But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve
  For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.
  • Iago, scene I

• Even now, now, very now, an old black ram
  Is tupping your white ewe.
  • Iago, scene I

• Your daughter and the Moor are now making the beast with two backs.
  • Iago, scene I

• Keep up your bright swords, for the dew will rust them.
  • Othello, scene II

• Most potent, grave, and reverend signiors,
  My very noble and approved good masters,
  That I have ta’en away this old man’s daughter,
  It is most true; true, I have married her:
  The very head and front of my offending
  Hath this extent, no more. Rude am I in my speech,
  And little bless’d with the soft phrase of peace:
  For since these arms of mine had seven years’ pith,
  Till now some nine moons wasted, they have used
  Their dearest action in the tented field,
  And little of this great world can I speak,
  More than pertains to feats of broil and battle,
  And therefore little shall I grace my cause
  In speaking for myself. Yet, by your gracious patience,
  I will a round unvarnish’d tale deliver
  Of my whole course of love; what drugs, what charms,
  What conjuration and what mighty magic,
  For such proceeding I am charged withal,
  I won his daughter.
  • Othello, scene III

• Her father loved me; oft invited me;
  Still question’d me the story of my life,
  From year to year, the battles, sieges, fortunes,
  That I have passed.
  I ran it through, even from my boyish days,
  To the very moment that he bade me tell it;
  Wherein I spake of most disastrous chances,
  Of moving accidents by flood and field
  Of hair-breadth scapes i’ the imminent deadly breach,
  Of being taken by the insolent foe
  And sold to slavery, of my redemption thence
  And portance in my travels’ history:
  Wherein of antres vast and deserts idle,
  Rough quarries, rocks and hills whose heads touch heaven
  It was my hint to speak,–such was the process;
  And of the Cannibals that each other eat,
  The Anthropophagi and men whose heads
  Do grow beneath their shoulders. This to hear
  Would Desdemona seriously incline:
  But still the house-affairs would draw her thence:
  Which ever as she could with haste dispatch,
  She’ld come again, and with a greedy ear
  Devour up my discourse: which I observing,
  Took once a pliant hour, and found good means
  To draw from her a prayer of earnest heart
  That I would all my pilgrimage dilate,
  Whereof by parcels she had something heard,
  But not intentively: I did consent,
  And often did beguile her of her tears,
  When I did speak of some distressful stroke
  That my youth suffer’d. My story being done,
  She gave me for my pains a world of sighs:
  She swore, in faith, twas strange, ’twas passing strange,
  ‘Twas pitiful, ’twas wondrous pitiful:
  She wish’d she had not heard it, yet she wish’d
  That heaven had made her such a man: she thank’d me,
  And bade me, if I had a friend that loved her,
  I should but teach him how to tell my story.
  And that would woo her. Upon this hint I spake:
  She loved me for the dangers I had pass’d,
  And I loved her that she did pity them.
  This only is the witchcraft I have used:
  Here comes the lady; let her witness it.
  • Othello, scene III

• That I did love the Moor to live with him,
  My downright violence and storm of fortunes
  May trumpet to the world: my heart’s subdued
  Even to the very quality of my lord:
  • Desdemona, scene III

• But he bears both the sentence and the sorrow
  That, to pay grief, must of poor patience borrow.
  • Duke, scene III

• The robb’d that smiles, steals something from the thief;
  He robs himself that spends a bootless grief.
  • Duke of Venice, scene III

• Look to her, Moor, if thou hast eyes to see:
  She has deceived her father, and may thee.
  • Brabantio, scene III

• Thus do I ever make my fool my purse.
  • Iago, scene III

• I hate the Moor;
  And it is thought abroad, that ‘twixt my sheets
  He has done my office: I know not if ‘t be true;
  But I, for mere suspicion in that kind, will do as if for surety.
  • Iago, scene III

• The Moor is of a free and open nature,
  That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,
  And will as tenderly be led by the nose
  As asses are.
  • Iago, scene III

Act II

• If after every tempest come such calms,
  May the winds blow till they have waken’d death!
  • Othello, scene i

• She never yet was foolish that was fair; For even her folly help’d her to an heir.
  • Iago, scene I

• Knavery’s plain face is never seen till us’d.
  • Iago, scene i

• Reputation is an idle and most false imposition; oft got without merit and lost without deserving.
  • Iago, scene iii

• Now, by heaven,
  My blood begins my safer guides to rule;
  And passion, having my best judgment collied,
  Assays to lead the way. ‘Zounds, if I stir,
  Or do but lift this arm, the best of you
  Shall sink in my rebuke. Give me to know
  How this foul rout began, who set it on;
  And he that is approv’d in this offence,
  Though he had twinn’d with me, both at a birth,
  Shall lose me. What! in a town of war,
  Yet wild, the people’s hearts brimful of fear,
  To manage private and domestic quarrel?
  In night, and on the court and guard of safety?
  ‘Tis monstrous. Iago, who began’t?
  • Othello, scene iii

• And what’s he then that says I play the villain?
  When this advice is free I give and honest,
  Probal to thinking and indeed the course
  To win the Moor again? For ’tis most easy
  The inclining Desdemona to subdue
  In any honest suit: she’s framed as fruitful
  As the free elements. And then for her
  To win the Moor — were’t to renounce his baptism,
  All seals and symbols of redeemed sin,
  His soul is so enfetter’d to her love,
  That she may make, unmake, do what she list,
  Even as her appetite shall play the god
  With his weak function. How am I then a villain
  To counsel Cassio to this parallel course,
  Directly to his good? Divinity of hell!
  When devils will the blackest sins put on,
  They do suggest at first with heavenly shows,
  As I do now: for whiles this honest fool
  Plies Desdemona to repair his fortunes
  And she for him pleads strongly to the Moor,
  I’ll pour this pestilence into his ear,
  That she repeals him for her body’s lust;
  And by how much she strives to do him good,
  She shall undo her credit with the Moor.
  So will I turn her virtue into pitch,
  And out of her own goodness make the net
  That shall enmesh them all.
  • Iago, scene iii

Act III

• Then put up your pipes in your bag, for I’ll away. Go, vanish into air, away!
  • Clown, scene i

• Excellent wretch! Perdition catch my soul,
  But I do love thee; and when I love thee not,
  Chaos is come again.
  • Othello, scene iii

• Men should be what they seem;
  Or those that be not, would they might seem none!
  • Iago, scene iii

• Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
  Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
  Who steals my purse steals trash; ’tis something, nothing;
  ’Twas mine, ’tis his, and has been slave to thousands;
  But he that filches from me my good name,
  Robs me of that which not enriches him,
  And makes me poor indeed.
  • Iago, scene iii

• O! beware, my lord, of jealousy;
  It is the green-ey’d monster which doth mock
  The meat it feeds on.
  • Iago, scene iii

• Think’st thou I’d make a life of jealousy,
  To follow still the changes of the moon
  With fresh suspicions? No; to be once in doubt,
  Is once to be resolved.
  • Othello, scene iii

• She did deceive her father, marrying you;
  And when she seem’d to shake and fear your looks
  She lov’d them most.
  • Iago, scene iii

• Othello: I do not think but Desdemona’s honest.
  Iago: Long live she so, and long live you to think so!
  Othello: And, yet, how nature erring from itself,—
  Iago: Ay, there’s the point.
  • Scene iii

• If she be false, O! then heaven mocks itself.
  I’ll not believe’t.
  • Othello, scene iii

• O! now, for ever
  Farewell the tranquil mind; farewell content!
  • Othello, scene iii

• Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore,
  Be sure of it; give me the ocular proof;
  Or, by the worth of mine eternal soul,
  Thou hadst been better have been born a dog
  Than answer my wak’d wrath.
  • Othello, scene iii

• There are a kind of men so loose of soul,
  That in their sleeps will mutter their affairs.
  • Iago, scene iii

• ‘Tis not a year or two shows us a man:
  They are all but stomachs, and we all but food;
  They eat us hungerly, and when they are full,
  They belch us.
  • Emilia, scene iv

Act IV

• Do it not with poison, strangle her in her bed.
  • Iago, scene i

• Who would not make her husband a cuckold to make him a monarch?
  • Emilia, scene iii

• Heaven me such uses send,
  Not to pick bad from bad, but by bad mend.
  • Desdemona, scene iii

Act V

• O damn’d Iago! O inhuman dog!
  • Roderigo, scene i

• Put out the light, and then put out the light.
  • Othello, scene ii

• [He kisses her]
  O balmy breath, that dost almost persuade
  Justice to break her sword. One more, one more!
  Be thus when thou art dead, and I will kill thee,
  And love thee after. One more, and that’s the last!
  So sweet was ne’er so fatal. I must weep,
  But they are cruel tears. This sorrow’s heavenly;
  It strikes where it doth love. She wakes.
  • Othello, scene ii

• What noise is this? Not dead — not yet quite dead?
  I that am cruel am yet merciful;
  I would not have the linger in thy pain
  So, so.
  • Othello, scene ii

• It is the very error of the moon;
  She comes more near the earth than she was wont;
  And makes men mad.
  • Othello, scene ii

• I hold my peace, sir? no;
  No, I will speak as liberal as the north;
  Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
  All, all, cry shame against me, yet I’ll speak.
  • Emilia, scene ii

• Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:
  From this time forth I never will speak word.
  • Iago, scene ii

• I pray you, in your letters,
  When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,
  Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,
  Nor set down aught in malice: then, must you speak
  Of one that lov’d not wisely but too well;
  Of one not easily jealous, but, being wrought,
  Perplex’d in the extreme; of one whose hand,
  Like the base Indian, threw a pearl away
  Richer than all his tribe; of one whose subdu’d eyes
  Albeit unused to the melting mood,
  Drop tears as fast as the Arabian trees
  Their med’cinable gum. Set you down this;
  And say besides, that in Aleppo once,
  Where a malignant and a turban’d Turk
  Beat a Venetian and traduc’d the state,
  I took by the throat the circumcised dog,
  And smote him thus.
  • Othello, scene ii

• I kissed thee ere I killed thee, no way but this,
  Killing myself, to die upon a kiss.
  • Othello, scene ii

On this day in 1611 – Shakespeare’s play The Tempest is performed for the first time, at Whitehall Palace in London.

The shipwreck in Act I, Scene 1, in a 1797 engraving by Benjamin Smith after a painting by George Romney

The Tempest is a play by William Shakespeare, believed to have been written in 1610–11.  It is set on a remote island, where the sorcerer Prospero, rightful Duke of Milan, plots to restore his daughter Miranda to her rightful place using illusion and skillful manipulation.  He conjures up a storm, the eponymous tempest, to lure his usurping brother Antonio and the complicit King Alonso of Naples to the island. There, his machinations bring about the revelation of Antonio’s lowly nature, the redemption of the King, and the marriage of Miranda to Alonso’s son, Ferdinand.

Prospero and Miranda from a painting by William Maw Egley; ca. 1850

 

Miranda by John William Waterhouse

 

A depiction from Nicholas Rowe’s 1709 edition of Shakespeare’s plays of the stage direction of the opening of the 1674 adaptation 

Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
As I foretold you, were all spirits and
Are melted into air, into thin air;
And—like the baseless fabric of this vision—
The cloud-capped towers, the gorgeous palaces,
The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
And like this insubstantial pageant faded,
Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
As dreams are made on, and our little life
Is rounded with a sleep. …

 —Prospero 

Ariel (Fuseli, c.1800–1810) 

Ferdinand Lured by Ariel by John Everett Millais, 1850 

Prospero, Ariel and sleeping Miranda from a painting by William Hamilton 

Oil sketch of Emma Hart, as Miranda, by George Romney 

Miranda and Ferdinand by Angelica Kauffman, 1782 

A charcoal drawing by Charles Buchel of Herbert Beerbohm Tree as Caliban in the 1904 production.  

Caliban, Stephano and Trinculo dancing, detail of a painting by Johann Heinrich Ramberg 

“Miranda” by Frederick Goodall, from the Graphic Gallery of Shakespeare’s Heroines 

William Hogarth’s painting of The Tempest ca. 1735.

Fyodor Paramonov as Caliban, Maly Theatre (Moscow), 1905

Act I

• Antonio: Where is the master, boatswain?
  Boatswain: Do you not hear him? You mar our labour: keep your cabins; you do assist the storm.
  Gonzalo: Nay, good, be patient.
  Boatswain: When the sea is. Hence! What cares these roarers for the name of king? To cabin! silence! Trouble us not.
  Gonzalo: Good, yet remember whom thou hast aboard.
  Boatswain: None that I more love than myself. You are counsellor; — if you can command these elements to silence, and work the peace of the present, we will not hand a rope more. Use your authority; if you cannot, give thanks you have liv’d so long, and make yourself ready in your cabin for the mischance of the hour, if it so hap.
  • Scene i

• I have great comfort from this fellow. Methinks he hath no drowning mark upon him; his complexion is perfect gallows.
  • Gonzalo, scene i

• A pox o’ your throat, you bawling, blasphemous,
  incharitable dog!
  • Sebastian, scene i

• All lost! to prayers, to prayers! All lost!
  • Mariners, scene i

• Now would I give a thousand furlongs of sea for an acre of barren ground — long heath, brown furze, anything. The wills above be done, but I would fain die a dry death.
  • Gonzalo, scene i

• Miranda: If by your art, my dearest father, you have
  Put the wild waters in this roar, allay them.
  The sky, it seems, would pour down stinking pitch,
  But that the sea, mounting to the welkin’s cheek,
  Dashes the fire out. O, I have suffered
  With those that I saw suffer! A brave vessel,
  Who had, no doubt, some noble creatures in her,
  Dash’d all to pieces! O, the cry did knock
  Against my very heart! Poor souls, they perish’d!
  Had I been any god of power, I would
  Have sunk the sea within the earth, or e’er
  It should the good ship so have swallow’d, and
  The fraughting souls within her.
  Prospero: Be collected;
  No more amazement; tell your piteous heart
  There’s no harm done.
  Miranda: O, woe the day!
  Prospero: No harm.
  I have done nothing but in care of thee —
  Of thee, my dear one! thee, my daughter.
  • Scene ii

• Miranda: You have often
  Begun to tell me what I am; but stopp’d,
  And left me to a bootless inquisition,
  Concluding, Stay; not yet.
  Prospero: The hour’s now come;
  The very minute bids thee ope thine ear.
  • Scene ii

• What see’st thou else
  In the dark backward and abysm of time?
  • Prospero, scene ii

• The government I cast upon my brother,
  And to my state grew stranger, being transported
  And rapt in secret studies.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• I, thus neglecting worldly ends, all dedicated
  To closeness, and the bettering of my mind
  • Prospero, scene ii

• Like one
  Who having unto truth, by telling of it,
  Made such a sinner of his memory,
  To credit his own lie.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• My library
  Was dukedom large enough.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• Knowing I lov’d my books, he furnish’d me,
  From mine own library, with volumes that
  I prize above my dukedom.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• Know thus far forth:
  By accident most strange, bountiful Fortune —
  Now my dear lady — hath mine enemies
  Brought to this shore; and by my prescience
  I find my zenith doth depend upon
  A most auspicious star, whose influence
  If now I court not, but omit, my fortunes
  Will ever after droop.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• All hail, great master! grave sir, hail! I come
  To answer thy best pleasure; be’t to fly,
  To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
  On the curl’d clouds. To thy strong bidding task
  Ariel, and all his quality.
  • Ariel, scene ii

• Ferdinand,
  With hair up-staring, — then like reeds, not hair, —
  was the first man that leapt; cried Hell is empty,
  And all the devils are here.
  • Ariel, scene ii

• From the still-vex’d Bermoothes.
  • Ariel, scene ii

• I will be correspondent to command,
  And do my spriting gently.
  • Ariel, scene ii

• Caliban: As wicked dew as e’er my mother brush’d
  With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen,
  Drop on you both! a south-west blow on ye,
  And blister you all o’er!
  Prospero: For this, be sure, to-night thou shalt have cramps,
  Side-stitches that shall pen thy breath up; urchins
  Shall, for that vast of night that they may work,
  All exercise on thee; thou shalt be pinch’d
  As thick as honeycomb, each pinch more stinging
  Than bees that made ’em.
  • Scene ii

• This island’s mine, by Sycorax my mother,
  Which thou tak’st from me. When thou cam’st first,
  Thou strok’st me and made much of me, wouldst give me
  Water with berries in’t, and teach me how
  To name the bigger light, and how the less,
  That burn by day and night; and then I lov’d thee,
  And show’d thee all the qualities o’ the isle,
  The fresh springs, brine-pits, barren place and fertile.
  Curs’d be I that did so! All the charms
  Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats, light on you!
  For I am all the subjects that you have,
  Which first was mine own king.
  • Caliban, scene ii

• You taught me language, and my profit on’t
  Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you,
  For learning me your language!
  • Caliban, scene ii

• If thou neglect’st, or dost unwillingly
  What I command, I’ll rack thee with old cramps,
  Fill all thy bones with aches, make thee roar,
  That beasts shall tremble at thy din.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• Come unto these yellow sands,
  And then take hands;
  Curt’sied when you have and kiss’d,
  The wild waves whist,
  Foot it featly here and there,
  And, sweet sprites, the burden bear.
  • Ariel, scene ii

• Full fathom five thy father lies;
  Of his bones are coral made;
  Those are pearls that were his eyes;
  Nothing of him that doth fade,
  But doth suffer a sea-change
  Into something rich and strange.
  Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:
  Ding-dong.
  Hark! now I hear them — Ding-dong, bell.
  • Ariel, scene ii

• The fringed curtains of thine eye advance,
  And say what thou seest yond.
  • Prospero, scene ii

• This
  Is the third man that e’er I saw; the first
  That e’er I sigh’d for.
  • Miranda, scene ii

• There’s nothing ill can dwell in such a temple:
  If the ill spirit have so fair a house,
  Good things will strive to dwell with ’t.
  • Miranda, scene ii

• My spirits, as in a dream, are all bound up.
  My father’s loss, the weakness which I feel,
  The wreck of all my friends, nor this man’s threats,
  To whom I am subdu’d, are but light to me,
  Might I but through my prison once a day
  Behold this maid. All corners else o’ th’ earth
  Let liberty make use of; space enough
  Have I in such a prison.
  • Ferdinand, scene ii

Act II

• Gonzalo: Here is everything advantageous to life.
  Antonio: True; save means to live.
  • Scene i

• Alonso: You cram these words into mine ears against
  The stomach of my sense. Would I had never
  Married my daughter there! for, coming thence,
  My son is lost; and, in my rate, she too,
  Who is so far from Italy remov’d
  I ne’er again shall see her. O thou mine heir
  Of Naples and of Milan, what strange fish
  Hath made his meal on thee?
  Francesco: Sir, he may live:
  I saw him beat the surges under him,
  And ride upon their backs; he trod the water,
  Whose enmity he flung aside, and breasted
  The surge most swol’n that met him; his bold head
  ‘Bove the contentious waves he kept, and oar’d
  Himself with his good arms in lusty stroke
  To the shore, that o’er his wave-worn basis bow’d,
  As stooping to relieve him; I not doubt
  He came alive to land.
  • Scene i

• Sebastian: Well, I am standing water.
  Antonio: I’ll teach you how to flow.
  • Scene i

• We all were sea-swallow’d, though some cast again:
  And, by that destiny, to perform an act,
  Whereof what’s past is prologue, what to come
  In yours and my discharge.
  • Antonio, scene I

• While you here do snoring lie,
  Open-ey’d Conspiracy
  His time doth take.
  If of life you keep a care,
  Shake off slumber, and beware.
  Awake, awake!
  • Ariel, scene i

• All the infections that the sun sucks up
  From bogs, fens, flats, on Prosper fall, and make him
  By inch-meal a disease! His spirits hear me,
  And yet I needs must curse; but they’ll nor pinch,
  Fright me with urchin-shows, pitch me i’ the mire,
  Nor lead me, like a firebrand, in the dark
  Out of my way, unless he bid ’em; but
  For every trifle are they set upon me;
  Sometime like apes, that moe and chatter at me,
  And after, bite me; then like hedgehogs, which
  Lie tumbling in my barefoot way, and mount
  Their pricks at my footfall; sometime am I
  All wound with adders, who, with cloven tongues,
  Do hiss me into madness.
  • Caliban, scene ii

• A very ancient and fish-like smell.
  • Trinculo, scene ii

• Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.
  • Trinculo, scene ii

• The master, the swabber, the boatswain, and I,
  The gunner, and his mate,
  Lov’d Mall, Meg, and Marian, and Margery,
  But none of us car’d for Kate;
  For she had a tongue with a tang,
  Would cry to a sailor Go hang!
  She lov’d not the savour of tar nor of pitch,
  Yet a tailor might scratch her where’er she did itch.
  Then to sea, boys, and let her go hang!
  This is a scurvy tune too; but here’s my comfort. [Drinks]
  • Stephano, scene ii

• Stephano: Here; swear then how thou escapedst.
  Trinculo: Swam ashore man, like a duck; I can swim like a duck, I’ll be sworn.
  Stephano: Here, kiss the book. Though thou canst swim like a duck, thou art made like a goose.
  • Scene ii

• Caliban: Hast thou not dropp’d from heaven?
  Stephano: Out o’ th’ moon, I do assure thee; I was the Man i’ th’ Moon, when time was.
  Caliban: I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee.
  My mistress show’d me thee, and thy dog and thy bush.
  • Scene ii

• I prithee, be my god.
  • Caliban, scene ii

Act III

• There be some sports are painful, and their labour
  Delight in them sets off; some kinds of baseness
  Are nobly undergone; and most poor matters
  Point to rich ends. This my mean task
  Would be as heavy to me as odious, but
  The mistress which I serve quickens what’s dead,
  And makes my labours pleasures.
  • Ferdinand, scene i

• Full many a lady
  I have ey’d with best regard; and many a time
  The harmony of their tongues hath into bondage
  Brought my too diligent ear; for several virtues
  Have I lik’d several women, never any
  With so full soul, but some defect in her
  Did quarrel with the noblest grace she ow’d,
  And put it to the foil; but you, O you,
  So perfect and so peerless, are created
  Of every creature’s best!
  • Ferdinand, scene i

• Miranda: Do you love me?
  Ferdinand: O heaven! O earth! Bear witness to this sound,
  And crown what I confess with kind event,
  If I speak true! If hollowly, invert
  What best is boded me to mischief! I,
  Beyond all limit of what else i’ the world
  Do love, prize, honour you.
  • Scene i

• Ferdinand: Wherefore weep you?
  Miranda: At mine unworthiness, that dare not offer
  What I desire to give, and much less take
  What I shall die to want.
  • Scene i

• I am your wife, if you will marry me;
  If not, I’ll die your maid. To be your fellow
  You may deny me; but I’ll be your servant,
  Whether you will or no.
  • Miranda, scene i

• Ferdinand: Here ’s my hand.
  Miranda: And mine, with my heart in ’t.
  • Scene i

• Servant-monster! the folly of this island! They say there’s but five upon this isle: we are three of them; if th’ other two be brain’d like us, the state totters.
  • Trinculo, scene ii

• How does thy honour? Let me lick thy shoe.
  I’ll not serve him, he is not valiant.
  • Caliban, scene ii

• Ariel: Thou liest.
  Caliban: Thou liest, thou jesting monkey, thou: I would my
  valiant monster would destroy thee: I do not lie.
  Stephano: Trinculo, if you trouble him any more in’s tale, by this hand, I will supplant some of your teeth.
  • Scene ii

• Why, as I told thee, ’tis a custom with him
  I’ the afternoon to sleep; there thou mayst brain him,
  Having first seiz’d his books; or with a log
  Batter his skull, or paunch him with a stake,
  Or cut his wezand with thy knife. Remember,
  First to possess his books; for without them
  He’s but a sot, as I am, nor hath not
  One spirit to command: they all do hate him,
  As rootedly as I — burn but his books.
  • Caliban, scene ii

• Flout ’em and scout ’em, and scout ’em and flout ’em;
  Thought is free.
  • Stephano, scene ii

• He that dies pays all debts: I defy thee. Mercy upon us!
  • Stephano, scene ii

• Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,
  Sounds, and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.
  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments
  Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,
  That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,
  Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,
  The clouds methought would open and show riches
  Ready to drop upon me, that, when I wak’d,
  I cried to dream again.
  • Caliban, scene ii

• Alonso: Give us kind keepers, heavens! What were these?
  Sebastian: A living drollery. Now I will believe
  That there are unicorns; that in Arabia
  There is one tree, the phoenix’ throne, one phoenix
  At this hour reigning there.
  Antonio: I’ll believe both;
  And what does else want credit, come to me,
  And I’ll be sworn ’tis true; travellers ne’er did lie,
  Though fools at home condemn ’em.
  • Scene iii

• A kind
  Of excellent dumb discourse.
  • Alonso, scene iii

• You are three men of sin, whom Destiny, —
  That hath to instrument this lower world
  And what is in’t, —the never-surfeited sea
  Hath caus’d to belch up you; and on this island
  Where man doth not inhabit, you ‘mongst men
  Being most unfit to live. I have made you mad;
  And even with such-like valour, men hang and drown
  Their proper selves.
  [Alonso, Sebastian, etc., draw their swords]
  You fools! I and my fellows
  Are ministers of Fate; the elements,
  Of whom your swords are temper’d may as well
  Wound the loud winds, or with bemock’d-at stabs
  Kill the still-closing waters, as diminish
  One dowle that’s in my plume.
  • Ariel, scene iii

• O, it is monstrous, monstrous!
  Methought the billows spoke, and told me of it;
  The winds did sing it to me; and the thunder,
  That deep and dreadful organ-pipe, pronounc’d
  The name of Prospero; it did bass my trespass.
  Therefore my son i’ the ooze is bedded; and,
  I’ll seek him deeper than e’er plummet sounded,
  And with him there lie mudded.
  • Alonso, scene iii

Act IV

• The strongest oaths are straw
  To th’ fire i’ the blood. Be more abstemious,
  Or else good night your vow!
  • Prospero, scene i

• Ceres: Hail, many-coloured messenger, that ne’er
  Dost disobey the wife of Jupiter;
  Who, with thy saffron wings, upon my flow’rs
  Diffusest honey drops, refreshing show’rs;
  And with each end of thy blue bow dost crown
  My bosky acres and my unshrubb’d down,
  Rich scarf to my proud earth; — why hath thy Queen
  Summon’d me hither to this short-grass’d green?
  Iris: A contract of true love to celebrate,
  And some donation freely to estate
  On the blest lovers.
  • Scene i

• Our revels now are ended. These our actors,
  As I foretold you, were all spirits, and
  Are melted into air, into thin air;
  And, like the baseless fabric of this vision,
  The cloud-capp’d towers, the gorgeous palaces,
  The solemn temples, the great globe itself,
  Yea, all which it inherit, shall dissolve,
  And, like this insubstantial pageant faded,
  Leave not a rack behind. We are such stuff
  As dreams are made on; and our little life
  Is rounded with a sleep.
  • Prospero, scene i

• Pray you, tread softly, that the blind mole may not
  Hear a foot fall; we now are near his cell.
  • Caliban, scene i

• Trinculo: Ay, but to lose our bottles in the pool —
  Stephano: There is not only disgrace and dishonor in that, monster, but an infinite loss.
  • scene i

• With foreheads villainous low.
  • Caliban, scene i

Act V

• Though with their high wrongs I am struck to the quick,
  Yet, with my nobler reason ‘gainst my fury
  Do I take part; the rarer action is
  In virtue than in vengeance.
  • Prospero, scene i

• Ye elves of hills, brooks, standing lakes, and groves;
  And ye that on the sands with printless foot
  Do chase the ebbing Neptune, and do fly him
  When he comes back; you demi-puppets that
  By moonshine do the green sour ringlets make,
  Whereof the ewe not bites; and you whose pastime
  Is to make midnight mushrooms, that rejoice
  To hear the solemn curfew; by whose aid —
  Weak masters though ye be — I have be-dimm’d
  The noontide sun, call’d forth the mutinous winds,
  And ‘twixt the green sea and the azur’d vault
  Set roaring war. To the dread rattling thunder
  Have I given fire, and rifted Jove’s stout oak
  With his own bolt; the strong-bas’d promontory
  Have I made shake, and by the spurs pluck’d up
  The pine and cedar. Graves at my command,
  Have wak’d their sleepers, op’d, and let ’em forth,
  By my so potent art. But this rough magic
  I here abjure; and, when I have requir’d
  Some heavenly music — which even now I do, —
  To work mine end upon their senses that
  This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
  Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
  And, deeper than did ever plummet sound,
  I’ll drown my book.
  • Prospero, scene i

• Where the bee sucks, there suck I;
  In a cowslip’s bell I lie;
  There I couch when owls do cry.
  On the bat’s back I do fly
  After summer merrily.
  Merrily, merrily, shall I live now,
  Under the blossom that hangs on the bough.
  • Ariel, scene i

• O, wonder!
  How many goodly creatures are there here!
  How beauteous mankind is! O brave new world,
  That has such people in’t!
  • Miranda, scene i
  • It is this statement by Miranda which provided Aldous Huxley the title of his dystopian novel, Brave New World, in which “The Savage” quotes this passage.

Epilogue

• Now my charms are all o’erthrown,
  And what strength I have’s mine own,
  Which is most faint: now, ’tis true,
  I must be here confin’d by you,
  Or sent to Naples. Let me not,
  Since I have my dukedom got
  And pardon’d the deceiver, dwell
  In this bare island by your spell;
  But release me from my bands
  With the help of your good hands.
  Gentle breath of yours my sails
  Must fill, or else my project fails,
  Which was to please. Now I want
  Spirits to enforce, art to enchant;
  And my ending is despair,
  Unless I be reliev’d by prayer,
  Which pierces so that it assaults
  Mercy itself, and frees all faults.
  As you from crimes would pardon’d be,
  Let your indulgence set me free.
  • Prospero

William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase in 1900

Today is the birthday of William Merritt Chase (Nineveh, Indiana; November 1, 1849 – October 25, 1916 New York City); painter, known as an exponent of Impressionism and as a teacher.  He is also responsible for establishing the Chase School, which later would become Parsons The New School for Design.

Gallery 

Femmes sous Treillis. 1886

Self portrait, 1915–16, oil on canvas, Richmond Art Museum

 “Keying Up” – The Court Jester, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts 

Studio Interior, c. 1882, Brooklyn Museum

Lydia Field Emmet, 1892, oil on canvas, Brooklyn Museum

Mrs. Chase in Pink, Figge Art Museum 

A Friendly Call, 1895. National Gallery of Art 

Landscape: Shinnecock, Long Island, c. 1896, Princeton University Art Museum

Still Life, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston 

• 

  Mrs Chase Playing the Piano, 1883

• 

  Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler, 1883

• 

  A Modern Magdalen, 1888

• 

  Open Air Breakfast, 1888

• 

  An Afternoon Stroll, c. 1895 San Diego Museum of Art

• 

  First Touch of Autumn, 1898

• 

  A Sunny Day at Shinnecock Bay, c. 1892

• 

  In The Studio, c. 1892-3

• 

  The Song, 1907

• 

  The Moorish Warrior, ca. 1878. Brooklyn Museum.

• 

  Girl in a Japanese Costume, ca. 1890. Brooklyn Museum

• 

  Study of a Girl in Japanese Dress ca. 1895 Brooklyn Museum

Stephen Crane
Formal portrait of Stephen Crane taken in Washington, D.C., about March 1896

Today is the birthday of Stephen Crane (Newark, New Jersey; November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900 Badenweiler, German Empire); poet, novelist, and short story writer. Prolific throughout his short life, he wrote notable works in the Realist tradition as well as early examples of American Naturalism and Impressionism.  In my opinion, one of the most innovative writers of his generation.

In 1896, Crane endured a highly publicized scandal after appearing as a witness in the trial of a suspected prostitute, an acquaintance named Dora Clark.  Late that year he accepted an offer to travel to Cuba as a war correspondent.  As he waited in Jacksonville, Florida, for passage, he met Cora Taylor, with whom he began a lasting relationship.  En route to Cuba, Crane’s vessel the SS Commodore, sank off the coast of Florida, leaving him and others adrift for 30 hours in a dinghy.  Crane described the ordeal in “The Open Boat”.  During the final years of his life, he covered conflicts in Greece (accompanied by Cora, recognized as the first woman war correspondent) and later lived in England with her.  He was befriended by writers such as Joseph Conrad and H. G. Wells.  Plagued by financial difficulties and ill health, Crane died of tuberculosis in a Black Forest sanatorium in Germany at the age of 28.

Crane’s writing is characterized by vivid intensity, distinctive dialects, and irony.  Common themes involve fear, spiritual crises and social isolation.  Although recognized primarily for The Red Badge of Courage, which has become an American classic, Crane is also known for his poetry, journalism, and short stories such as “The Open Boat”, “The Blue Hotel”, “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky”, and The Monster.  His writing made a deep impression on 20th-century writers, most prominent among them Ernest Hemingway, and is thought to have inspired the Modernists and the Imagists.

Verse 

• Unwind my riddle.
  Cruel as hawks the hours fly;
  Wounded men seldom come home to die;
  The hard waves see an arm flung high;
  Scorn hits strong because of a lie;
  Yet there exists a mystic tie.
  Unwind my riddle.
  • Epigraph in “The Clan of No Name” (1899); published in the anthology Wounds in the Rain (1900)

The Black Riders and Other Lines (1895)

• In the desert
  I saw a creature, naked, bestial,
  Who, squatting upon the ground,
  Held his heart in his hands,
  And ate of it.
  I said, “Is it good, friend?”
  “It is bitter—bitter,” he answered;
  “But I like it
  Because it is bitter,
  And because it is my heart.”
  • III

• If there is a witness to my little life,
  To my tiny throes and struggles,
  He sees a fool;
  And it is not fine for gods to menace fools.
  • XIII

• I saw a man pursuing the horizon;
  Round and round they sped.
  I was disturbed at this;
  I accosted the man.
  “It is futile,” I said,
  “You can never—”
• “You lie,” he cried,
  And ran on.
  • XXIV

War Is Kind and Other Lines (1899)

• Do not weep, maiden, for war is kind.
  Because your lover threw wild hands toward the sky
  And the affrighted steed ran on alone,
  Do not weep.
  War is kind.
  • Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind, No. 1, st. 1

• Hoarse, booming drums of the regiment,
  Little souls who thirst for fight,
  These men were born to drill and die.
  The unexplained glory flies above them,
  Great is the battle-god, great, and his kingdom —
  A field where a thousand corpses lie.
  • Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind, st. 2

• Do not weep, babe, for war is kind.
  Because your father tumbled in the yellow trenches,
  Raged at his breast, gulped and died,
  Do not weep.
  War is kind.
  • Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind, st. 3

• Swift blazing flag of the regiment,
  Eagle with crest of red and gold,
  These men were born to drill and die.
  Point for them the virtue of slaughter,
  Make plain to them the excellence of killing
  And a field where a thousand corpses lie.
  • Do Not Weep, Maiden, For War is Kind, st. 4

• The wayfarer,
  Perceiving the pathway to truth,
  Was struck with astonishment.
  It was thickly grown with weeds.
  “Ha,” he said,
  “I see that none has passed here
  In a long time.”
  Later he saw that each weed
  Was a singular knife.
  “Well,” he mumbled at last,
  “Doubtless there are other roads.”
  • The Wayfarer, No. 13

• A man said to the universe:
  “Sir I exist!”
  “However,” replied the universe,
  “The fact has not created in me
  A sense of obligation.”
  • A Man Said to the Universe, No. 20

Louis Dewis

Today is the birthday of Louis Dewis (Mons 1872– 5 December 1946 Biarritz, France); Belgian Post-Impressionist painter, who lived most of his adult life in France.

Louis Dewachter married Elisabeth Florigni (1873 – 25 August 1952).  Elisabeth was a Bordeaux socialite and the daughter of Joseph Jules Florigni (1842 – 14 April 1919) and Rose Lesfargues Palmyre Florigni (1843 – 11 September 1917).

Gallery

Confidants

The Old Beggar, 1916

Konrad Mägi
Konrad Mägi (photo c. 1898-1905)

Today is the birthday of Konrad Vilhelm Mägi (Hellenurme Manor, Rõngu Parish, Tartu County (now in Palupera Parish, Valga County); 1 November 1878 – 15 August 1925 Tartu); painter, primarily known for his landscape work.  He was one of the most colour-sensitive Estonian painters of the first decades of the 20th century, and Mägi’s works on motifs of the island of Saaremaa are the first modern Estonian nature paintings.

Gallery

Portrait of a Woman (1908) A Landscape with a Bell Tower (1913-1914) Landscape with a Red Cloud (1913-1914) Vilsandi Motif (1913-1914) Landscape with Rocks (1913-1914) Landscape of Norway (1908-1910) Motif from Saaremaa (date unknown) Capri Island (1922-1923) Italian Landscape. (1922-1923) Venice (1922-1923)

 Mac Tag

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konrad magi, louis dewis, Othello, stephen crane, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, the tempest, william merritt chase, William Shakespeare

Dear Zazie,  First, Happy Halloween!  Tick or treat?  We are large fans of Halloween here at TLC.  Particularly, we are fans of scary movies.  The old ones are the best and Hitchcock’s, are the best of the best.

Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Has love left you without mercy?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

trick or treat
well, the treat
is all mine

my treat
is simple
i know

i know that you
are a rare,
wonderful woman

and people who see you,
at the gym,
or the market,
or walkin’ down the street
have no idea
just how wonderful you are

but i know
and that is my treat
……

this week,
been watchin’ plenty
of Hitchcock movies

she often looked like
a blonde leadin’ lady
from one of his films

dependin’
on her mood
and her hair
it might be
Grace, or Kim,
or Janet, or Tippi

who will she be,
tonight

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

needless to say,
what is so needed
to be said

what ails thee
on all hallows’ eve
are you without
the only one
who can make you
feel alive

the only one
who can take
your hand and calm
your wanderin’ spirit

on this, all hallows’ eve
are you without
the one

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

John Keats
Portrait of John Keats by William Hilton. National Portrait Gallery, London

Today is the birthday of John Keats (Moorgate, London; 31 October 1795 – 23 February 1821 Rome); Romantic poet.  He was one of the main figures of the second generation of Romantic poets, along with Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, despite his work having been in publication for only four years before his death.

Although his poems were not generally well received by critics during his lifetime, his reputation grew after his death, and by the end of the 19th century, he had become one of the most beloved of all English poets.  He had a significant influence on a diverse range of poets and writers.  Jorge Luis Borges stated that his first encounter with Keats’s work was the most significant literary experience of his life.

The poetry of Keats is characterised by sensual imagery, most notably in the series of odes.  This is typical of romantic poets, as they aimed to accentuate extreme emotion through the emphasis of natural imagery.  Today his poems and letters are some of the most popular and most analysed in English literature.

Life mask of Keats by Benjamin Haydon, 1816 

On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer

Much have I travell’d in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo hold.
Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep-browed Homer ruled as his demesne;
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez when with eagle eyes
He star’d at the Pacific — and all his men
Look’d at each other with a wild surmise —
Silent, upon a peak in Darien.

The sonnet “On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer”
October 1816 

My heart aches, and a drowsy numbness pains
My sense, as though of hemlock I had drunk,
Or emptied some dull opiate to the drains
One minute past, and Lethe-wards had sunk:
‘Tis not through envy of thy happy lot,
But being too happy in thine happiness,—
That thou, light-winged Dryad of the trees,
In some melodious plot
Of beechen green, and shadows numberless,
Singest of summer in full-throated ease.

First stanza of “Ode to a Nightingale”,
May 1819

Keats befriended Isabella Jones in May 1817, while on holiday in the village of Bo Peep, near Hastings.  She is described as beautiful, talented and widely read, not of the top flight of society yet financially secure, an enigmatic figure who would become a part of Keats’s circle.  Throughout their friendship Keats never hesitates to own his sexual attraction to her, although they seem to enjoy circling each other rather than offering commitment.  He writes that he “frequented her rooms” in the winter of 1818–19, and in his letters to George says that he “warmed with her” and “kissed her”.  The themes of “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “The Eve of St Mark” may well have been suggested by her, the lyric Hush, Hush! [“o sweet Isabel”] was about her, and that the first version of “Bright Star” may have originally been for her.  In 1821, Jones was one of the first in England to be notified of Keats’s death.

Letters and drafts of poems suggest that Keats first met Frances (Fanny) Brawne between September and November 1818.  She shared her first name with both Keats’s sister and mother, and had a talent for dress-making and languages as well as a natural theatrical bent.  During November 1818 she developed an intimacy with Keats.

Ambrotype of Fanny Brawne taken circa 1850 (photograph on glass)

Keats began to lend Brawne books, such as Dante’s Inferno, and they would read together.  He gave her the love sonnet “Bright Star” (perhaps revised for her) as a declaration.  It was a work in progress which he continued at until the last months of his life, and the poem came to be associated with their relationship.  From this point there is no further documented mention of Isabella Jones.  Sometime before the end of June, he arrived at some sort of understanding with Brawne, far from a formal engagement as he still had too little to offer, with no prospects and financial stricture.  Keats endured great conflict knowing his expectations as a struggling poet in increasingly hard straits would preclude marriage to Brawne.  Their love remained unconsummated. Darkness, disease and depression surrounded him, reflected in poems such as “The Eve of St. Agnes” and “La Belle Dame sans Merci” where love and death both stalk. “I have two luxuries to brood over in my walks;” he wrote to her, “…your loveliness, and the hour of my death.”

In one of his many hundreds of notes and letters, Keats wrote to Brawne on 13 October 1819: “My love has made me selfish. I cannot exist without you – I am forgetful of every thing but seeing you again – my Life seems to stop there – I see no further. You have absorb’d me. I have a sensation at the present moment as though I was dissolving – I should be exquisitely miserable without the hope of soon seeing you … I have been astonished that Men could die Martyrs for religion – I have shudder’d at it – I shudder no more – I could be martyr’d for my Religion – Love is my religion – I could die for that – I could die for you.”

Tuberculosis took hold and he was advised by his doctors to move to a warmer climate.  In September 1820 Keats left for Rome knowing he would probably never see Brawne again.  After leaving he felt unable to write to her or read her letters.  He died there five months later.  None of Brawne’s letters to Keats survive.

It took a month for the news of his death to reach London, after which Brawne stayed in mourning for six years.  In 1833, more than 12 years after his death, she married.  She outlived Keats by more than 40 years.

Keats was buried in the Protestant Cemetery, Rome.  His last request was to be placed under a tombstone bearing no name or date, only the words, “Here lies One whose Name was writ in Water.”  Severn and Brown erected the stone, which under a relief of a lyre with broken strings, includes the epitaph:

“This Grave / contains all that was Mortal / of a / Young English Poet / Who / on his Death Bed, in the Bitterness of his Heart / at the Malicious Power of his Enemies / Desired / these Words to be / engraven on his Tomb Stone: / Here lies One / Whose Name was writ in Water. 24 February 1821″

The text bears an echo from Catullus LXX

“Sed mulier cupido quod dicit amanti / in vento et rapida scribere oportet aqua” (What a woman says to a passionate lover / should be written in the wind and the running water). 

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness
Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eaves run;
To bend with apples the moss’d cottage-trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has o’er-brimm’d their clammy cells.

First stanza of “To Autumn”,
September 1819

The final stanza “To Autumn”:

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,-
While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,
And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;^[79]

 In honour of Keats, here is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” (Beautiful Woman Without Mercy):

La Belle Dame Sans Merci

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
Alone and palely loitering?
The sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

Ah, what can ail thee, wretched wight,
So haggard and so woe-begone
The squirrel’s granary is full,
And the harvest’s done.

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

I met a lady in the meads,
Full beautiful, a faery’s child:
Her hair was long, her foot was ligh,
And her eyes were wild.

I set her on my pacing steed,
And nothing else saw all day long;
For sideways would she lean, and sing
A faery’s song.

I made a garland for her head,
And bracelets too, and fragrant zone;
She looked at me as she did love,
And made sweet moan.

She found me roots of relish sweet,
And honey wild, and manna dew,
And sure in language strange she said,
“I love thee true!”

She took me to her elfin grot,
And there she gazed and sighed deep,
And there I shut her wild, sad eyes—
So kissed to sleep.

And there we slumbered on the moss,
And there I dreamed, ah! woe betide,
The latest dream I ever dreamed
On the cold hill side.

I saw pale kings, and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
Who cried—“La belle Dame sans merci
Hath thee in thrall!”

I saw their starved lips in the gloam,
With horrid warning gaped wide,
And I awoke and found me here,
On the cold hill side.

And that is why I sojourn here,
Alone and palely loitering,
Though the sedge is withered from the lake,
And no birds sing.

The Song of the Day is “La Belle Dame Sans Merci” music by Charles Villiers Stanford sung by Ian Bostridge.

Acc 96-153, Box 1, Folder 1.11

Today is the birthday of Natalie Barney (Natalie Clifford Barney; Dayton, Ohio; October 31, 1876 – February 2, 1972 Paris; salonist, playwright, poet and novelist who lived as an expatriate in Paris.

Barney’s salon was held at her home at 20 rue Jacob in Paris’s Left Bank for more than 60 years and brought together writers and artists from around the world, including many leading figures in French literature along with American and British Modernists of the Lost Generation. She worked to promote writing by women and formed a “Women’s Academy” (L’Académie des Femmes) in response to the all-male French Academy while also giving support and inspiration to male writers from Remy de Gourmont to Truman Capote.

She was openly lesbian and began publishing love poems to women under her own name as early as 1900, considering scandal as “the best way of getting rid of nuisances” (meaning heterosexual attention from young men). She wrote in both French and English. In her writings she supported feminism and pacifism. She opposed monogamy and had many overlapping long and short-term relationships, including on-and-off romances with poet Renée Vivien and dancer Armen Ohanian and a 50-year relationship with painter Romaine Brooks. Her life and love affairs served as inspiration for many novels written by others, ranging from the salacious French bestseller Idylle Saphique by Liane de Pougy to The Well of Loneliness by Radclyffe Hall, perhaps the most famous lesbian novel of the twentieth century.

Marie Laurencin
Marie Laurencin, c. 1912, Paris

And today is the birthday of Marie Laurencin (Paris 31 October 1883 – 8 June 1956 Paris); painter and printmaker.  She became an important figure in the Parisian avant-garde as a member of the Cubists associated with the Section d’Or.

She became romantically involved with the poet Guillaume Apollinaire, and has often been identified as his muse.  Laurencin had important connections to the salon of the American expatriate and famed lesbian writer Natalie Clifford Barney.  She had heterosexual and lesbian affairs.

During the First World War, Laurencin left France for exile in Spain with her German-born husband, Baron Otto von Waëtjen, since through her marriage she had automatically lost her French citizenship.  The couple subsequently lived together briefly in Düsseldorf.

Gallery

1909, Réunion à la campagne (Apollinaire et ses amis), oil on canvas, 130 x 194 cm, Musée Picasso, Paris. Reproduced in The Cubist Painters, Aesthetic Meditations (1913)

• 

  1910-11, Les jeunes filles (Jeune Femmes, Young Girls), oil on canvas, 115 x 146 cm. Exhibited Salon des Indépendants, 1911, Moderna Museet, Stockholm

• 

  1911, La Toilette des jeunes filles (Die Jungen Damen), black and white photograph. Exhibited at the 1913 Armory Show, New York, Chicago and Boston

• 

  1912, Femme à l’éventail (Woman with a Fan), black and white photograph published in Albert Gleizes, Jean Metzinger, Du “Cubisme”, Edition Figuière, Paris, 1912

• 

  1913, Le Bal élégant, La Danse à la campagne

• 

  1921, Portrait de Jean Cocteau

Mac Tag

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charles villiers stanford, cowboy coleridge, ian bostridge, john keats, la belle dame sans merci, love letter, love poem, love song, marie laurencin, muse, Rhett, the lovers almanac, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Tell me your dreams and desires.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

for Tamela…

what do you want
“I thought you knew;
to go through life
jumping naked
into fountains.”

in the summer of 2010,
like a ghost from the grave,
i began to write again

she had once been a dancer,
still was in the way she moved,
now just tryin’ to make her way

we came soon to only prefer
the company of each other
we took long lunches,
went to cocktail parties,
and the opera, and took
long walks in a cemetery

we talked about
plans and dreams,
dancin’ and poetry,
beauty and sorrow

and i began to write
and i have not stopped

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the luckiest ones
are ones who find
each other

this quiet room, where words and notes,
between images and visions, come to one
long quelled emotions flame once again

the dream startin’ and re-startin’
when thoughts entwine, how dear,
these long vistas of us together

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Alfred Sisley
Alfred Sisley: 1882

Today is the birthday of Alfred Sisley (Paris; 30 October 1839 – 29 January 1899 Moret-sur-Loing); Impressionist landscape painter who was born and spent most of his life in France, but retained British citizenship.  Perhaps the most consistent of the Impressionists in his dedication to painting landscape en plein air (i.e., outdoors).  He deviated into figure painting only rarely and, unlike Renoir and Pissarro, found that Impressionism fulfilled his artistic needs.

Among his important works are a series of paintings of the River Thames, mostly around Hampton Court, executed in 1874, and landscapes depicting places in or near Moret-sur-Loing.  The notable paintings of the Seine and its bridges in the former suburbs of Paris are like many of his landscapes, characterized by tranquillity, in pale shades of green, pink, purple, dusty blue and cream.

In 1866, Sisley began a relationship with Eugénie Lesouezec (1834–1898; also known as Marie Lescouezec), a Breton living in Paris.  Sisley died at the age of 59, a few months after the death of his wife.

Gallery

Pierre-Auguste Renoir, Sisley and his wife

Molesey Weir – Morning, one of the paintings executed by Sisley on his visit to Britain in 1874

Rest along the Stream. Edge of the Wood, 1878, Musée d’Orsay

Avenue of Chestnut Trees near La Celle-Saint-Cloud, 1865

La Seine au point du jour, 1877, Musée Malraux, Le Havre 

The Terrace at Saint-Germain, Spring, 1875. The Walters Art Museum

Flood at Port-Marly, 1876. Musée d’Orsay

•  
• 

  St. Martin Canal, 1870

• 

  Early Snow at Louveciennes, c. 1871-1872

• 

  Bridge at Villeneuve-la-Garenne 1872

• 

  Sentier de la Mi-cote, Louveciennes, 1873

• 

  Fog, Voisins, 1874

• 

  Among the Vines Louveciennes, 1874

• 

  Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874

• 

  Regatta at Hampton Court, 1874

• 

  Regatta at Molesey, 1874

• 

  Snow on the Road Louveciennes, 1874

• 

  Under the Bridge at Hampton Court, 1874

• 

  Meadow, 1875

• 

  Le Pont de Moret, effet d’orage, 1887, Musée Malraux, Le Havre

• 

  Small Meadows in Spring, c. 1881

• 

  View of Saint-Mammès, (circa 1880). The Walters Art Museum.

• 

  A path at Les Sablons, 1883

• 

  Women Going to the Woods, 1886

• 

  Seaside, Langland , 1887

• 

  Church in Moret, 1889

• 

  Saint-Mammès am Morgen, 1890

  

  Today is the birthday of Ambroise Paul Valéry (Paul Toussaint Jules Valéry; Sète, Hérault, Occitanie, France; 30 October 1871 – 20 July 1945 Paris); poet, essayist, and philosopher. In addition to his poetry and fiction (drama and dialogues), his interests included aphorisms on art, history, letters, music, and current events. Valéry was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 12 different years.

  Perhaps best known as a poet, he is sometimes considered to be the last of the French symbolists. He published fewer than a hundred poems. On the night of 4 October 1892, during a heavy storm, Valéry underwent an existential crisis, an event that impacted his writing career. Around 1898, he quit writing altogether, publishing not a word for nearly twenty years. This hiatus was in part due to the death of his mentor, Stéphane Mallarmé. When, in 1917, he finally broke his ‘great silence’ with the publication of La Jeune Parque; he was forty-six years of age.

  This sublimely musical masterpiece, of 512 alexandrine lines in rhyming couplets, took him four years to complete, and it secured his fame. With “Le Cimetière marin” and “L’Ébauche d’un serpent,” it is, in my opinion, one of the greatest French poems of the twentieth century.

  The title refers to the youngest of the three Parcae (the minor Roman deities also called The Fates). The poem is written in the first person, and is the soliloquy of a young woman contemplating life and death, engagement and withdrawal, love and estrangement, in a setting dominated by the sea, the sky, stars, rocky cliffs, and the rising sun.

  In 1900, he married Jeannie Gobillard, a friend of Mallarmé’s family, who was also a niece of the painter Berthe Morisot. The wedding was a double ceremony in which the bride’s cousin, Morisot’s daughter, Julie Manet married the painter, Ernest Rouart.

  Valéry died in Paris in 1945. He is buried in the cemetery of his native town, Sète, the same cemetery celebrated in his famous poem, Le Cimetière marin.

  Verse 

  Charmes ou poèmes (1922)

  • Ce toit tranquille, où marchent des colombes,
    Entre les pins palpite, entre les tombes;
    Midi le juste y compose de feux
    La mer, la mer, toujours recommencée
    O récompense après une pensée
    Qu’un long regard sur le calme des dieux!
    • This quiet roof, where dove-sails saunter by,
      Between the pines, the tombs, throbs visibly.
      Impartial noon patterns the sea in flame —
      That sea forever starting and re-starting.
      When thought has had its hour, oh how rewarding
      Are the long vistas of celestial calm!
      • Le Cimetière Marin
    • Variant translations:
    • The sea, the ever renewing sea!

  • Quel pur travail de fins éclairs consume
    Maint diamant d’imperceptible écume,
    Et quelle paix semble se concevoir!
    Quand sur l’abîme un soleil se repose,
    Ouvrages purs d’une éternelle cause,
    Le temps scintille et le songe est savoir.
    • What grace of light, what pure toil goes to form
      The manifold diamond of the elusive foam!
      What peace I feel begotten at that source!
      When sunlight rests upon a profound sea,
      Time’s air is sparkling, dream is certainty —
      Pure artifice both of an eternal Cause.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Beau ciel, vrai ciel, regarde-moi qui change!
    Après tant d’orgueil, après tant d’étrange
    Oisiveté, mais pleine de pouvoir,
    Je m’abandonne à ce brillant espace,
    Sur les maisons des morts mon ombre passe
    Qui m’apprivoise à son frêle mouvoir.
    • Beautiful heaven, true heaven, look how I change!
      After such arrogance, after so much strange
      Idleness — strange, yet full of potency —
      I am all open to these shining spaces;
      Over the homes of the dead my shadow passes,
      Ghosting along — a ghost subduing me.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Ici venu, l’avenir est paresse.
    L’insecte net gratte la sécheresse;
    Tout est brûlé, défait, reçu dans l’air
    A je ne sais quelle sévère essence . . .
    La vie est vaste, étant ivre d’absence,
    Et l’amertume est douce, et l’esprit clair.
    • Now present here, the future takes its time.
      The brittle insect scrapes at the dry loam;
      All is burnt up, used up, drawn up in air
      To some ineffably rarefied solution . . .
      Life is enlarged, drunk with annihilation,
      And bitterness is sweet, and the spirit clear.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Allez! Tout fuit! Ma présence est poreuse,
    La sainte impatience meurt aussi!
    • All perishes. A thing of flesh and pore
      Am I. Divine impatience also dies.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis

  • Le vent se lève! . . . il faut tenter de vivre!
    L’air immense ouvre et referme mon livre,
    La vague en poudre ose jaillir des rocs!
    Envolez-vous, pages tout éblouies!
    Rompez, vagues! Rompez d’eaux rejouies
    Ce toit tranquille où picoraient des focs!
    • The wind is rising! . . . We must try to live!
      The huge air opens and shuts my book: the wave
      Dares to explode out of the rocks in reeking
      Spray. Fly away, my sun-bewildered pages!
      Break, waves! Break up with your rejoicing surges
      This quiet roof where sails like doves were pecking.
      • As translated by by C. Day Lewis
    • Variant translations:
    • The wind is rising … we must attempt to live.

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  What or who matters to you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Welcome home!”
thank you
good to be home
uncle ben, who traveled widely,
said the best part of goin’ away
was comin’ home

with you,
i now know
what he meant

i should be tired
but i am not
i lie here
by candlelight
waitin’

for sleep,
for dreams
for you to come

train whistle
soundin’
in the distance
comin’ from the East

would that it were
bringin’ you
to come lay with me
and end the waitin’

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

how do you become a lover
“You must be chosen.”
and how does it feel
“Like nothin’ else.”

just got home from watchin’
The Mountain Between Us
and all i can think about
is you

now i lay me
down to sleep
to dream of you

but sleep will not come
cold outside but calm
from my bed,
i can see stars
through the windows

the only sounds;
the cracklin’ fire,
a train whistle
in the distance
the only light;
the candles,
the woodstove
in the corner

so i lie here and wait
for dreams to remove
the mountain between us

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Muse, you shined a light into my darkness and gave me back my words.  For that I am ever grateful.  I am glad you walked into my life.  My words are dedicated to you.

All That Matters

© copyright 2016 mac tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “All That Matters” by Kölsch featuring Troels Abrahamsen

 

On this day in 1787 – Mozart’s opera Don Giovanni receives its first performance in Prague.

Don Giovanni
Portrait of Francisco D’Andrade in the title role by Max Slevogt, 1912

Don Giovanni (K. 527; complete title: Il dissoluto punito, ossia il Don Giovanni, literally The Rake Punished, namely Don Giovanni or The Libertine Punished) is an opera in two acts with music by Mozart and Italian libretto by Lorenzo Da Ponte.  It is based on the legends of Don Juan, a fictional libertine and seducer.  It was premiered by the Prague Italian opera at the Teatro di Praga (now called the Estates Theatre).  Da Ponte’s libretto was billed as dramma giocoso, a term that denotes a mixing of serious and comic action.  Mozart entered the work into his catalogue as an opera buffa.  Although sometimes classified as comic, it blends comedy, melodrama and supernatural elements.

A staple of the standard operatic repertoire.  It has also proved a fruitful subject for writers and philosophers.

Original playbill for the Vienna premiere of Don Giovanni

Libretto

English quotations here are cited from Robert Pack and Marjorie Lelash (trans.) Three Mozart Libretti (New York: Dover, 1993).

• Notte e giorno faticar,
  Per chi nulla sa gradir,
  Piova e vento sopportar,
  Mangiar male e mal dormir.
  Voglio far il gentiluomo
  E non voglio più servir.
  • I must work night and day for someone who doesn’t appreciate me; I must bear the wind and rain, scarcely eating or sleeping! I, too, would like to be a gentleman, and no longer a servant.
  • Leporello, Act I, sc. i; translation p. 135.

• Madamina, il catalogo è questo
  Delle belle che amò il padron mio;
  un catalogo egli è che ho fatt’io;
  Osservate, leggete con me.
  In Italia seicento e quaranta;
  In Almagna duecento e trentuna;
  Cento in Francia, in Turchia novantuna;
  Ma in Ispagna son già mille e tre.
  • My dear lady! This is the catalogue of the women my master has loved. It’s a list that I’ve compiled – look at it; read it over with me! In Italy, six hundred and forty; in Germany, two hundred and thirty-one; a hundred in France; ninety-one in Turkey – but in Spain there are already a thousand and three.
  • Leporello, Act I, sc. v; translation p. 145.

• Nella bionda egli ha l’usanza
  Di lodar la gentilezza,
  Nella bruna la costanza,
  Nella bianca la dolcezza.
  • With blondes, it’s his habit to praise their sweetness; with brunettes, their constancy; with old women, their tenderness.
  • Leporello, Act I, sc. v; translation p. 147.

• Delle vecchie fa conquista
  Pel piacer di porle in lista;
  Sua passion predominante
  È la giovin principiante.
  Non si picca – se sia ricca,
  Se sia brutta, se sia bella;
  Purché porti la gonnella,
  Voi sapete quel che fa.
  • He even seduces the old women, simply for the pleasure of adding them to his list. But his preference is really for the young beginners. He never thinks of whether she’s rich, ugly or beautiful – as long as she wears a skirt, you know very well what he does!
  • Leporello, Act I, sc. v; translation p. 147.

• Don Giovanni: Là ci darem la mano,
  Là mi dirai di sì.
  Vedi, non è lontano;
  Partiam, ben mio, da qui.
  Zerlina: Vorrei e non vorrei,
  Mi trema un poco il cor.
  Felice, è ver, sarei,
  Ma può burlarmi ancor.
  • Don Giovanni:
  • There we will take each other’s hands,
  • there you will tell me “yes”.
  • See; it is not far off;
  • let us go my love from here!
    Zerlina:
  • I’d like to, and yet I’m afraid – something within me holds back. Perhaps I would be happy – but still he may be deceiving me!
  • Act I, sc. ix, translation p. 153.

• Ah! la mia lista
  Doman mattina
  D’una decina
  Devi aumentar!
  • Ah, my list
  • tomorrow morning
  • of a dozen
  • you have to increase!
  • Don Giovanni, Act I, sc. xv, translation pp. 163-5.

• Di rider finirai pria dell’aurora!
  • By dawn your laughter will be ended.
  • La Statua, Act II, sc. xv, translation p. 203.

• Vivan le femmine,
  Viva il buon vino!
  Sostegno e gloria
  d’umanità!
  • Long live women!
  • Long live good wine!
  • Support and glory
  • of humanity!
  • Don Giovanni, Act II, sc. xviii, translation p. 211.

Today is the birthday of Andrei Petrovich Ryabushkin (Stanichnaya sloboda, Borisoglebskiy uezd, Tambov gubernia, Russia; 29 October [O.S. 17 October] 1861 – 10 May [O.S. 27 April] 1904 Didvino, Russia); painter. His major works were devoted to life of ordinary Russians of the 17th century.

Gallery

by Vasily Mathe

 

The Deacon

Tea-drinking 

• 

  Sunday. 1889

• 

  Session of Tsar Mikhail Feodorvich with his boyars in his State Chamber. 1893

• 

  A 17th-century Moscow Street on a Holiday. 1895

• 

  Merchant Family in the 17th century. 1896

• 

  Strelets Patrol at the Ilyinsky Gates in Old Moscow. 1897

• 

  Waiting for the Tzar 1901

• 

  Wedding Train in the 17th century Moscow. 1901

• 

  A Young Man Breaking into the Girls’ Dance, and the Old Women are in Panic. 1902

• 

  Novgorod Church. 1903

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all that matters, andrei ryabushkin, cowboy coleridge, don giovanni, kolsch, mozart, Rhett, the lovers chronicle, tla, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i have been here often
in many moods,
but this visit
with you
will be the last…

searchin’ in those days,
full of certainty
that i should find
that which others
before me had found

but i found nothin’
but hints and shadows,
vagabond promises
pavin’ a weary road

you and i both know
the sadness that comes
from the disappointment
of the unfulfilled search

but now, no longer
havin’ to be satisfied
with snatchin’ glimpses
of what could be

look at us,
we have done our share
we were made for this,
somethin’ quite extraordinary

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

thanks Karen…

“You know the kind;
the kind worth seeking
with the purpose
of finding.
Once found,
it’s impossible to forget.”

i have never been one
to doubt a bright, funny,
pretty woman,
so i believe you,
though i have never
known that kind first hand

it has not been
for a lack of seekin’,
trust me on this one
and i thought i had found it
on more than one occasion

but only to be found,
sadly mistaken
perhaps i sought too hard,
was too earnest
like i deserved it
or it was owed to me

was i too eager,
blinded by lust
into not seein’
what was obvious
so caught up in fallin’
that i could not see
there was no stayin’

is it possible
that my fault lies
in lovin’ the fallin’ part
but bein’ afraid
of the stayin’ part

or is it just that i never
found the one
where the fallin’ and stayin’
are one in the same

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

you try to turn away
but i will not let you
i take your arm
and turn you to face me
you start to speak
but i put my finger on your lips
we stand, lookin’
into each other’s eyes for a moment
a moment that lengthens and lingers
a moment that becomes somethin’
somethin’ we both need
i know it
you know it
then i take you
in my arms and hold you
and you allow yourself
to flow into the strength
of this embrace,
our embrace,
an embrace that from now on
will always be there

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Evelyn Waugh
Evelyn Waugh, circa 1940

Today is the birthday of Evelyn Waugh (Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh; London; 28 October 1903 – 10 April 1966 Combe Florey, Somerset); writer of novels, biographies and travel books.  He was also a prolific journalist and reviewer of books.  His most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall (1928) and A Handful of Dust (1934), the novel Brideshead Revisited (1945) and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour (1952–61).  In my opinion, one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century.

In 1927 Waugh met and fell in love with Evelyn Gardner, the daughter of Lord and Lady Burghclere.  In December, Waugh and Gardner became engaged, despite the opposition of Lady Burghclere, who felt that Waugh lacked moral fibre and kept unsuitable company.  Among their friends, they quickly became known as “He-Evelyn” and “She-Evelyn.  They were married in St Paul’s Church, Portman Square, on 27 June 1928, with only Acton, Alec Waugh and the bride’s friend Pansy Pakenham present.  The couple made their home in a small flat in Canonbury Square, Islington.  The first months of the marriage were overshadowed by a lack of money, and by Gardner’s poor health, which persisted into the autumn.

Waugh was commissioned to write travel articles in return for a free Mediterranean cruise, which he and Gardner began in February 1929, as an extended, delayed honeymoon.  The trip was disrupted when Gardner contracted pneumonia and was carried ashore to the British hospital in Port Said.  The couple returned home in June, after her recovery.  A month later, without warning, Gardner confessed that their mutual friend, John Heygate, had become her lover.  After an attempted reconciliation failed, a shocked and dismayed Waugh filed for divorce on 3 September 1929.

In October 1933, he began proceedings for the annulment of the marriage on the grounds of “lack of real consent”.  The case was heard by an ecclesiastical tribunal in London, but a delay in the submission of the papers to Rome meant that the annulment was not granted until 4 July 1936.  In the meantime, following an initial encounter in Portofino, Waugh had fallen in love with Laura Herbert.  He proposed marriage, by letter, in spring 1936.  There were initial misgivings from the Herberts, an aristocratic Catholic family; as a further complication, Laura Herbert was a cousin of Evelyn Gardner.  Despite some family hostility the marriage took place on 17 April 1937 at the Church of the Assumption in Warwick Street, London.

Brideshead Revisited (1945)

• When I reached C Company lines, which were at the top of the hill, I paused and looked back at the camp, just coming into full view below me through the grey mist of early morning.
  • First lines of Prologue

• “I have been here before,” I said; I had been there before; first with Sebastian more than twenty years ago on a cloudless day in June, when the ditches were creamy with meadowsweet and the air heavy with all the scents of summer; it was a day of peculiar splendour, and though I had been there so often, in so many moods, it was to that first visit that my heart returned on this, my latest.
  • First lines part 1, chapter 1

• But I was in search of love in those days, and I went full of curiousity and the faint, unrecognized apprehension that here, at last, I should find that low door in the wall, which others, I knew, had found before me, which opened on an enclosed and enchanted garden, which was somewhere, not overlooked by any window, in the heart of that grey city.
  • Part 1, Chapter 1

• To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom.
  • Part 1, Chapter 1

• ‘…Conversation should be like juggling; up go the balls and the plates, up and over, in and out, good solid objects that glitter in the footlights and fall with a bang if you miss them. But when dear Sebastian speaks it is like a little sphere of soapsud drifting off the end of an old clay pipe, anywhere, full of rainbow light for a second and then – phut! vanished, with nothing left at all, nothing.’
  • Part 1, Chapter 2

• How ungenerously in later life we disclaim the virtuous moods of our youth, living in retrospect long, summer days of unreflecting dissipation. There is no candour in a story of early manhood which leaves out of account the home-sickness for nursery morality, the regrets and resolutions of amendment, the black hours which, like zero on the roulette table, turn up with roughly calculable regularity.”
• The trouble with modern education is you never know how ignorant they are

• • Part 1, Chapter 3

• “It is typical of Oxford,” I said, “to start the new year in autumn.”

• • Part 1, start of chapter 4
• O God, make me good, but not yet

• • Part 1, start of chapter 5

• ‘…I wonder if you remember the story mummy read us the evening Sebastian first got drunk – I mean the bad evening. “Father Brown” said something like “I caught him” (the thief) “with an unseen hook and and invisible line which is long enough to let him wander to the ends of the world and still to bring him back with a twitch upon the thread.”‘
  • This quotes The Queer Feet by G. K. Chesterton

• • Part 2, Chapter
• It doesn’t matter what people call you unless they call you pigeon pie and eat you up.

• • Part 2, Chapter 3

• My theme is memory, that winged host that soared about me one grey morning of war-time.
• We possess nothing certainty except the past.
  • Part 3, start of chapter 1

• ‘perhaps all our loves are merely hints and symbols; vagabond-language scrawled on gate-posts and paving-stones along the weary road that others have tramped before us; perhaps you and I are types and this sadness which sometimes falls between us springs from disappointment in our search, each straining through and beyond the other, snatching a glimpse now and then of the shadow which turns the corner always a pace or two ahead of us.’
• She seemed to say “Look at me. I have done my share. I am beautiful. It is something quite out of the ordinary, this beauty of mine. I am made for delight. But what do I get out of it? Where is my reward?”

That was the change in her from ten years ago; that, indeed, was her reward, this haunting, this magical sadness which spoke straight to the heart and struck silence; it was the completion of her beauty.”

• • Part 3, Chapter 4

• I have lived carefully, sheltered myself from the cold winds, eaten moderately of what was in season, drunk fine claret, slept in my own sheets; I shall live long.
  • Part 3, chapter 5, Lord Marchmain’s dying soliloquy.

• O God, if there is a God, forgive him his sins, if there is such a thing as sin.
• ‘…But I saw today there was one thing unforgivable – like things in the school-room, so bad they were unpunishable, that only mummy could deal with – the bad thing I was on the point of doing, that I’m not quite bad enough to do; to set up a rival good to God’s.’
  • Part 3, near end of chapter 5

• Quomondo sedet sola civitas. Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.
  • Epilogue

Francis Bacon
Bacon, photographed in the early 1950s

Today is the birthday of Francis Bacon (Dublin 28 October 1909 – 28 April 1992 Madrid); figurative painter known for his bold, grotesque, emotionally charged, raw imagery. He is best known for his depictions of popes, crucifixions and portraits of close friends. His abstracted figures are typically isolated in geometrical cage like spaces, set against flat, nondescript backgrounds. Bacon said that he saw images “in series”, and his work typically focuses on a single subject for sustained periods, often in triptych or diptych formats. His output can be broadly described as sequences or variations on a single motif; beginning with the 1930s Picasso-informed Furies, moving on to the 1940s male heads isolated in rooms or geometric structures, the 1950s screaming popes, and the mid-to-late 1950s animals and lone figures, the 1960s portraits of friends, the nihilistic 1970s self-portraits, and the cooler more technical 1980s late works.

Bacon took up painting in his late 30s, having drifted as an interior decorator, bon vivant and gambler. He said that his artistic career was delayed because he spent too long looking for subject matter that could sustain his interest. His breakthrough came with the 1944 triptych Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, which sealed his reputation as a uniquely bleak chronicler of the human condition. From the mid-1960s he mainly produced portraits of friends and drinking companions, either as single or triptych panels. Following the 1971 suicide of his lover George Dyer, his art became more sombre, inward-looking and preoccupied with the passage of time and death. The climax of this later period is marked by masterpieces, including his 1982’s “Study for Self-Portrait” and Study for a Self-Portrait Triptych, 1985-86.

Despite his bleak existentialist outlook, Bacon in person was highly engaging and charismatic, articulate, well-read and unapologetically gay. He was a prolific artist, but nonetheless spent many of the evenings of his middle age eating, drinking and gambling in London’s Soho.

After Dyer’s suicide, he settled into a platonic and somewhat fatherly relationship with his eventual heir, John Edwards. The art critic Robert Hughes described him as “the most implacable, lyric artist in late 20th-century England, perhaps in all the world” and along with Willem de Kooning as “the most important painter of the disquieting human figure in the 50’s of the 20th century.” Francis Bacon was the subject of two Tate retrospectives and a major showing in 1971 at the Grand Palais. Since his death his reputation and market value have grown steadily, and his work is among the most acclaimed, expensive and sought-after. In the late 1990s a number of major works, previously assumed destroyed, including early 1950s popes and 1960s portraits, reemerged to set record prices at auction. In 2013 his Three Studies of Lucian Freud set the world record as the most expensive piece of art sold at auction.

While holidaying in Madrid in 1992, Bacon was admitted to the Handmaids of Maria, a private clinic, where he was cared for by Sister Mercedes. His chronic asthma, which had plagued him all his life, had developed into a respiratory condition and he could not talk or breathe very well.

He died of a heart attack on 28 April 1992, attempts to resuscitate him having failed. He had bequeathed his estate to John Edwards and Brian Clark, executor of the Estate. In 1998 the director of the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin secured the donation of the contents of Bacon’s chaotic studio at 7 Reece Mews, South Kensington. The contents of his studio were moved and reconstructed in the gallery. The relocated studio opened to the public in 2001. The entire contents of the studio have been catalogued: approximately 570 books, 1,500 photographs, 100 slashed canvases, 1,300 leaves from torn books, 2,000 artist materials, and 70 drawings. Other categories include artists correspondence, magazines, newspapers and vinyl records.

 Gallery

Three Studies for Figures at the Base of a Crucifixion, 1944. Oil and pastel on Sundeala board. Tate Britain, London

Head VI, 1949

Three Studies for a Portrait of Henrietta Moraes, 1963

Triptych, May–June 1973, oil on canvas, 198 × 147 cm. Collection of Esther Grether

Dyer photographed by John Deakin, retouched by Bacon, who often folded or creased, or spattered with paint, photographs of friend so as to find distortions he could exploit in his paintings. Although Dyer was handsome and charming in his own raw way, he was out of his depth when dealing with both Bacon’s wasp-tongued Soho set and intellectual art world friends

Study for a Self-Portrait Triptych, 1985-86, Marlborough Fine Art, London

 

 

Bacon’s relocated studio in situ, Dublin

Head of a Woman 1960

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

we move across the floor
riveted together,
limb for limb

the music breaks
over us in crescendos
as we maneuver,
two as one

as in all things
that we do

“Does she know
you love her?”
of course
that is why i do,
because she knows
she is the only one
who has ever known

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

how do you figure,
well you cannot
there ain’t no figurin’
when somethin’ good
comes along
you gotta roll with it

where is it gonna go
who the hell knows
but answer me this,
you got somethin’
better to do
…exactly

do you remember
what your hands are for
why you started sketchin’
why you began writin’ verse
do you remember
the best use of your heart

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

1827 – Bellini’s third opera, Il pirata, is premiered at Teatro alla Scala di Milano.

Il pirata
Opera by Vincenzo Bellini
Rubini as Gualtiero in the premiere production

Il pirata (The Pirate) is an opera in two acts by Vincenzo Bellini to an Italian libretto by Felice Romani which was based on a three-act mélodrame from 1826, Bertram, ou le Pirate (Bertram, or The Pirate) by Charles Nodier and “Raimonde” (actually Isidore Justin Séverin Taylor).  This play was itself based upon a French translation of the “five-act verse tragedy” Bertram, or The Castle of St Aldobrando by Charles Maturin which appeared in London in 1816.

The original play has been compared with Bellini’s opera and the influence of Il pirata on Gaetano Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor has been noted.

Librettist Felice Romani 

Tamburini as Ernesto in Il pirata 1827

Tenor Giovanni Battista Rubini, sang Gualtiero

Soprano Henriette Méric-Lalande, sang Imogene

Sigrid Hjertén
Sigrid Hjertén at work

Today is the birthday of Sigrid Hjertén (Sundsvall 27 October 1885 – 24 March 1948 Stockholm); modernist painter.  She worked as an artist for 30 years before dying of complications from a botched lobotomy for schizophrenia.

Ateljéinteriör (Studio interior) from 1916 shows how radical Hjertén was for her time.  The painting describes the roles she played as artist, woman, and mother: different identities in different worlds.  Hjertén sits on the sofa between two artists – her husband, Isaac Grünewald, and, perhaps, Einar Jolin – who talk to each other over her head.  Her large blue eyes stare into the distance.  In the foreground a woman dressed in black – a sophisticated alter ego – leans against a male figure who might be the artist Nils von Dardel.  Her son Ivàn crawls out of the right-hand corner.  In the background we glimpse one of Hjertén’s paintings of the period, Zigenarkvinna (Gypsy woman).  Studio Interior and Den röda rullgardinen (The red blind), from 1916, have given rise in recent years to new interpretations based on contemporary gender studies and reveal information about the artist’s private life.

Gallery

Studio interior from 1916

Decorative Head

 

Nightmare

 

“Le Bar du Marin ” 1930

 

Dylan Thomas
Thomas at the Gotham Book Shop, in New York City, 1952

Today is the birthday of Dylan Marlais Thomas (Uplands, Swansea, Glamorgan, Wales 27 October 1914 – 9 November 1953 New York City); poet and writer whose works include the poems “Do not go gentle into that good night” and “And death shall have no dominion”; the ‘play for voices’ Under Milk Wood; and stories and radio broadcasts such as A Child’s Christmas in Wales and Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog.  He became widely popular in his lifetime and remained so after his premature death at the age of 39 in New York City.  By then, he had acquired a reputation, which he had encouraged, as a “roistering, drunken and doomed poet”.  Many of his works appeared in print while he was still a teenager; however, it was the publication of “Light breaks where no sun shines,” in 1934, that caught the attention of the literary world.

While living in London, Thomas met Caitlin Macnamara, whom he married in 1937.  Their relationship was defined by alcoholism and apparently was mutually destructive.

Thomas first traveled to the United States in the 1950s. This is where his readings brought him a level of fame while his erratic behaviour and drinking worsened.  His time in America cemented Thomas’s legend.  During his fourth trip to New York in 1953, Thomas became gravely ill and fell into a coma, from which he never recovered.  His body was returned to Wales where he was interred at the village churchyard in Laugharne on 25 November 1953.

Though Thomas wrote exclusively in the English language, in my opinion, he is one of the most important Welsh poets of the 20th century.  He is noted for his original, rhythmic and ingenious use of words and imagery.  Thomas’s position as one of the great modern poets has been much discussed, and his popularity remains.

Verse

• Light breaks where no sun shines;
  Where no sea runs, the waters of the heart
  Push in their tides;
  And, broken ghosts with glow-worms in their heads,
  The things of light
  File through the flesh where no flesh decks the bones.
  • “Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines”, st. 1 (1934), st. 1
• Dawn breaks behind the eyes;
  From poles of skull and toe the windy blood
  Slides like a sea;
  Nor fenced, nor staked, the gushers of the sky
  Spout to the rod
  Divining in a smile the oil of tears.
  • Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 3

• Light breaks on secret lots,
  On tips of thought where thoughts smell in the rain;
  When logics die,
  The secret of the soil grows through the eye,
  And blood jumps in the sun;
  Above the waste allotments the dawn halts.
  • Light Breaks Where No Sun Shines, st. 1 (1934), st. 5)

• When all my five and country senses see,
  The fingers will forget green thumbs and mark
  How, through the halfmoon’s vegetable eye,
  Husk of young stars and handfull zodiac,
  Love in the frost is pared and wintered by.
  • “When All My Five And Country Senses See” (1939)

• They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
  Though they go mad they shall be sane,
  Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again;
  Though lovers be lost love shall not;
  And death shall have no dominion.
  • “And Death Shall Have No Dominion”, st. 1 (1943)

• After the first death, there is no other.
  • “A Refusal To Mourn The Death, By Fire, Of A Child In London”, st. 4 (1946))

• Do not go gentle into that good night,
  Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
  Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
  • “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night” (1952)

Fern Hill (1946)

• Now as I was young and easy under the apple boughs
  About the lilting house and happy as the grass was green,
  The night above the dingle starry,
  Time let me hail and climb
  Golden in the heydays of his eyes.
  And honoured among wagons I was prince of the apple towns.
  • St. 1

• In the sun that is young once only,
  Time let me play and be
  Golden in the mercy of his means.
  • St. 2

• And the sabbath rang slowly
  In the pebbles of the holy streams.
  • St. 2

• And honoured among foxes and pheasants by the gay house
  Under the new made clouds and happy as the heart was long,
  In the sun born over and over,
  I ran my heedless ways.
  • St. 5

• Time held me green and dying
  Though I sang in my chains like the sea.
  • St. 6

And death shall have no dominion.
Dead men naked they shall be one
With the man in the wind and the west moon;
When their bones are picked clean and the clean bones gone,
They shall have stars at elbow and foot;
Though they go mad they shall be sane,
Though they sink through the sea they shall rise again
Though lovers be lost love shall not;
And death shall have no dominion.

From “And death shall have no dominion”
Twenty-five Poems (1936)

Not for the proud man apart
From the raging moon I write
On these spindrift pages
Nor for the towering dead
With their nightingales and psalms
But for the lovers, their arms
Round the griefs of the ages,
Who pay no praise or wages
Nor heed my craft or art.

From “In my Craft or Sullen Art”
Deaths and Entrances, 1946

Sylvia Plath
Plath in 1961

And today is the birthday of Sylvia Plath (Boston October 27, 1932 – February 11, 1963 London); in my opinion, one of the most renowned and influential poets, novelists, and short story writers of the 20th century.  She was married to fellow poet Ted Hughes from 1956 until they separated in September 1962.  They lived together in the United States and then England and had two children.  Plath was clinically depressed for most of her adult life.  She committed suicide in 1963.

Plath is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry and is best known for her two published collections, The Colossus and Other Poems, and Ariel.  She also wrote The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel published shortly before her death.  In 1982, she won a posthumous Pulitzer Prize for The Collected Poems.

Verse 

• How frail the human heart must be —
  a mirrored pool of thought.
  • “I Thought I Could Not Be Hurt,” quoted in the introduction to Letters Home: Correspondence 1950–1963 (1975) as Plath’s first poem, written at age 14
• I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
  I lift my lids and all is born again.
  • “Mad Girl’s Love Song” (1953) from Collected Poems (1981)

• What did my fingers do before they held him?
  What did my heart do, with its love?
  • “Three Women: A Poem for Three Voices” (1962), a radio play published in 1968

The Colossus (1960)

• So many of us!
  So many of us!
• We are shelves, we are
  Tables, we are meek,
  We are edible,
• Nudgers and shovers
  In spite of ourselves.
  Our kind multiplies:
• We shall by morning
  Inherit the earth.
  Our foot’s in the door.
  • “Mushrooms”

The Bell Jar (1963)

• “It’s a tango.” Marco maneuvered me out among the dancers. “I love tangos.” “I can’t dance.” “You don’t have to dance. I’ll do the dancing.” Marco hooked an arm around my waist and jerked me up against his dazzling white suit. Then he said, “Pretend you are drowning.” I shut my eyes, and the music broke over me like a rainstorm. Marco’s leg slid forward against mine and my leg slid back and I seemed to be riveted against him, limb for limb, moving as he moved, without any will or knowledge of my own, and after a while I thought, “It doesn’t take two to dance, it only takes one,” and I let myself blow and bend like a tree in the wind. “What did I tell you?” Marco’s breath scorched my ear. “You’re a perfectly respectable dancer.”
  • Ch. 9

• “Does she know you love her?” “Of course.” I paused. The obstacle seemed unreal to me. “If you love her,” I said, “you’ll love somebody else someday.”
  • Ch. 9

• When they asked some old Roman philosopher or other how he wanted to die, he said he would open his veins in a warm bath. I thought it would be easy, lying in the tub and seeing the redness flower from my wrists, flush after flush through the clear water, till I sank to sleep under a surface gaudy as poppies.  But when it came right down to it, the skin of my wrist looked so white and defenseless that I couldn’t do it.  It was as if what I wanted to kill wasn’t in that skin or the thin blue pulse that jumped under my thumb, but somewhere else, deeper, more secret, and a whole lot harder to get at.
  • Ch. 12

Ariel (1965)

• Now your head, excuse me, is empty.
  I have the ticket for that.
  Come here, sweetie, out of the closet.
  Well, what do you think of that?
  Naked as paper to start
• But in twenty-five years she’ll be silver,
  In fifty, gold.
  A living doll, everywhere you look.
  It can sew, it can cook,
  It can talk, talk, talk.
• It works, there is nothing wrong with it.
  You have a hole, it’s a poultice.
  You have an eye, it’s an image.
  My boy, it’s your last resort.
  Will you marry it, marry it, marry it.
  • “The Applicant”

• Dying
  Is an art, like everything else.
  I do it exceptionally well.
  • “Lady Lazarus”

• Herr God, Herr Lucifer,
  Beware.
  Beware. Out of the ash
  I rise with my red hair
  And I eat men like air.
  • “Lady Lazarus”

• I am inhabited by a cry.
  Nightly it flaps out
  Looking, with its hooks, for something to love.
• I am terrified by this dark thing
  That sleeps in me;
  All day I feel its soft, feathery turnings, its malignity.
  • “Elm”

• I am incapable of more knowledge.
  What is this, this face
  So murderous in its strangle of branches? —
• Its snaky acids hiss.
  It petrifies the will. These are the isolate, slow faults,
  That kill, that kill, that kill.
  • “Elm”

• This is the light of the mind, cold and planetary.
  The trees of the mind are black. The light is blue.
  • “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

• The moon is no door. It is a face in its own right,
  White as a knuckle and terribly upset.
  It drags the sea after it like a dark crime; it is quiet
  With the O-gape of complete despair. I live here.
  • “The Moon and the Yew Tree”

• You do not do, you do not do
  Any more, black shoe
  In which I have lived like a foot
  For thirty years, poor and white,
  Barely daring to breathe or Achoo.
  • “Daddy”

• There’s a stake in your fat black heart
  And the villagers never liked you.
  They are dancing and stamping on you.
  They always knew it was you.
  Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.
  • “Daddy”

• Darling, all night
  I have been flickering, off, on, off, on.
  The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss.
  • “Fever 103”

• Perfection is terrible, it cannot have children.
  • “The Munich Mannequins”

• The blood jet is poetry,
  There is no stopping it.
  • “Kindness”

• The woman is perfected
  Her dead
• Body wears the smile of accomplishment,
  The illusion of a Greek necessity
• Flows in the scrolls of her toga,
  Her bare
• Feet seem to be saying:
  We have come so far, it is over.
• Each dead child coiled, a white serpent,
  One at each little
• Pitcher of milk, now empty.
  She has folded
• Them back into her body as petals
  Of a rose close when the garden
• Stiffens and odors bleed
  From the sweet, deep throats of the night flower.
• The moon has nothing to be sad about,
  Staring from her hood of bone.
• She is used to this sort of thing.
  Her blacks crackle and drag.
  • “Edge”

• Axes
  After whose stroke the wood rings,
  And the echoes!
  Echoes travelling
  Off from the centre like horses.
  • “Words”

Crossing the Water (1971)

• These hills are too green and sweet to have tasted salt.
  I follow the sheep path between them. A last hook brings me
  To the hills’ northern face, and the face is orange rock
  That looks out on nothing, nothing but a great space
  Of white and pewter lights, and a din like silversmiths
  Beating and beating at an intractable metal.
  • “Blackberrying”

• These poems do not live: it’s a sad diagnosis.
  They grew their toes and fingers well enough,
  Their little foreheads bulged with concentration.
  If they missed out on walking about like people
  It wasn’t for any lack of mother-love.
  • “Stillborn”

• Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
  Searching my reaches for what she really is.
  Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
  I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
  She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
  I am important to her. She comes and goes.
  Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
  In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
  Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
  • “Mirror”

• I’m a riddle in nine syllables,
  An elephant, a ponderous house,
  A melon strolling on two tendrils.
  O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!
  This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.
  Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.
  I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.
  I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,
  Boarded the train there’s no getting off.
  • “Metaphors”

Winter Trees (1972)

• You said you would kill it this morning.
  Do not kill it. It startles me still,
  The jut of that odd, dark head, pacing
• Through the uncut grass on the elm’s hill.
  It is something to own a pheasant,
  Or just to be visited at all.
• I am not mystical: it isn’t
  As if I thought it had a spirit.
  It is simply in its element.
• That gives it a kingliness, a right.
  • “Pheasant”

And I
Am the arrow,

The dew that flies
Suicidal, at one with the drive
Into the red

Eye, the cauldron of morning.

from the poem Ariel, October 12, 1962

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dylan thomas, il pirata, sigrid hjerten, sylvia plath, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, vincenzo bellini

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Who is a reflection of you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

dream a little dream…

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

all that can be hoped for
is to write somethin’
that will resonate
with you

maybe somethin’ about
layin’ you down
in a bed of roses

or how i await
each passin’ moment
with greater anticipation
until i hear your voice again

oh wait, this is better..

i have no greater hope
than that someday
you will accompany me

Copyright 2018 Mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

thanks Karen…

i ain’t talkin ’bout romance
romance is for pikers
“You’re talking about
something rare.”
yes

“The kind that floods your blood
with emotions, the kind
that reshapes you,
defines you
and elevates you.”
yes

“The kind that is worth
everything you have…”
yes
“…with the one
you cannot be without!”
yes

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today, a once ago conversation between two friends who want to be more than friends.  Hope you enjoy.

Dear Muse,
Song lines of the day.  Hope this resonates with you, it does with me; Bon Jovi “Bed of Roses”;
“I wanna lay you down in a bed of roses
For tonight I’ll sleep on a bed of nails
I wanna be just as close as your Holy Ghost is
And lay you down in a bed of roses.”
Mac

Dear Mac,

This resonates on many levels.  I will see you at lunch tomorrow!

M

Dear Muse,

I shall be awaitin’ each passin’ moment with greater anticipation.
Mac

Dear Mac,

Dear Muse,
Regardin’ my so called charm: It matters not a whit to me whether others think I am charmin’.  It matters to me only that you think so.  I also think that what you call my charm, I call merely my reflection of you; my response to you.
Mac

Dear Muse,
Just a quick note to let you know I enjoyed our lunch and that I am findin’ our time together ever more enjoyable.  I regret but one thing about our time together; that it ends.  Please be safe.
Until,
Mac

Charlotte de Sauve
Portrait of Charlotte de Sauve, painted by an unknown artist

Today is the birthday of Charlotte de Beaune Semblançay, Viscountess of Tours, Baroness de Sauve, Marquise de Noirmoutier (France 26 October 1551 – 30 September 1617 France); noblewoman, courtesan and a mistress of King Henry of Navarre, who later ruled as King Henry IV of France. She was a member of Queen Mother Catherine de’ Medici’s notorious “Flying Squadron” (L’escadron volant in French), a group of beautiful female spies and informants recruited to seduce important men at Court, and thereby extract information to pass on to the Queen Mother.

Charlotte was sent to court where she was educated in the household of the Queen Mother, Catherine de’ Medici. Blonde-haired, and described as having been “beautiful, intelligent, and immoral”, she was married to Simon de Fizes, Baron de Sauve, secretary of state first to King Charles IX and afterwards King Henry III, in 1569 when she was eighteen years old. Her marriage was arranged by the powerful Guise family. In the words of historian Jean Heritier, her background meant that “at twenty-one, she knew all there was to be known about politics”. Author Mark Strage described Charlotte as having had a face that was “more agreeable and animated than sensuous”.

She was appointed maid-of-honour to Marguerite de Valois. She is recorded as taking part in some of the extravagant pageants and ballets which Catherine de’ Medici produced in abundance. She helped Catherine mount an outdoor banquet and lavish show depicting the Apotheosis of Woman on 9 June 1577 at the château of Chenonceau. During the banquet the male guests were served by Catherine’s most beautiful ladies-in-waiting who wore topless gowns and their hair flowing loose as was the custom of brides on their wedding night.

On 27 November 1579 Baron de Sauve died. Charlotte then married Francois de La Tremoille, Marquis de Noirmoutier on 18 October 1584.

Charlotte later became the mistress of Henry’s greatest adversary, Henry I, Duke of Guise, with whom she spent the night at Blois on 22 December 1588, before his assassination by “the Forty-five”, Henry III’s bodyguards, the following morning. She had other lovers, including the Duc d’Épernon and the Seigneur d’Avrilly.

Vasily Vereshchagin
Vasily Vereshchagin

Today is the birthday of Vasily Vasilyevich Vereshchagin (Cherepovets, Novgorod Governorate, October 26, 1842 – April 13, 1904; Port Arthur, Manchuria); artist.  The graphic nature of his realist scenes led many of them to never be printed or exhibited.

Gallery

At the Fortress Walls: Let Them In! (1871).

The Apotheosis of War (1871)

The Road of the War Prisoners, 1878-1879. Oil on canvas. Brooklyn Museum

Suppression of the Indian Revolt by the English (1884). 

In 1902

Fakir (1874–1876)

• 

  Bhil (1884)

• 

  Mounted Warrior in Jaipur (1881)

• 

  Parsi Priest (Fire-Worshiper). Bombay (1874–1876)

• 

  Portrait of Bacha (1867–1868)

• 

  A Garden Gate in Chuguchak (1869–1870)

Guillermo Kahlo
Guillermo Kahlo in 1920

Today is the birthday of Guillermo Kahlo (born Carl Wilhelm Kahlo; Pforzheim, Grand Duchy of Baden 26 October 1871 – 14 April 1941 Mexico City); photographer. He documented important architectural works, churches, streets, landmarks, as well as industries and companies in Mexico at the beginning of the 20th century.

Kahlo married María Cardena in August, 1893. The night she died giving birth to their third child, he asked Antonio Calderón for his daughter Matilde’s hand in marriage. After the marriage, Kahlo sent his and Maria’s daughters away to be raised in a convent.

Kahlo and Calderón were the parents of painter Frida Kahlo.

He died on 14 April 1941 in Coyoacán, Mexico City.

Gallery

• 

  Frida Kahlo
• 

  Frida Kahlo
• 

  Construcción del Palacio Legislativo
• 

  Frida Kahlo
• 

  Frida Kahlo

 

Beryl Markham
Beryl Markham in 1936

And today is the birthday of Beryl Markham (née Clutterbuck, Ashwell, Rutland, United Kingdom 26 October 1902 – 3 August 1986 Nairobi, Kenya, Africa); British-born Kenyan aviator (one of the first bush pilots), adventurer, racehorse trainer and author. She was the first woman to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. She wrote about her adventures in her memoir, West with the Night.

On her family’s farm, she developed her knowledge of and love for horses. Barely an adult, she became the first licensed female racehorse trainer in Kenya and rapidly became a successful and renowned figure among the racing community of Kenya.

Impetuous, single-minded and beautiful, Markham was admired and described as a noted non-conformist, even in a colony known for its colourful eccentrics. She was married three times, taking the name Markham from her second husband, the wealthy Mansfield Markham. She is believed to have had an openly public affair in 1929 with Prince Henry, Duke of Gloucester, the son of George V, but the Windsors allegedly cut the romance short. She also had an affair with Hubert Broad, who was later named by Mansfield Markham as a co-respondent in his 1937 divorce from Beryl. After her Atlantic crossing, she returned to be with Broad, who was also a great influence in her flying career.

She befriended the Danish writer Karen Blixen during the years that Baroness Blixen was managing her family’s coffee farm in the Ngong hills outside Nairobi. When Blixen’s romantic connection with the hunter and pilot Denys Finch Hatton was winding down, Markham started her own affair with him. He invited her to tour game lands on what turned out to be his fatal flight, but Markham supposedly declined because of a premonition of her flight instructor, British pilot Tom Campbell Black.

Largely inspired by Black, with whom she had a long-term affair, Markham took up flying. She worked for some time as a bush pilot, spotting game animals from the air and signaling their locations to safaris on the ground. She also mingled with the notorious Happy Valley set, a group of hedonistic, largely British and Anglo-Irish aristocrats and adventurers who settled in the “Happy Valley” region of the Wanjohi Valley, near the Aberdare mountain range, in colonial Kenya and Uganda between the 1920s and the 1940s. In the 1930s, the group became infamous for its decadent lifestyles and exploits, following reports of drug use and sexual promiscuity. The area around Naivasha was one of the first to be settled in Kenya by white people and was one of the main hunting grounds of the ‘set’. The colonial town of Nyeri, Kenya, to the east of the Aberdare Range, was the centre of Happy Valley settlers. Some of the notable members of the Happy Valley set were: The 3rd Baron Delamere and his son and heir the 4th Baron Delamere; Denys Finch Hatton; Sir Jock Delves Broughton and wife Diana Delves Broughton; Josslyn Hay, 22nd Earl of Erroll; Lady Idina Sackville; Alice de Janzé (cousin of J. Ogden Armour) and her husband Frédéric de Janzé.

Beryl Markham, circa 1930.

Markham chronicled her many adventures in her memoir, West with the Night, published in 1942.

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