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

my dear friend Marci:
“I’m heading back from my trip
right now, single. Shit sucks.
For being a logical person,
this shouldn’t be difficult.”

“How in the hell a body
needs a head and a heart
to function, yet they give
such conflicting signals.”

you can only do so much
to save those who are lost
and you gotta make sure
you do not lose yourself

comes down to this…
only you can answer
is it worth your all,
everything you have
cuz that is pro’bly
what it will take

and make sure
you ask yourself this…
can you live
with not tryin’ anymore,
with walkin’ away

it might be
all you have left
it was all i had left

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Konstantin Fyodorovich Yuon or Juon (Moscow October 24 [O.S. October 12] 1875 – April 11, 1958; Moscow); painter and theatre designer associated with the Mir Iskusstva.  Later, he co-founded the Union of Russian Artists and the Association of Artists of Revolutionary Russia.

From 1892 to 1898 he studied at the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture where Konstantin Savitsky and Konstantin Korovin were among his distinguished teachers. After graduating from the Moscow Art School he took private lessons from Valentin Serov (1898–1900). During several trips to Western Europe, particularly in Paris, he became acquainted with the cityscapes of Camille Pissarro and other Impressionists, but retained his own distinctive style.

In 1900 he opened the first private painting and drawing school in Moscow. Some noted Russian painters received art education in the school (for example, Olga Zhekulina). Later he taught in Leningrad Academy of Arts and the Surikov Art Institute in Moscow. His studio in Moscow was widely used by other painters. He designed sets for plays at the Moscow Art Theatre and the Maly Theater, becoming the official designer for this theater from 1945 to 1947. He also contributed sets for operas.

Gallery

Portrait of Klavdiya Yuon, the artist’s wife

 

Portrait of Klavdiya Yuon, the artist’s wife, 1911

View of the Troitse-Sergiyeva Lavra from Vokzalnaya Street, 1911

New Planet 1921 

Mac Tag

Continue reading

konstantin yuon, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  What would poets write of your dreams?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Almanac

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

do dreams,
come true…

havin’ fun
was never an issue
for us

long lunches,
cocktails parties,
the opera,
doin’ nothin’

none of it
ever more fun,
before or after us

but as much
as i miss
those times

i miss most of all
not bein’ there
for you to lean on

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

muse,
let your eyes close
by dreams caress
unto your breast,
upon your pillow lay
here, a world away
with no fears or tears

have i come and will i stay
a vision by your side
nothin’ claim i
nor touch, nor word,
but a lonely sigh,
to be near you
my only care

who would not go as i have gone
a poet on this dream could rhyme,
‘Here lies a dream, one for all time
Enter, this is where we belong’

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

For you a busy day here at TLC: A day in history story, a poem, lyrics and a song.  All for you.

Today is the birthday of Jean-Louis Forain (Reims, France 23 October 1852 – 11 July 1931 Paris); Impressionist painter and printmaker, working in media including oils, watercolour, pastel, etching and lithograph.

Forain’s quick and often biting wit allowed him to befriend poets Arthur Rimbaud and Paul Verlaine as well as many writers, most notably Joris-Karl Huysmans. He was one of only “seven known recipients” to receive a first edition of A Season in Hell directly from Rimbaud.  He was the youngest artist to frequent and participate in the feverish debates led by Édouard Manet and Edgar Degas at the Café de la Nouvelle Athènes in Montmartre.

A follower and protégé of Degas, Forain joined the Impressionist circle in time to take part in the fourth independent exhibition in 1879; he participated in four of the eight Impressionist Exhibitions (1879, 1880, 1881 and 1886). Influenced by Impressionist theories on light and color, he depicted scenes of everyday life: his watercolors, pastels and paintings focused on Parisian popular entertainments and themes of modernity—the racetrack, the ballet, the comic opera and bustling cafés.

Forain was the most famous caricaturist of the Belle époque, and drew, among others, for the Figaro for more than 30 years. From 1898–1899 Forain worked as an illustrator for the weekly French magazine Psst…!, a satirical publication to promote the anti-Dreyfus.

Aside from being influenced by his friend of over fifty years, Edgar Degas, Forain was greatly influenced by Honoré Daumier, and his treatment of subjects in his drawings for publications such as Le Figaro and Le Courrier Francais are often reminiscent of Daumier’s. In 1892 he published the first volume of La Comédie Parisienne, a collection of Forain’s illustrations and commentary on the major political stories that disrupted France’s Third Republic—such as the anarchic crisis and the Dreyfus affair. In 1891 Forain married the painter Jeanne Bosc with whom he had a son, Jean-Loup, born in 1895.

During the first World War, Forain’s illustrations honored the patriotism of his contemporaries, and he enlisted in the Section de Camouflage under Lucien-Victor Guirand de Scévola. In his later years, Forain created numerous scenes of the Law Courts and other Parisian institutions plus social satire caricatures of late 19th and early 20th century French life.

In 1931, shortly before his death, he was made a member of the Royal Academy of Arts in London. He was one of France’s most famous and revered artists during his time. He was, perhaps, most highly respected for his numerous drawings which chronicled and commented on Parisian city life at the end of the 19th century. Followers and admirers of Forain’s work included Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec.

Gallery

Femme à sa toilette (vers 1895-1896), Mexico, musée Soumaya.

Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère (1878), New York, Brooklyn Museum

Le Client (1878), Memphis, Dixon Gallery and Gardens

On this day in 1939, author Zane Grey died in Altadena, California.  Grey married Dolly Roth, an apparently fine and forgivin’ woman.  Durin’ his courtship of Dolly, Grey still saw previous girlfriends and warned her frankly, “But I love to be free. I cannot change my spots. The ordinary man is satisfied with a moderate income, a home, wife, children, and all that….But I am a million miles from being that kind of man and no amount of trying will ever do any good“.  He added, “I shall never lose the spirit of my interest in women.”  It was in Altadena that he spent time with his mistress Brenda Montenegro.  The two met while hikin’ Eaton Canyon in California.  Of her he wrote, “I saw her flowing raven mane against the rocks of the canyon. I have seen the red skin of the Navajo, and the olive of the Spaniards, but her…her skin looked as if her Creator had in that instant molded her just for me. I thought it was an apparition. She seemed to be the embodiment of the West I portray in my books, open and wild.”  Just as I felt that you muse, had been molded for me.

And on this day in 1872, French poet Théophile Gautier died in Paris.  From TG we get the Poem of the Day which inspired me to write the lyrics of the day.  To borrow from Shakespeare: Once more unto the dreams we go dear muse.  And talk of phantoms as Halloween approaches.  First the poem, then the lyrics:

The Phantom of the Rose

The Phantom of the Dream

Mac Tag

Perhaps when we find ourselves wanting everything, it is because we are dangerously close to wanting nothing. – Syvia Plath

If . . . I myself can understand what I’ve written, I feel the day hasn’t been totally wasted. — S. J. Perelman

Continue reading

andrew lloyd webber, cowboy coleridge, dreams of sanity, love letter, love poem, love song, michael crawford, muse, Rhett, s j perelman, sarah brightman, sylvia plath, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, the pantom of the rose, the phantom of the dream, the phantom of the opera, theophile gautier, twt, zane, zane grey, 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/copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

they both lived
in an old hotel downtown
unbeknownst to each other

they came and went
in anonymity
his carefully calculated
hers by wont
of her circumstances

he was a writer,
or he hoped so
she was stuck
livin’ a life she felt
was chosen for her

his habit, ’round midnight,
was to go down to the big lobby
and write in the quiet solitude

she came down one night
when her husband was away,
bored, lonely, and seekin’
escape from her insomnia

she found her escape,
and he found much more,
when their eyes met across
the big room and he rose

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Are you just going to go?”
i b’lieve so
“Don’t you ever get lonely?”
sometimes
sometimes

as if it really matters…

the moon ascends
the stars burn,
fillin’ the great big
High Plains night
yet every day
you try

as if it does matter,
to git the right words
to capture the light
to actually see

and you try
to remember
it is only a feelin’
and that someone
will read the words
and understand

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Kristjan Raud
Kristjan Raud, from Estonica (date unknown)

Today is the birthday of Kristjan Raud (22 October 1865, Kirikuküla, Vinni Parish, Estonia – 19 May 1943, Tallinn, Estonia); painter and illustrator who was one of the founders of the Estonian National Museum.  Folklore elements figure heavily in his subject matter and his style is reminiscent of Primitivism.  His twin brother, Paul, also became a well-known painter.

Gallery 

Kalev Proposes Marriage, from the Kalevipoeg 

• 

  Under the Stars

• 

  Laundry

• 

  The Oath

• 

  Martyr (or, Victim)

• 

  Witch and Piglets

Mac Tag

Continue reading

kristjan raud, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

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

therefore
all days shall be ours
wherever we go
whatever we do…

“Take me someplace.”

of course

the hard part
will be choosin’
where to go

luckily,
it does not matter

anywhere we go
will be special
because we are there
……

whenever
life’s stress
encroaches
there whispers
the solace of you

so i stand,
on a chilly autumn night
with the High Plains sky
spreadin’ all around me

i open my arms wide
and bless the fortunes
that brought me you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Domenico Zampieri known as Domenichino
St. John the Evangelist, c. 1621–29

Today is the birthday of Domenico Zampieri, known as Domenichino for his shortness (Bologna October 21, 1581 – April 6, 1641 Naples); Baroque painter of the Bolognese or Carracci School of painters.

Gallery

The Sibyl og Cumae, at the Borghese Gallery

The Adoration of the Shepherds, c. 1607-10, Oil on canvas, 143 x 115cm, National Gallery of Scotland

Landscape with Tobias

The Sacrifice of Isaac, 1627 – 1628 

A Virgin with a Unicorn, c. 1604–05, fresco in Palazzo Farnese, Rome, after a design by Annibale Carracci 

Portrait of Giovanni Battista Agucchi, c. 1621, City Art Gallery, York

• 

  Portrait of Guido Reni, 1603-04

• 

  Last Communion of St. Jerome, 1614, Pinacoteca Vaticana

• 

  Detail from Diana and her Nymphs, 1616–17

• 

  Saint Cecilia Playing the Viol, 1618

• 

  River landscape with Boatmen and Fisherman, an elegant couple walking by the shore

• 

  Madonna and Child with St Petronius and St John the Evangelist

• 

  Apparition of the Virgin and Child and San Gennaro at the Miraculous Oil Lamp, 1637–38, Cathedral of Naples

   

Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Coleridge in 1795

Today is the birthday of Samuel Taylor Coleridge (Ottery St. Mary, Devon; 21 October 1772 – 25 July 1834 Highgate, Middlesex); poet, literary critic and philosopher who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a member of the Lake Poets.  He wrote the poems The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major prose work Biographia Literaria.  Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases, including suspension of disbelief.  He was a major influence on Emerson and American transcendentalism.

Throughout his adult life Coleridge had crippling bouts of anxiety and depression; it has been speculated that he had bipolar disorder, which had not been defined during his lifetime.  He was physically unhealthy, which may have stemmed from a bout of rheumatic fever and other childhood illnesses.  He was treated for these conditions with laudanum, which fostered a lifelong opium addiction.

His friends reportedly lamented the fact that he had wasted much of his talent.  They considered him the most brilliant writer and thinker they had ever known, but thought he had accomplished so little.  Near the end of his life, his friend Charles Lamb wrote of Coleridge, “His face when he repeats his verses hath its ancient glory, an Archangel a little damaged.”  Hmm, reminds me of someone… 

Mary Matilda Betham, Sara Coleridge (Mrs. Samuel Taylor Coleridge), Portrait miniature, 1809

Image of Coleridge, from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and The Vision of Sir Launfal (by Coleridge and James Russell Lowell), published by Sampson Low, 1906. 

At Jesus College, Coleridge was introduced to political and theological ideas then considered radical, including those of the poet Robert Southey.  Coleridge joined Southey in a plan, soon abandoned, to found a utopian commune-like society, called Pantisocracy, in the wilderness of Pennsylvania.  In 1795, the two friends married sisters Sarah and Edith Fricker, in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, but Coleridge’s marriage with Sarah proved unhappy.  He grew to detest his wife, whom he only married because of social constraints.  He eventually separated from her.

Coleridge at age 42, portrait by Washington Allston

^Verse

What if you slept… 

What if you slept
And what if
In your sleep
You dreamed
And what if
In your dream
You went to heaven
And there plucked a strange and beautiful flower
And what if
When you awoke
You had that flower in your hand
Ah, what then?

“Frost at Midnight”

Therefore all seasons shall be sweet to thee,

Whether the summer clothe the general earth

With greenness, or the redbreast sit and sing

Betwixt the tufts of snow on the bare branch

Of mossy apple-tree, while the nigh thatch

Smokes in the sun-thaw; whether the eave-drops fall

Heard only in the trances of the blast,

Or if the secret ministry of frost

Shall hang them up in silent icicles,

Quietly shining to the quiet Moon.

• The frost performs its secret ministry,
  Unhelped by any wind.
  • “Frost at Midnight”, l. 1 (1798)

• Forth from his dark and lonely hiding place
  (Portentous-sight!) the owlet Atheism,
  Sailing an obscene wings athwart the noon,
  Drops his blue-fringèd lids, and holds them close,
  And hooting at the glorious sun in Heaven,
  Cries out, “Where is it?”
  • “Fears in Solitude”, l. 81 (1798).

• And the Devil did grin, for his darling sin
  Is pride that apes humility.
  • “The Devil’s Thoughts”, st. 6 (1799).

All thoughts, all passions, all delights,
Whatever stirs this mortal frame,
All are but ministers of Love,
And feed his sacred flame.

• “Love”, st. 1 (1799).

And in Life’s noisiest hour,
There whispers still the ceaseless Love of Thee,
The heart’s Self-solace and soliloquy.

You mould my Hopes, you fashion me within.

• “The Presence of Love” (1807), lines 1-4.

And looking to the Heaven, that bends above you,
How oft! I bless the Lot, that made me love you.

• “The Presence of Love” (1807), lines 10-11.

Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he —
Oh, lift a thought in prayer for S.T.C!
That he, who many a year, with toil of breath,
Found death in life, may here find life in death.

• “Epitaph”, written for himself (1833).

Engraving of a scene from The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. The frozen crew and the albatross by Gustave Doré (1876)

 

And on this day in 1940 – The first edition of the Ernest Hemingway novel For Whom the Bell Tolls is published.

For Whom the Bell Tolls

First edition cover

For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, a young American in the International Brigades attached to a republican guerrilla unit during the Spanish Civil War.  As a demolition man, he is assigned to blow up a bridge during an attack on the city of Segovia.

Ernest Hemingway wrote For Whom the Bell Tolls in Havana, Cuba; Key West, Florida; and Sun Valley, Idaho in 1939.  In Cuba, he lived in the Hotel Ambos-Mundos where he worked on the manuscript.  The novel was finished in July 1940 and published in October.  The characters in the novel include those who are purely fictional, those based on real people but fictionalized, and those who were actual figures in the war.  Set in the Sierra de Guadarrama mountain range between Madrid and Segovia, the action takes place during four days and three nights.  For Whom the Bell Tolls became a Book of the Month Club choice, sold half a million copies within months, was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize, and became a literary triumph for Hemingway.  The first edition print run was 75,000 copies priced at $2.75.

The book’s title is taken from the metaphysical poet John Donne’s series of meditations and prayers on health, pain, and sickness (written while Donne was convalescing from a nearly fatal illness) published in 1624 as Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, specifically Meditation XVII.  Hemingway quotes part of the meditation (using Donne’s original spelling) in the book’s epigraph, which in turn refers to the practice of funeral tolling:

No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe; every man is a peece of the Continent, a part of the maine; if a Clod bee washed away by the Sea, Europe is the lesse, as well as if a Promontorie were, as well as if a Mannor of thy friends or of thine owne were; any mans death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankinde; And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.

I am no romantic glorifier of the Spanish woman, nor did I ever think of a casual piece as anything much other than a casual piece in any country. But when I am with Maria I love her so that I feel, literally, as though I would die and I never believed in that or thought that it could happen.

• Ch. 13

What a business. You go along your whole life and they seem as though they mean something and they always end up not meaning anything. There was never any of what this is. You think that is one thing you will never have. And then, on a lousy show like this, co-ordinating two chicken-crut guerilla bands to help you blow a bridge under impossible conditions, to abort a counter-offensive that will probably already be started, you run into a girl like this Maria.

• Ch. 13

If we win here we will win everywhere. The world is a fine place and worth the fighting for and I hate very much to leave it.

• Ch 43

For him it was a dark passage which led to nowhere, then to nowhere, then again to nowhere, once again to nowhere, always and forever to nowhere, heavy on the elbows in the earth to nowhere, dark, never any end to nowhere, hung on all time always to unknowing nowhere, this time and again for always to nowhere, now not to be borne once again always and to nowhere, now beyond all bearing up, up, up and into nowhere, suddenly, scaldingly, holdingly all nowhere gone and time absolutely still and they were both there, time having stopped and he felt the earth move out and away from under them.

• Ch. 13

• Today is only one day in all the days that will ever be. But what will happen in all the other days that ever come can depend on what you do today. It’s been that way all this year. It’s been that way so many times. All of war is that way.

• That tomorrow should come and that I should be there.

Mac Tag

Continue reading

domenichino, ernest hemingway, for whom the bell tolls, samuel taylor coleridge, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  What is your winter dream?  Do your realities converge with your dreams?  Rhett

The Lover’s Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© coyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a stellar autumn night
for a trip…

a long overdue
rendezvous awaits
the culmination
of a journey
that began
eight years ago

whatever has been,
mere prelude
to what will be

do you see me comin’
up that tree lined drive

would ’twere
that it were now

need there be
a reason for survivin’

in this case
it is so

the one constant
over time and distance

it is time
we have arrived

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i have written, often,
that beauty and sorrow
are all that matter
so of course,
i revere Rimbaud
no one ever
wrote it better

for Rimbaud it was hope
that was extinguished
for me, need

i survived
deux saisons en enfer
i do not need another

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Arthur Rimbaud
Rimbaud, aged 17, by Étienne Carjat, probably taken in December 1871.

Today is the birthday of Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud (Charleville, Ardennes; 20 October 1854 – 10 November 1891 Marseille); poet who is known for his influence on modern literature and arts, which prefigured surrealism.  Rimbaud started writing at a very young age and was a prodigious student, but abandoned his formal education in his teenage years to run away from home amidst the Franco-Prussian War.  After running away, during his late adolescence and early adulthood, he began the bulk of his literary output, but completely stopped writing at the age of 21, after assembling one of his major works, Illuminations.

Rimbaud was known to have been a libertine and for being a restless soul, having engaged in a volatile romantic relationship with fellow poet Paul Verlaine, which lasted nearly two years.   After the end of his literary career, he traveled extensively on three continents as a merchant before his death from cancer just after his thirty-seventh birthday.  As a poet, Rimbaud is well-known for his contributions to Symbolism and, among other works, Une Saison en Enfer 1873 (A Season in Hell), which was a significant precursor to modernist literature.

Caricature of Rimbaud drawn by Verlaine in 1872.

Verlaine (far left) and Rimbaud (second to left) in an 1872 painting by Henri Fantin-Latour 

Rimbaud (self-portrait) in Harar in 1883.

Versi (Verse)

• Je est un autre.
  • I am another.
  • Letter to Georges Izambard; Charleville, 13 May 1871
• Ô mes petites amoureuses,
  Que je vous hais !
  • Oh my little mistresses,
    How I hate you!
  • Poésies (1871), “Mes petites amoureuses”

• J’allais sous le ciel, Muse! et j’étais ton féal.
  • I went out under the sky, Muse! and I was your vassal.
  • Ma Bohéme. Fantaisie (My Bohemian Life (Fantasy)), st. 1

• Mon auberge était à la Grande-Ourse.
  Mes étoiles au ciel avaient un doux frou-frou.
  • My tavern was the Big Bear.
    My stars in the sky rustled softly.
  • Ma Bohéme. Fantaisie (My Bohemian Life (Fantasy)), st. 2

• Mon triste coeur bave à la poupe.
  • My sad heart foams at the stern.
  • Le Coeur Volé (The Stolen Heart, st. 1

• A noir, E blanc, I rouge, U vert, O bleu: voyelles,
  Je dirai quelque jour vos naissances latentes !
  • Black A, white E, red I, green U, blue O: vowels,
    Someday I shall recount your latent births.
  • Voyelles (Vowels (1871)

• Elle est retrouvée,
  Quoi ? — L’Éternité.
  C’est la mer allée
  Avec le soleil.
  • It is found again.
    What? Eternity.
    It is the sea
    Gone with the sun.
  • L’Éternité (1872)
  • Variant translation:
    It has been recovered.
    What? — Eternity.
    It is the sea escaping
    With the sun.

• O saisons, ô châteaux,
  Quelle âme est sans défauts ?
  • O seasons, O castles,
    What soul is without flaws?
  • Bonheur (Happiness)

• J’ai embrassé l’aube d’été.
  • I have embraced the summer dawn.
  • Illuminations. Aube (Dawn) (1874)
  • Variant translation: I have kissed the summer dawn.

• Il pleut doucement sur la ville.
  • It rains softly on the town.
  • From a lost poem

• Je dis qu’il faut être voyant, se faire voyant. Le poète se fait voyant par un long, immense et raisonné dérèglement de tous les sens.
  • I say one must be a seer, make oneself a seer. The poet makes himself a seer by an immense, long, deliberate derangement of all the senses.
  • Letter to Paul Demeny (May 15, 1871)

Le Bateau Ivre (The Drunken Boat) (1871)

• Plus léger qu’un bouchon j’ai dansé sur les flots.
  • Lighter than a cork I danced on the waves.
  • St. 4

• Plus douce qu’aux enfants la chair des pommes sures,
  L’eau verte pénétra ma coque de sapin.
  • Sweeter than apples to children
    The green water spurted through my pine-wood hull.
  • St. 5

• Je me suis baigné dans le Poème
  De la Mer…
  Dévorant les azurs verts.
  • I have bathed in the Poem
    Of the Sea…
    Devouring the green azures.
  • St. 6

• J’ai vu le soleil bas, taché d’horreurs mystiques,
  Illuminant de longs figements violets,
  Pareils à des acteurs de drames très-antiques.
  • I have seen the sunset, stained with mystic horrors,
    Illumine the rolling waves with long purple forms,
    Like actors in ancient plays.
  • St. 9

• J’ai vu des archipels sidéraux! et des îles
  Dont les cieux délirants sont ouverts au vogueur:
  Est-ce en ces nuits sans fond que tu dors et t’exiles,
  Million d’oiseaux d’or, ô future Vigueur ?
  • I have seen starry archipelagoes! and islands
    Whose raving skies are opened to the voyager:
    Is it in these bottomless nights that you sleep, in exile,
    A million golden birds, O future Vigor?
  • St. 25

Une Saison en Enfer (A Season in Hell) (1873)

• Un soir, j’ai assis la Beauté sur mes genoux. – Et je l’ai trouvée amère. – Et je l’ai injuriée.
  • One evening, I sat Beauty in my lap. — And I found her bitter. — And I cursed her.

• Je parvins à faire s’évanouir dans mon esprit toute l’espérance humaine.
  • I found I could extinguish all human hope from my soul.

• La vie est la farce à mener par tous.
  • Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

• Jadis, si je me souviens bien, ma vie était un festin où s’ouvraient tous les coeurs, où tous les vins coulaient.
  • Once, I remember well, my life was a feast where all hearts opened and all wines flowed.

• Je suis esclave de mon baptême.
  • Baptism enslaved me.

• La vieillerie poétique avait une bonne part dans mon alchimie du verbe.
  • Old poetics played a large part in my alchemy of the word.

• L’amour est à réinventer, on le sait.
  • Love is to be reinvented, that is clear.

• Moi ! moi qui me suis dit mage ou ange, dispensé de toute morale, je suis rendu au sol.
  • I! I who fashioned myself a sorcerer or an angel, who dispensed with all morality, I have come back to earth.

• Il faut être absolument moderne.
  • One must be absolutely modern.

• Je me crois en enfer, donc j’y suis.
  • I believe I am in Hell, and so I am there.

Rimbaud wrote a poem “A Winter Dream” that served as inspiration for this poem.  We return to two of our favorite themes here at TLC; dreams and the film Inception.  Hope you like today’s POD:

A Winter Dream

The Song of the Day is “A Winter’s Dream” by Symphony X.

Today is the birthday of Aelbert Jacobsz Cuyp (October 20, 1620 – November 15, 1691); one of the leading landscape painters of the Dutch Golden Age in the 17th century.  The most famous of a family of painters, the pupil of his father Jacob Gerritsz Cuyp (1594–1651/52), he is especially known for his large views of the Dutch countryside in early morning or late afternoon light.

He is known to have been married to Cornelia Bosman in 1658, a date coinciding so directly with the end of his productivity as a painter that it has been accepted that his marriage played some sort of role in the end of his artistic career.

Cuyp in Vaderlandse Historie 2 (1926)

 

Portrait of a Young maid holding a cooking pot full of dumplings, ca. 1652

The Maas at Dordrecht (circa 1650), showing the Maas River in front of Cuyp’s hometown of Dordrecht, National Gallery of Art.

Piping Shepherds (Metropolitan Museum of Art) 

Herd of Sheep at Pasture, 1650, Städelsches Kunstinstitut 

Cattle near a River, painting by an imitator of Cuyp (suspected 18th century).

• 

  Landscape with cattle (c. 1639-1649) National Gallery of Victoria.

• 

  A View of the Maas at Dordrecht (about 1645-1646) J. Paul Getty Museum

• 

  Herdsmen with Cows (circa 1645) Dulwich Picture Gallery

• 

  Cattle near the Maas, with Dordrecht in the distance

• 

  Avenue at Meerdervoort

• 

  The Mussel Eater, circa 1650, Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen

• 

  Cows in a River, c. 1654

• 

  The Negro Page circa 1652, Royal Collection

   

• And today is the birthday of Frits Thaulow (Christiania, 20 October 1847 – Volendam, 5 November 1906); Impressionist painter, best known for his naturalistic depictions of landscape.

  Thaulow was married twice.  In 1874 he married Ingeborg Charlotte Gad (1852–1908).  The marriage dissolved in 1886.  In 1886 he married Alexandra Lasson (1862–1955), the daughter of Carl Lasson (1830–1893), a noted Norwegian attorney.

  Gallery

Mac Tag

If she, my liege, can make me know this clearly, I’ll love her dearly, ever, ever dearly.

– Shakespeare

I turned silences and nights into words. What was unutterable, I wrote down. I made the whirling world stand still.

– Arthur Rimbaud

Can our dreams ever blur the intransigent lines which draw the shape that shuts us in?

– Sylvia Plath

Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.

Continue reading

a winters dream, aelbert cuyp, cowboy coleridge, for those who dream, frits thaulow, inception, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, pod, poem of the day, Rhett, sod, song of the day, symphony x, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Almanac from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Who are you rememberin’?  Rhett

The Lover’s Almanac

Dear Muse,

i walked into that room
not knowin’ i was walkin’
into a life changin’ moment

you stood up from the chair
you were sittin’ in,
and smiled
and i was slayed

i may git weary,
i sure git sad,
and there is much
that i have missed

but i have this

i met you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

funny thing about time
sometimes it brings relief
sometimes, it enhances the pain
to say that i miss you
is to not say enough

to say that i want you
is the only truth i know

all that was
remains heaped
in my memories
and old dreams abide

so that now
in solitude
that which reigns…
so rememberin’ you

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Leigh Hunt, Portrait by Benjamin Robert Haydon.

Today is the birthday of James Henry Leigh Hunt (19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859), best known as Leigh Hunt; essayist, poet, and writer.

Hunt, engraved by H. Meyer from a drawing by J. Hayter

In 1809, Leigh Hunt married Marianne Kent (whose parents were Thomas and Ann).  Marianne, in ill health for most of her life, died 26 January 1857, aged sixty-nine.  Leigh Hunt made little mention of his family in his autobiography.  Marianne’s sister, Elizabeth Kent (Hunt’s sister-in-law), became his amanuensis.

Hunt’s financial affairs were in confusion, and only Percy Bysshe Shelley’s generosity saved him from ruin.  In return he showed sympathy to Shelley during the latter’s domestic distresses, and defended him in the Examiner.  He introduced Keats to Shelley and wrote a very generous appreciation of him in the Indicator.

The Funeral of Shelley by Louis Édouard Fournier (1889); pictured in the centre are, from left, Trelawny, Hunt, and Byron.

Quotes

• Jenny kissed me when we met,
  Jumping from the chair she sat in;
  Time, you thief, who love to get
  Sweets into your list, put that in.
  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
  Say that health and wealth have missed me;
  Say I’m growing old, but add
  Jenny kissed me.
  • “Jenny Kissed Me”, in The Monthly Chronicle (November 1838)

• Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,
  Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
  • Politics and Poetics

• The two divinest things this world has got,
  A lovely woman in a rural spot!
  • Poem The Story of Rimini, iii, 257

• With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks
  To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.
  • The Story of Rimini

• She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
  He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
  The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
  Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady’s face.
  “By God!” said Francis, “rightly done!” and he rose from where he sat:
  “No love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that.”
  • The Glove and the Lions

• Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
  Stolen kisses much completer,
  Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
  Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
  • Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard.
  • Confer Colley Cibber: “Stolen sweets are best.”

• It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
  Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
  And times and things, as in that vision, seem
  Keeping along it their eternal stands.
  • A Thought of the Nile
• and then we wake,
  And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
  Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
  Our own calm journey on for human sake.
  • A Thought of the Nile

• That there is pain and evil, is no rule
  That I should make it greater, like a fool.
  • A Thought or Two on Reading Pomfret’s “Choice”, in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, London: Edward Moxon, 1846, p. 147.

Theodoros Vryzakis
Portrait by Ludwig Thiersch (c. 1845/50)

Today is the birthday of Theodoros Vryzakis (Thebes; 19 October 1819- 6 December 1878 Munich); painter, known mostly for his historical scenes.  He was one of the founders of the “Munich School”, composed of Greek artists who had studied in that city.

Gallery 

• 

  The Sortie of Messolonghi (1853)

• 

  The Consolation (1856)

• 

  The Reception of Lord Byron at Missolonghi (1861)

• 

  The Camp of Georgios Karaiskakis (1855)

• 

  Grateful Hellas (1858)

Umberto Boccioni
Umberto Boccioni self-portrait (1905)

Today is the birthday of Umberto Boccioni (Reggio Calabria; 19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916 Verona); painter and sculptor.  He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures.  Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death.  His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized a major retrospective of 100 pieces.

Gallery 

Self portrait, 1905, oil on canvas 

Three Women, 1909-10

The Morning, 1909 

The City Rises, 1910 

The Laugh, 1911 

States of Mind II: The Farewells, 1911

Dynamism of a Cyclist, 1913 

Elasticity, 1912

Portrait of Ferruccio Busoni, 1916 

• 

  States of Mind III; Those Who Stay, 1911, Museum of Modern Art, New York

• 

  Modern Idol, 1911, Estorick Collection of Modern Italian Art, Islington, London

• 

  The Street Enters the House, 1911, Sprengel-Museum, Hanover

• 

  Head + House + Light, 1912, sculpture destroyed

• 

  Visioni simultanee, 1912, Von Der Heydt Museum, Wuppertal

• 

  L’antigrazioso, 1912, private collection

• 

  Dynamism of a Man’s Head, 1913, private collection

• 

  Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913, Museum of Modern Art, New York

• 

  Charge of the Lancers, 1915, Collection of Riccardo and Magda Jucker, Milan

• 

  Horizontal Volumes, 1915, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

And on this day in 1950, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay died at her home, Steepltop, in Austerlitz, New York.  In my opinion she wrote some of the best sonnets of the century.  She was also well known for her affairs with both men and women.  In 1923 she married Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880–1949), the widower of the labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland, a political icon Millay had met during her time at Vassar.  Both Millay and Boissevain had other lovers throughout their twenty-six-year marriage.  Millay’s most significant such relationship during this time was with the poet George Dillon for whom she wrote a number of her sonnets.  Milly and Dillon collaborated on translations from Charles Baudelaire‘s Les Fleurs du Mal in 1936.  Of course, the Poem of the Day is a Sonnet from Millay.  It is typically called “Sonnet No. 2: Time does not bring relief; you all have lied.”  I changed him/his to her and I call it:

Rememberin’ Her

The Song of the Day is “Remembering” by Avishai Cohen Trio.

I stand stricken, often, so rememberin’ you.

Mac Tag

Continue reading

Avishai Cohen Trio, cowboy coleridge, edna st vincent millay, leigh hunt, muse, poem of the day, remem, rememberin you part two, remembering, remembering her, Rhett, song of the day, the lovers almanac, theodoros vryakis, twt, umberto boccioni, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Whose shadow do you chase?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

not denied,
only delayed…

yes, the thrill
i recall
that lettin’ go feelin’,
where fear disappears

i remember
everything with you
words that for years
had no meanin’
of a sudden
awoke
with you

but it was like a dream,
was it not
we were right there
and then i was gone

it is temptin’
to wallow in the darkness
of the years that followed
but to what avail
for the tale you already know
of madness and near death

no, all that matters
is that we are still standin’
and all that came before
is just a reminder
how lucky we are

and all that was denied
has only been delayed

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

tryin’ to fight off
some negative vibes
messin’ with my creativity

tell me somethin’ good
anything
hell, make it up
if you have to

remind me
how much i enjoyed
sketchin’ your hands
how i loved
takin’ photos of you

remind me
how good your smile
made me feel
how you could always
make me laugh

remind me
that you are there

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

My apologies in advance for this one takin’ kind of a dark turn.  But I go where the words take me and sometimes they take me to a dark place.  The Poem of the Day:

Chasin’ Your Shadow

What a thrill runs through me
With you I feel powerless
And my fears disappear
I cannot control myself
You are the guardian of my faith
With you happiness has come

Your love revived my courage,
And my heart, no longer huntin’
Again, it is you
That revived my faith
Pour yourself into me
I await my fill

But if tomorrow
I wake from this dream
This thought freezes my blood
What will I in this darkness
Do, in death and groans
Centuries will fill my bones

Where time, all bloody of Her injury,
Beside me in the dark night
My hand meets Her hand
What is this breakaway shadow of death
This is Time… She calls me
She wants me to come Her way

Aside my torment
And Her fatal words
Disappear, come not this way
Dissipate up, fatal dream
The dawn of happiness rises
The shadow of you… Come

© copyright 2012 mac Tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Chasing a Shadow” by Charlotte Martin.  The sound quality is not that great but the song is.

Today is the birthday of Luca Giordano (Naples 18 October 1634 – 12 January 1705 Naples); late Baroque painter and printmaker in etching.  Fluent and decorative, he worked successfully in Naples and Rome, Florence and Venice, before spending a decade in Spain.

After his return to Naples early in 1702, Giordano continued to paint prolifically.  Executed in a lighter, less rhetorical style, these late works, prefiguring Rococo, proved influential throughout the eighteenth century, and were admired by Fragonard.

He spent large sums in acts of munificence, and was particularly liberal to poorer artists. One of his maxims was that the good painter is the one whom the public like, and that the public are attracted more by colour than by design.

Giordano had an astonishing facility, which often lead to an impression of superficiality of his works. He left many works in Rome, and far more in Naples. Of the latter, his Christ expelling the Traders from the Temple in the church of the Padri Girolamini, a colossal work, full of expressive “lazzaroni” or beggars from Naples; also the frescoes of the Triumph of Judith at San Martino, and those in the Tesoro della Certosa, including the subject of Moses and the Brazen Serpent; and the cupola paintings in the Church of Santa Brigida. This church contains the artist’s own tomb. Other notable examples are the Judgment of Paris in the Berlin Museum, and Christ with the Doctors in the Temple, in the Corsini Gallery of Rome. In later years, he painted influential frescoes for the Cappella Corsini, the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi and other works.

Sources differ as to whether he died on 3 January or 12 January 1705.

Gallery

Ariane abandonnée

The rape of lucretia

• 

  St. Michael, ca. 1663, Gemäldegalerie, Berlin

• 

  The Adoration of the Magi

• 

  The creation of man, 1684–1686, fresco in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi in Florence

• 

  Triumph of Judith, Certosa di San Martino, Naples

• 

  Triumph of the Medici in the clouds of Mount Olympus, 1684–1686, fresco in the Palazzo Medici-Riccardi

• 

  Mars and Venus with Cupid, 1663, Museo di Capodimonte, Naples

Mac Tag

Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge

Continue reading

charlotte martin, chasin your shadow, chasing a shadow, cowboy coleridge, love letter, love poem, love song, luca giordano, muse, Rhett, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  How does your heart break?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

thrill runs through me
with you i feel vulnerable
fear disappearin’, lettin’ go
cannot control myself
the consummation
with you has come

revived, no longer hurtin’
pour yourself into me
i await my fill

i wake not from a dream
my hand finds yours
the dawn awaits

© Copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

where choice begins…

bewildered
every damn time
ever after came undone

each time goin’ in
i just knew
i was seein’ clearly

but i could never
remember

seemed like,
when the choices began,
then the paradise
and the innocence
would disappear

so if nothin’ else
i can say this

at last
choosin’ wisely

and livin’ this vision
is the culmination
of what had to be

now i can see
i remember
and i know

that we were
and are
of each other

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

for Sheli…

no doubt
the mistake of a life
leavin’ her standin’ there
in the High Plains sun
a kiss and a promise
that could not be kept

a see ya later
that damn near turned
into never see again

i was full of myself
and certain that i knew
what i wanted,
to make it in the big city
she fell in with a sonuvabitch
who damn near killed her

she is married now
to a good guy and happy
and i am glad
but here i sit
holdin’ back,
and chokin’ back
regret with every breath

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

from this moment,
i am hooked
our eyes lock
i walk up
and say hello
i know not much
only this;
you are a rare one

in a you state of mind
the totem spins…
we are in Madrid
we drink too much
we have amazin’ sex
we go back to the cafes
and drink more wine
we git married by Goya
he was showin’ us
the Black Paintin’s
when I woke up

hard to think since then
you are the only true
had things been different
maybe it is the dream
maybe it is the wine;
mind in a flurry
are we of each other

© copyright 2016 Mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

I was immediately inspired by yesterday’s Poem of the Day, so I began workin’ on my own version of “Roses and Rue”.  I find that old poems provide fine inspiration to write lyrics.  So here are the lyrics of the day:

A Poet’s Heartbreak

Could we get back what was lost,
Were it worth the cost,
Could we re-learn love’s song,
Bein’ apart so long

Could the past that is fled
Call back its dead,
Could we sing the old refrain,
Were it worth the pain

I remember we used to meet
At our favorite place to eat,
And you said each pretty word
In a way I had not heard

And your voice had a quaver in it,
As if it would quit,
And shook, in your lovely throat
With its last note

And your eyes, they were bright
Like stars at night,
And they did not resist
When I leaned and kissed

And your mouth, it would smile
For a long, long while,
Then spread all over with laughter
For minutes after

You were never afraid of a shower,
You would never cower:
I remember you ran and danced
Naked when the rain advanced

I remember I could not catch you,
No one could match you,
You looked wonderful,
And I watched in wonder, full

I remember your hair gleamin’
In the rain streamin’
That day on the beach
When everything was in our reach

I remember so well the room,
Where our passion came abloom
The night for the first time
Our bodies moved in rhyme

And the look on your face,
When we reached that place,
Where hearts and flesh entwine
And everything is fine

And the handkerchief of French lace
Which you held to your face
Had a small tear left a stain
Or was it the rain

In your eyes as you waved adieu
Was a look full of rue
In your voice as it said good-bye
Was a petulant cry

“You have only wasted your time.”
That was my selfish crime
Then I rushed through the gate
But it was all too late

Could we get back what was lost,
Were it worth the cost,
Could the past that is fled
Call back its dead

That is a poet’s heartbreak,
Dear love, for your sake,
In rhythm and rhyme and much ado,
In roses and rue

But strange that I was not told
That the brain can hold
In a tiny ivory cell
God’s heaven and hell

That is a poet’s heartbreak,
Dear love, for your sake,
In rhythm and rhyme and much ado,
In roses and rue

The Song of the Day is “Heartbreak Warfare” by John Mayer.

On this day in 1771 – Premiere in Milan of the opera Ascanio in Alba, composed by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, age 15.

Ascanio in Alba
Opera by W. A. Mozart
The composer in 1777, by an unknown painter

Ascanio in Alba, K. 111, is a pastoral opera in two parts (Festa teatrale in due atti) by Mozart to an Italian libretto by Giuseppe Parini.  It was commissioned by the Empress Maria Theresa.

Synopsis

Place: the site of the future city of Alba Longa, near Rome

Act 1

The opening scene introduces Venus and Ascanio, the son she had by Aeneas.  The goddess discusses the charms of Alba and invites her son to go and rule there.  She urges him not to reveal his identity to Silvia, a nymph to whom he is betrothed, but to introduce himself to her under a false identity to test her virtue.  While shepherds summon their promised ruler, Fauno reveals that the smiling face of Aceste, a priest, is a sign that the day will be a day of supreme happiness.  Obeying the goddess, Ascanio pretends to be a foreigner attracted by the beauties of the place.  Aceste tells the shepherds that their valley will be the site of a fine city and that they will have a sovereign, Ascanio, before the day is out.  He also informs Silvia that she will be Ascanio’s bride, but she replies that she is in love with a young man she has seen in a dream.  The priest reassures her, saying the young man in her dream can be none other than Ascanio.  Venus then appears to Ascanio and asks him to test the girl a little longer before revealing his true identity.

Act 2

Ascanio spots Silvia among the shepherds and tries to talk to her.  The girl immediately recognizes the young man from her dreams.  Fauno intervenes and suggests to “the foreigner” (Ascanio) that he should go off and announce the building of Alba in foreign parts.  Thus convinced that the foreigner is not Ascanio, Silvia is deeply saddened.  She finally decides to accept her fate but declares she never will love anyone else than Ascanio.

Aceste consoles Silvia, saying that her tribulations are about to come to an end.  Venus is invoked by a magnificent chorus.  Silvia and Ascanio add their voices to the chorus and the goddess descends on her chariot surrounded by clouds.  Venus unites the two lovers and explains how she had intended her son to discover the virtue of his fiancée.  Aceste pronounces an oath of fidelity and loyalty to Venus, who then retires.  It only remains for Ascanio to perpetuate the race of Aeneas and guide the city of Alba to prosperity.

Today is the birthday of Adolphe-Félix Cals (17 October 1810 – 3 October 1880 Honfleur); portrait, genre, and landscape painter.

Gallery

self-portrait (1851)

A sunday in Saint-Siméon, 1876

Sundown at Honfleur (1875)

Childe Hassam

Today is the birthday of Frederick Childe Hassam (Boston; October 17, 1859 – August 27, 1935 East Hampton, New York); Impressionist painter, noted for his urban and coastal scenes.  Along with Mary Cassatt and John Henry Twachtman, Hassam was instrumental in promulgating Impressionism to American collectors, dealers, and museums.  He produced over 3,000 paintings, oils, watercolors, etchings, and lithographs over the course of his career, and was an influential American artist of the early 20th century.

In February 1884, Hassam married Kathleen Maude (or Maud) Doane (born 1861), a family friend whom he had courted for several years.  Throughout their life together, she ran the household, arranged travel, and attended to other domestic tasks, but little is known about their private life.  Although he had shown steady improvement in his oil painting, before letting go of illustration Hassam decided to return to Paris with his wife.  Hassam’s success with illustration was sufficient, that in 1886 the couple were able to engage a well-located apartment/studio with a maid near the Place Pigalle, the center of the Parisian art community.  The couple returned to the United States in 1889, taking residence in New York City.

Gallery

View in Montmartre, Paris, 1889, Princeton University Art Museum 

Late Afternoon, New York, Winter, c. 1900. Brooklyn Museum

Washington Arch, in Washington Square Park, c. 1893 

Rainy Day, Boston (1885), Toledo Museum of Art in Ohio

Celia Thaxter’s Garden, 1890, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City 

Celia Thaxter in her Garden, 1892, Smithsonian Institution 

Church at Old Lyme, oil on canvas, Childe Hassam, 1905

Snowstorm, Madison Square, c. 1890

August Afternoon, Appledore, 1900 

Mt. Beacon at Newburgh, 1916 

The Water Garden, c. 1909 

The Avenue in the Rain, oil on canvas, 1917. The White House

• 

  A Back Road, Brooklyn Museum

• 

  Meadows, Brooklyn Museum

• 

  Montauk, Brooklyn Museum

• 

  The Gorge, Appledore, Brooklyn Museum

• 

  The Victorian Chair

• 

  Summer Sunlight

• 

  Improvisation

• 

  April – (The Green Gown)

Today is the birthday of Arthur Miller (Arthur Asher Miller; Harlem; October 17, 1915 – February 10, 2005 Roxbury, Connecticut); playwright, essayist, and a major figure in the twentieth-century American theater. Among his most popular plays are All My Sons (1947), Death of a Salesman (1949), The Crucible (1953) and A View from the Bridge (1955, revised 1956). He also wrote several screenplays and was most noted for his work on The Misfits (1961).

Miller was often in the public eye, from the  late 1940s till the early 1960s. During this time, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Drama; testified before the House Un-American Activities Committee; and was married to Marilyn Monroe.

In 1940, Miller married Mary Grace Slattery.Miller was exempted from military service during World War II because of a high school football injury to his left kneecap. That same year his first play was produced; The Man Who Had All the Luck won the Theatre Guild’s National Award.

In June 1956, Miller left Slattery and married Monroe. They had met in 1951, had a brief affair, and remained in contact since. Monroe had just turned 30 when they married and, having never had a real family of her own, was eager to join the family of her new husband.

Monroe began to reconsider her career and the fact that trying to manage it made her feel helpless. She admitted to Miller, “I hate Hollywood. I don’t want it anymore. I want to live quietly in the country and just be there when you need me. I can’t fight for myself anymore.”

She converted to Judaism to “express her loyalty and get close to both Miller and his parents”, writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers. Monroe told her friend, Susan Strasberg: “I can identify with the Jews. Everybody’s always out to get them, no matter what they do, like me.” Soon after she converted, Egypt banned all of her movies.

Away from Hollywood and the culture of celebrity, Monroe’s life became more normal; she began cooking, keeping house and giving Miller more attention and affection than he had been used to.

Later that year, Miller was subpoenaed by the HUAC, and Monroe accompanied him. In her personal notes, she wrote about her worries during this period:

I am so concerned about protecting Arthur. I love him—and he is the only person—human being I have ever known that I could love not only as a man to which I am attracted to practically out of my senses—but he is the only person—as another human being that I trust as much as myself…

Miller began work on writing the screenplay for The Misfits in 1960, directed by John Huston and starring Monroe. But it was during the filming that Miller and Monroe’s relationship hit difficulties, and he later said that the filming was one of the lowest points in his life. Monroe was taking drugs to help her sleep and more drugs to help her wake up, which caused her to arrive on the set late and then have trouble remembering her lines.

Shortly before the film’s premiere in 1961, Miller and Monroe divorced after their five years of marriage. Nineteen months later, Monroe died of a likely drug overdose.

Miller later married photographer Inge Morath in February 1962. She had worked as a photographer documenting the production of The Misfits. Miller and Inge remained together until her death in 2002.

Miller died of bladder cancer and heart failure, at his home. He died on the evening of February 10, 2005 (the 56th anniversary of the Broadway debut of Death of a Salesman), aged 89, surrounded by Barley, family and friends. His body was interred at Roxbury Center Cemetery in Roxbury.

After the Fall (1964)

• Where choice begins, Paradise ends, innocence ends, for what is Paradise but the absence of any need to choose this action?
  • Foreword

• I am bewildered by the death of love. And my responsibility for it.
  • Quentin in After the Fall (1964) Act II

• I saw clearly only when I saw with love. Or can one ever remember love? It’s like trying to summon up the smell of roses in a cellar. You might see a rose, but never the perfume. And that’s the truth of roses, isn’t it? — The perfume?
  • Quentin in After the Fall (1964) Act II

• I think it’s a mistake to ever look for hope outside of one’s self.

The Ride Down Mount Morgan (1991)

• I love her too, but our neuroses just don’t match.
  • Lyman speaking of his wife to his lawyer, Act 1

• Maybe all one can do is hope to end up with the right regrets.
  • Act 1

• Look, we’re all the same; a man is a fourteen-room house — in the bedroom he’s asleep with his intelligent wife, in the living-room he’s rolling around with some bareass girl, in the library he’s paying his taxes, in the yard he’s raising tomatoes, and in the cellar he’s making a bomb to blow it all up.
  • Lyman, Act 2

Mac Tag

Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.

Continue reading

a poets heartbreak, adolphe-felix cals, arthur miller, Ascanio in Alba, childe hassam, cowboy coleridge, heartbreak warfare, john mayer, love letter, love lyrics, love song, mozart, muse, Rhett, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, twt, Zazie

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  How does your heart break?  In roses and rue?  In roses and thorns?  In near rhymes and hard times.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

you know
when i write
of nothin’,
of as is
and solitude
and this vision

there can only be that
or with you
there is not another
other way to be

“I have been thinking
about feelings:
A musician
puts their feelings
to music. A poet
puts hers to verse.
A singer in her voice
and an artist in their strokes.
But I am not any of these.
So I put mine in silence,
in my thoughts. Can you hear?
Feel my heartbeat from many
miles away. Smell my softness.
Taste my skin. Touch my lips.
See my movements. Dance
in the stillness. Holding on
with arms wide open…”

doubt the blue in the sky
but never doubt,
that i see and feel

with you, with me
with the way it shall be

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

of you, i knew
of once ago,
i miss
but
the pull
of solitude
harder to resist

she was pretty
blonde hair, blue eyes
great hands and smile
she asked where i was from,
and when told, said;
i thought i should know you

but what to do with that
nothin’ ventured, nothin’ gained
but nothin’ suits right now
is it thus so,
how a poet’s heart breaks

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

like the wind she broke
when she saw the sage

he let her have
a couple of miles
of free runnin’
on the open trail,
then coaxed her in

his thoughts turned
to how they used
to ride together

he gazed out
on the purple lines
of the pass
and shut his eyes

© copyright 2016 Mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Oscar Wilde
Photograph taken in 1882 by Napoleon Sarony

Today is the birthday of Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde (Dublin; 16 October 1854 – 30 November 1900 Paris); playwright, novelist, essayist, and poet.  After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London’s most popular playwrights in the early 1890s.  He is remembered for his epigrams, his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray, his plays, as well as the circumstances of his imprisonment and early death.

As a spokesman for aestheticism, he tried his hand at various literary activities: he published a book of poems, lectured in the United States and Canada on the new “English Renaissance in Art”, and then returned to London where he worked as a journalist.  Known for his biting wit, flamboyant dress and stimulating conversation, Wilde became one of the best-known personalities of his day.

At the turn of the 1890s, he refined his ideas about the supremacy of art in a series of dialogues and essays, and incorporated themes of decadence, duplicity, and beauty into his only novel, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890).  He wrote Salome (1891) in French in Paris but it was refused a licence for England due to the absolute prohibition of Biblical subjects on the English stage.  Unperturbed, Wilde produced four society comedies in the early 1890s, which made him one of the most successful playwrights of late Victorian London.

At the height of his fame and success, while his masterpiece, The Importance of Being Earnest (1895), was still on stage in London, Wilde had the Marquess of Queensberry prosecuted for libel.  The Marquess was the father of Wilde’s lover, Lord Alfred Douglas.  The charge carried a penalty of up to two years in prison.  The trial unearthed evidence that caused Wilde to drop his charges and led to his own arrest and trial for gross indecency with men.  After two more trials he was convicted and imprisoned for two years’ hard labour.

In 1897, in prison, he wrote De Profundis, which was published in 1905, a long letter which discusses his spiritual journey through his trials, forming a dark counterpoint to his earlier philosophy of pleasure.  Upon his release he left immediately for France, never to return to Ireland or Britain.  There he wrote his last work, The Ballad of Reading Gaol (1898), a long poem commemorating the harsh rhythms of prison life.  He died destitute in Paris at the age of 46.

In honour of his birthday, here is his poem “Roses and Rue”, the Poem of the Day.

Roses and Rue

Could we dig up this long-buried treasure,
Were it worth the pleasure,
We never could learn love’s song,
We are parted too long

Could the passionate past that is fled
Call back its dead,
Could we live it all over again,
Were it worth the pain!

I remember we used to meet
By an ivied seat,
And you warbled each pretty word
With the air of a bird;

And your voice had a quaver in it,
Just like a linnet,
And shook, as the blackbird’s throat
With its last big note;

And your eyes, they were green and grey
Like an April day,
But lit into amethyst
When I stooped and kissed;

And your mouth, it would never smile
For a long, long while,
Then it rippled all over with laughter
Five minutes after.

You were always afraid of a shower,
Just like a flower:
I remember you started and ran
When the rain began.

I remember I never could catch you,
For no one could match you,
You had wonderful, luminous, fleet,
Little wings to your feet.

I remember your hair – did I tie it?
For it always ran riot –
Like a tangled sunbeam of gold:
These things are old.

I remember so well the room,
And the lilac bloom
That beat at the dripping pane
In the warm June rain;

And the colour of your gown,
It was amber-brown,
And two yellow satin bows
From the shoulders rose.

And the handkerchief of French lace
Which you held to your face-
Had a small tear left a stain?
Or was it the rain?

On your hand as it waved adieu
There were veins of blue;
In your voice as it said good-bye
Was a petulant cry,

“You have only wasted your life.”
(Ah, that was the knife!)
When I rushed through the garden gate
It was all too late.

Could we live it over again,
Were it worth the pain,
Could the passionate past that is fled
Call back its dead!

Well, if my heart must break,
Dear love, for your sake,
It will break in music, I know,
Poets’ hearts break so.

But strange that I was not told
That the brain can hold
In a tiny ivory cell
God’s heaven and hell.

The Song of the Day is “Every Rose has it’s Thorn” by Poison. we do not own the rights to this song.

For that is how a poet’s heart breaks.  In rhythm and rhyme and much ado, in roses and rue.  In near rhymes and hard times.  In sonnets and storms, in roses and thorns.

Gallery

Ballerine alla ribalta, 1922

“Tre personaggi a Firenze”

Dopo il bagno, 1922

Mac Tag

Follow us on twitter @cowboycoleridge.

Continue reading

cowboy coleridge, every rose has its thorn, love letter, love poem, love song, muse, oscar wilde, poison, Rhett, roses and rue, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, twt, Zazie