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

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

moon on the water
180 degree view
of the atlantic
at beverly

could be came true
brought us here
our first time

watchin’ the moonbeams
float on the waves, feelin’
the ocean breeze movin’
the air, a constant caress

arm in arm we are,
we will be in tune
a song to believe

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

in twilight’s reckonin’
a familiar refrain

tells us, like none other
tells us, what we need
to discover, to know

what we are holdin’
close, together

what we are searchin’
at dawn’s orange rise

ravishin’, repeat, we are
touchin’, we are

on our way

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

*Forgive her
Forgive yourself*

“Did you find
what you were looking for?”
yes
“Good.
I assume you have no regrets?”
no, do you
“Of course not.”
congratulations
you were right
“About what?”
about her

“I need you.”
i never left

…………

“Thank you.”
my pleasure
are you all right
“Fine, but I keep
thinking, now what.”

trust your inspiration
it will not let you down

“Will you be able to sleep now.”

not likely

“I wish I could set you free.
But your prison is inside.”

*silence*

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

thinkin’ about what has been
and what could have been

about the ones
let go or driven away
none of ’em the one though

of course thinkin’ about you
if only you had loved me
as i loved you
still love you

could you have loved me
had we but world enough and time

sometimes wonder
if fate punished me
by sendin’ me you

how ironic to hear
words i have said
come back to haunt me

“I want you, I need you
but I can’t love you.”

there is no could be
only what was
and what could have been

ain’t no damn could be
best go ahead and bury
that sumbitch right now

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag/Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Dante Gabriel Rossetti (London 12 May 1828 – 9 April 1882 Birchington-on-Sea, Kent ); poet, illustrator, painter and translator.  He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in 1848 with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais.  Rossetti was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement.  His work also influenced the European Symbolists and was a major precursor of the Aesthetic movement.  Rossetti’s art was characterised by its sensuality and its medieval revivalism.  His early poetry was influenced by John Keats.  His later poetry was characterised by the complex interlinking of thought and feeling, especially in his sonnet sequence, The House of Life.  Poetry and image are closely entwined in Rossetti’s work.  He frequently wrote sonnets to accompany his pictures, spanning from The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849) and Astarte Syriaca (1877), while also creating art to illustrate poems such as “Goblin Market” by the celebrated poet Christina Rossetti, his sister.  Rossetti’s personal life was closely linked to his work, especially his relationships with his models and muses Elizabeth Siddal, Fanny Cornforth and Jane Morris.

Rossetti and Siddal were married on Wednesday 23 May 1860 at St Clement’s Church in the seaside town of Hastings.  Siddal died of an overdose of laudanum in 1862, shortly after giving birth to a stillborn child.  Overcome with grief, Rossetti enclosed in his wife’s coffin a journal containing the only copy he had of his many poems, supposedly sliding the book into Siddal’s red hair.  By 1869, Rossetti was addicted to drugs and alcohol.  He had convinced himself he was going blind and could not paint.  He began to write poetry, but before publishing his newer poems he became obsessed with retrieving the poems he had slipped into his Siddal’s coffin.  Rossetti had exhumed and the notebook was retrieved.  The poetry was published in 1870.  The poems were sensual and erotic, and caused a scandal.

Rossetti maintained Cornforth in her own establishment and painted many voluptuous images of her between 1863 and 1865.  Morris, whom Rossetti had used as a model for the Oxford Union murals he painted with William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones in 1857, also sat for him during these years, she “consumed and obsessed him in paint, poetry, and life”.  In 1869, Morris and Rossetti rented a country house, Kelmscott Manor at Kelmscott, Oxfordshire, as a summer home, but it became a retreat for Rossetti and Morris to have a long-lasting and complicated liaison.  They spent summers there with the Morris’s children, while Morris travelled to Iceland in 1871 and 1873.

Portrait c. 1871, by George Frederic Watts

Gallery

 Self-portrait, 1847

 Portrait at 22 years of Age by William Holman Hunt

 The Girlhood of Mary Virgin (1849). (Models: the artist’s mother for St. Anne and his sister Christina for the Virgin)

The Day Dream. The sitter is Jane Morris

Bocca Baciata (1859) signalled a new direction on Rossetti’s work. (Model: Fanny Cornforth)

The Roman Widow at Museo de Arte de Ponce, Puerto Rico

Rossetti reading proofs of Ballads and Sonnets at 16 Cheyne Walk, by Henry Treffry Dunn (1882)

 Alexa Wilding (1879)

Albumen print of Rossetti by Charles Lutwidge Dodgson (Lewis Carroll) (1863)

• 

  Ecce Ancilla Domini (1850), Tate Britain, London

• 

  The Tune of the Seven Towers (1857), watercolour, Tate Britain

• 

  How Sir Galahad. Sir Bors, and Sir Percival were fed with the Sanc Grael; But Sir Percival’s Sister Died Along the Way (1864), watercolour, Tate Britain

• 

  Found (1865–1869, unfinished), Delaware Art Museum

• 

  The Blessed Damozel (model: Alexa Wilding)

• 

  Lady Lilith (1867), Metropolitan Museum of Art (model: Fanny Cornforth)

• 

  Lady Lilith (1868), Delaware Art Museum (Fanny Cornforth, overpainted at Kelsmcott 1872–73 with the face of Alexa Wilding)

• 

  Beata Beatrix (1864–1870), Tate Britain (model: Elizabeth Siddal)

• 

  Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress) (1868), oil on canvas, Kelmscott Manor

• 

  Pia de’ Tolomei (1868–1880), Spencer Museum of Art, University of Kansas, Lawrence (model: Jane Morris)

• 

  Proserpine (1874) (model: Jane Morris)

• 

  A Vision of Fiammetta (1878), one of Rossetti’s last paintings, now in the collection of Andrew Lloyd Webber (model: Marie Spartali Stillman)

• 

  La Belle Dame sans Merci (1848), pen and sepia with some pencil

• 

  Drawing of Elizabeth Siddal reading (1854)

• 

  Hamlet and Ophelia (1858), pen and ink drawing

• 

  Drawing of Annie Miller (1860)

• 

  Portrait of Marie Spartali Stillman (1869)

• 

  Drawing of Fanny Cornforth, graphite on paper (1869)

• 

  The Roseleaf (Portrait of Jane Morris) (1870), graphite on wove paper

• 

  King Arthur and the Weeping Queens, one of two illustrations by Rossetti for Edward Moxon’s illustrated edition of Tennyson’s Poems (1857)

• 

  Golden Head by Golden Head, illustration for Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Other Poems (1862)

• 

  Sir Tristram and la Belle Ysoude drink the potion, stained-glass panel by Morris, Marshall, Faulkner & Co., design by Rossetti (1862–63)

• 

  William Morris reading to Jane Morris while she takes the waters at Bad Ems (1869)

• 

  Mrs. Morris and the Wombat (1869)

Select Rossetti Poems

• I am not as these are, the poet saith
  In youth’s pride, and the painter, among men
  At bay, where never pencil comes nor pem
  • from Not As These in The House of Life 1870
• From perfect grief there need not be
  Wisdom or even memory;
  One thing then learned remains to me —
  The woodspurge has a cup of three.
  • The Woodspurge, st. 4 (1870).

• Tell me now in what hidden way is
  Lady Flora the lovely Roman?
  Where’s Hipparchia, and where is Thais,
  Neither of them the fairer woman?
  Where is Echo, beheld of no man,
  Only heard on river and mere—
  She whose beauty was more than human?—
  But where are the snows of yester-year?
  • The Ballad of Dead Ladies, st. 1 (1870).

• I have been here before,
  But when or how I cannot tell:
  I know the grass beyond the door,
  The sweet, keen smell,
  The sighing sound, the lights around the shore.
  • Sudden Light, st. 1 (1881).

• If God in his wisdom have brought close
  The day when I must die,
  That day by water or fire or air
  My feet shall fall in the destined snare
  Wherever my road may lie.
  • The King’s Tragedy, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Still we say as we go,—
  “Strange to think by the way
  Whatever there is to know,
  That shall we know one day.”
  • The Cloud Confines, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Gather a shell from the strewn beach
  And listen at its lips: they sigh
  The same desire and mystery,
  The echo of the whole sea’s speech.
  • The Sea-Limits, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Was it a friend or foe that spread these lies?
  Nay, who but infants question in such wise,
  ‘T was one of my most intimate enemies.
  • Fragment, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• If the light is
  It is because God said ‘Let there be light.’
  • At Sunrise, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

• Thou fill’st from the wingèd chalice of the soul
  Thy lamp, O Memory, fire-wingèd to its goal.
  • Mnemosyne, reported in Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations, 10th ed. (1919).

The Blessed Damozel (1850)

• The blessed damozel lean’d out
  From the gold bar of Heaven;
  Her eyes were deeper than the depth
  Of waters still’d at even;
  She had three lilies in her hand,
  And the stars in her hair were seven.
  • Stanza 1.

• Around her, lovers, newly met
  ‘Mid deathless love’s acclaims,
  Spoke evermore among themselves
  Their heart-remember’d names;
  And the souls mounting up to God
  Went by her like thin flames.
  • Stanza 7.

• From the fix’d place of Heaven she saw
  Time like a pulse shake fierce
  Through all the worlds. Her gaze still strove
  Within the gulf to pierce
  Its path; and now she spoke as when
  The stars sang in their spheres.

• The sun was gone now; the curl’d moon
  Was like a little feather
  Fluttering far down the gulf; and now
  She spoke through the still weather.
  Her voice was like the voice the stars
  Had when they sang together.

• We two will stand beside that shrine,
  Occult, withheld, untrod,
  Whose lamps are stirr’d continually
  With prayer sent up to God;
  And see our old prayers, granted, melt
  Each like a little cloud.

• We two will lie i’ the shadow of
  That living mystic tree
  Within whose secret growth the Dove
  Is sometimes felt to be,
  While every leaf that His plumes touch
  Saith His Name audibly.

The House of Life (1870—1881)

• A Sonnet is a moment’s monument,—
  Memorial from the Soul’s eternity
  To one dead deathless hour.
  • Introductory Sonnet.

• At length their long kiss severed, with sweet smart:
  And as the last slow sudden drops are shed
  From sparkling eaves when all the storm has fled,
  So singly flagged the pulses of each heart.
  • Nuptial Sleep.

• Beauty like hers is genius.
  • Genius in Beauty.

• Even as the moon grows queenlier in mid-space
  When the sky darkens, and her cloud-rapt car
  Thrills with intenser radiance from afar,—
  So lambent, lady, beams thy sovereign grace
  When the drear soul desires thee.
  • Gracious Moonlight.

• And Love, our light at night and shade at noon,
  Lulls us to rest with songs, and turns away
  All shafts of shelterless tumultuous day.
  • Heart’s Haven.

• Each hour until we meet is as a bird
  That wings from far his gradual way along
  The rustling covert of my soul.
  • Winged Hours.

• Sometimes thou seem’st not as thyself alone,
  But as the meaning of all things that are.
  • Heart’s Compass.

• Look in my face; my name is Might-have-been;
  I am also called No-more, Too-late, Farewell.
  • A Superscription.

• When all desire at last and all regret
  Go hand in hand to death, and all is vain,
  What shall assuage the unforgotten pain
  And teach the unforgetful to forget?
  • Newborn Death.

The Choice

I

• Eat thou and drink; to-morrow thou shalt die.
  Surely the earth, that’s wise being very old,
  Needs not our help. Then loose me, love, and hold
  Thy sultry hair up from my face; that I
  May pour for thee this golden wine, brim-high,
  Till round the glass thy fingers glow like gold.
  We’ll drown all hours: thy song, while hours are toll’d,
  Shall leap, as fountains veil the changing sky.

• Now kiss, and think that there are really those,
  My own high-bosom’d beauty, who increase
  Vain gold, vain lore, and yet might choose our way!
  Through many years they toil; then on a day
  They die not, — for their life was death, — but cease;
  And round their narrow lips the mould falls close.

II

• Watch thou and fear; to-morrow thou shalt die.

• Now while we speak, the sun speeds forth: can I
  Or thou assure him of his goal? God’s breath
  Even at this moment haply quickeneth
  The air to a flame; till spirits, always nigh
  Though screen’d and hid, shall walk the daylight here.

III

• Think thou and act; to-morrow thou shalt die
  Outstretch’d in the sun’s warmth upon the shore,
  Thou say’st: “Man’s measur’d path is all gone o’er:
  Up all his years, steeply, with strain and sigh,
  Man clomb until he touch’d the truth; and I,
  Even I, am he whom it was destin’d for.”
  How should this be? Art thou then so much more
  Than they who sow’d, that thou shouldst reap thereby?

• Nay, come up hither. From this wave-wash’d mound
  Unto the furthest flood-brim look with me;
  Then reach on with thy thought till it be drown’d.
  Miles and miles distant though the last line be,
  And though thy soul sail leagues and leagues beyond,—
  Still, leagues beyond those leagues, there is more sea.

 Massenet photographed by Eugène Pirou, 1895

Today is the birthday of Jules Massenet (Jules Émile Frédéric Massenet; Montaud, France 12 May 1842 – 13 August 1912 Paris); composer of the Romantic era best known for his operas, of which he wrote more than thirty.  The two most frequently staged are Manon (1884) and Werther (1892).  He also composed oratorios, ballets, orchestral works, incidental music, piano pieces, songs and other music.  Between 1867 and his death forty-five years later he wrote more than forty stage works in a wide variety of styles, from opéra-comique to grand-scale depictions of classical myths, romantic comedies, lyric dramas, as well as oratorios, cantatas and ballets.  Massenet had a good sense of the theatre and of what would succeed with the Parisian public.

Manon is one of my very favorite operas.  The French libretto was written by Henri Meilhac and Philippe Gille, based on the 1731 novel L’histoire du chevalier des Grieux et de Manon Lescaut by the Abbé Prévost.  Of course, this is one of my favorite books.  This is the sad story of a young girl, Manon Lescaut, from the French countryside who is on her way to a convent but instead turns into a Parisian prostitute, betraying her true love, the Chevalier Des Grieux.  In the aria, “Adieu, notre petite table” (“Goodbye, our little table”), after vacillatin’ in her decision she bids farewell to the humble domesticity she has shared.  In the aria “Ah, fuyez douce image” (Ah, flee, sweet image), Des Grieux tries to mentally banish the love of his life.  “Et c’est là l’histoire de Manon Lescaut!”

The songs of the day: Anna Netrebko as Manon “Adieu, notre petite table”

Luciano Pavarotti as Chevalier Des Grieux “Ah, fuyez douce image”

 

I kiss you and the world begins to fade. – WB Yeats

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abbe prevost, cowboy coleridge, dante gabriel rossetti, elizabeth siddal, jules massenet, love letter, manon lescaut, muse, the lovers chronicle, wb yeats

Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Check us out on Twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

azaleas in the sun
dogwoods bloomin’ neath
the Carolina blue sky

was it that long ago
to use the word saved,
is no exaggeration

so much discovered
the words, myself, you

but you
just as suddenly found
then suddenly gone

at least i have the words
you left behind

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

I was alone today in a car with a dark-haired beautiful woman.  The first time I have been alone with a beautiful woman since…  It was overwhelmin’.  Her perfume was makin’ my head swim.  It was intoxicatin’.  I yearned so to touch her.  I wanted her to touch me; to hold me.  It made me dream again…

walkin’ into the bedroom,
the bedroom they had shared
he could still smell her perfume

rememberin’ when they talked
about wearin’ pajamas to bed
she considered wearin’ anything
more than a few drops
of Chanel No. 5
to be overdressed

walkin’ over to the bed,
pickin’ up her pillow
he pressed it to his face
and breathed in deeply
he was awash with her

her presence,
flooded his senses
he felt lightheaded
and sat on the bed
alone with his anguish

but there were no tears
life had wrenched them away

© copyright 2012 Mac Tag Cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Jean-Léon Gérôme (Vesoul, Haute-Saone 11 May 1824 – 10 January 1904 Paris); painter and sculptor in the style now known as Academicism.  The range of his oeuvre included historical painting, Greek mythology, Orientalism, portraits, and other subjects.  In my opinion, one of the most important painters from this academic period.  In addition to being a painter, he was also a teacher with a long list of students.

Gallery

Photo by Nadar

Jean-Léon Gérôme.

Pygmalion et Galatée (1890), Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

“The Harem Bathing”

Après le bain

Today is the birthday of Irving Berlin (born Israel Isidore Baline, Russia, May 11, 1888 – September 22, 1989 New York City); composer and lyricist, in my opinion, one of the greatest songwriters in American history.  His music forms a significant part of the Great American Songbook.  His compositions include; “Alexander’s Ragtime Band”, “White Christmas”, “There’s No Business Like Show Business”, “God Bless America”, “When I Lost You”, “Blue Skies”, “Puttin’ on the Ritz”, “Anything You Can Do”, “Cheek to Cheek”, and “Always”.

I lost the sunshine and roses
I lost the heavens of blue
I lost the beautiful rainbow
I lost the morning dew
I lost the angel who gave me
Summer, the whole winter through
I lost the gladness that turned into sadness
When I lost you

The birds ceased their song
Right turned to wrong
Sweetheart when I lost you
A day turned to years
The world seemed in tears
Sweetheart when I lost you

Seated Woman in a Blue Dress

Today is the birthday of Salvador Dalí (Salvador Domingo Felipe Jacinto Dalí i Domènech, 1st Marquis of Dalí de Púbol; Figueres, Catalonia, Spain; 11 May 1904 – 23 January 1989 Figueres); surrealist painter.

Dalí was a skilled draftsman, best known for the striking and bizarre images in his surrealist work. His painterly skills are often attributed to the influence of Renaissance masters. Perhaps his best-known work, The Persistence of Memory, was completed in August 1931. Dalí’s expansive artistic repertoire included film, sculpture, and photography, at times in collaboration with a range of artists in a variety of media.

Dalí attributed his “love of everything that is gilded and excessive, my passion for luxury and my love of oriental clothes” to an “Arab lineage”, claiming that his ancestors were descendants of the Moors. He was highly imaginative, and also enjoyed indulging in unusual and grandiose behavior.

After living together since 1929, Dalí married Gala in a civil ceremony in 1934, and remarried in a Catholic ceremony in 1958 in the Pyrenean hamlet of Montrejic. They needed to receive a special dispensation by the Pope because Gala had been previously married and she was a believer (not Catholic, but was an Orthodox Christian). Dalí was said to have been a virgin when they met on the Costa Brava in 1929. She was Dalí’s muse, directly inspiring and appearing in many of his works.

In the early 1930s, Dalí started to sign his paintings with his and her name as “(i)t is mostly with your blood, Gala, that I paint my pictures”. He stated that Gala acted as his agent, and aided in redirecting his focus. According to most accounts, Gala had a strong libido and throughout her life had numerous extramarital affairs (among them with her former husband Paul Éluard), which Dalí encouraged, since he was a practitioner of candaulism. She had a fondness for young artists, and in her old age she often gave expensive gifts to those who associated with her.

In 1968, Dalí bought Gala the Castle of Púbol, Girona, where she would spend time every summer from 1971 to 1980. He also agreed not to visit there without getting advance permission from her in writing.

Gallery

Fertility

Cabaret Scene

La tentación de San Antonio

The Persistence of Memory

Gala

Mac Tag

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cowboy coleridge, her smell her touch her presence, irving berlin, love letter, muse, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Visit us on Twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

the struggle is real y’all

light the candles
and climb into
this cold bed

read a few pages from
The Living and the Dead,
before fatigue overtakes

blow out the candles
and drift, considerin’
what was said and put aside
how you replied, how you looked

write of light for the way
guidin’ where i stumble
quotin’, for understandin’,
verse, ours and others,
aloud, whispered, muttered…

how can we hear and be not moved
sit silent at what was bequeathed
what these can only memorize

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

remember…
becomin’ aware
of the possibility
of the search

that was it
to be onto somethin’
and without
was to be in despair

but the searches
always ended
in despair

the search is tricky
it likes to show you
takin’ up with “the one”,
sets about provin’
to everyone
what a nice person you are,
and settles you down
with a vengeance

then it wakes you up one day
and you are so sunk
in everydayness
that you might
just as well be dead

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

lookin’ at the mountains
the sun above the ridges
the shadows comin’ on
and there close behind
the mornin’
you could never
go back to

never learned,
always known
remember when…
movin’ together
born of somethin’
urgent, not to be
denied, nor understood
the rest is invention

never learned,
always known
el verdadero amor
somethin’ you just knew
was out there waitin’…
the rest is desperation

i remember when your lips
would touch mine,
and our fingers clutched
and we moved together

langourously

if only time could be turned back

© copyright 2016 Mac Tag/Cowboy Coleridge

Today is the birthday of Benito Pérez Galdós (Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Canary Islands, Spain; May 10, 1843 – January 4, 1920 Madrid); realist novelist.  In my opinion, second only to Cervantes in stature as a Spanish novelist.  He was the leading literary figure in 19th century Spain.  He remains popular in Spain, and it is considered an equal to Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy.

El amor es un arte que nunca se aprende y siempre se sabe. (Love is an art that will never learn and always know.)

El verdadero amor, el sólido y durable, nace del trato; lo demás es invención de los poetas, de los músicos y demás gente holgazana. (True love, solid and durable, is born of treatment; the rest is invention by poets, musicians and other lazy people.)

Today is the birthday of Léon Bakst (Lev (Leib) Samoilovich Rosenberg, Grodno (Belarus) 10 May 1866 – 28 December 1924 Rueil Malmaison, near Paris); painter and scene and costume designer.  He was a member of the Sergei Diaghilev circle and the Ballets Russes, for which he designed exotic, richly coloured sets and costumes.

Gallery

Bathers on the Lido

Operatic costume designs (1911)

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Benito Pérez Galdós, cowboy coleridge, I remember, Léon Bakst, Love, love letter, muse, poem, poetry, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  You can visit us on Twitter at @cowboycoleridge.  Are you in a serious and studious mood?  Ciao, Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

so much for that
just as well one presumes
right, one has to otherwise
there would be no way
to get a grip on the reins
which is what matters
what this is all about
for the pathway down
and never comin’ back
is losin’ one’s hold,
one’s sense of meanin’

that is what i tell myself

here in neverland

© copyright 2020.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

understand what is meant
either written or sung
the purpose bein’ here,
rapturous, together
closer now, the room
full with the smell
of incense and aural
confirmation of two
goin’ somewhere
believers who never
settle for ordinary

the music plays on
till we wake

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

dreamin’ now
of the never land
as is often the case,
perhaps too

-of course,
in a serious
and studious mood-

night on the High Plains
the windows open
a whisper of wind,
for a change,
writin’ verse for you
hopin’ you will come

do you know
“Yes I know.”

i understand
has somethin’
to do
with the riddle
of my raisin’
i could never
get the hang
of the thing
my cry
never became

to live with…

i dream on and on
till i wake up

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge

Only two topics of interest…

Love and the dead
Love or the lack thereof

this goes both ways
the closer you git
the less you know
the less understood
die young or ride away

© copyright 2016 Mac tag all rights reserved

by Herbert Rose Barraud, sepia carbon print on card mount, 1892

Today is the birthday of J. M. Barrie (James Matthew Barrie; Kirriemuir, Scotland 9 May 1860 – 19 June 1937 London); novelist and playwright, perhaps best remembered today as the creator of Peter Pan.  He was born and educated in Scotland but moved to London, where he wrote a number of successful novels and plays.  There he met the Llewelyn Davies boys, who inspired him to write about a baby boy who has magical adventures in Kensington Gardens (included in The Little White Bird), then to write Peter Pan, or The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up, a “fairy play” about an ageless boy and an ordinary girl named Wendy who have adventures in the fantasy setting of Neverland.

Barrie became acquainted with actress Mary Ansell in 1891, when he asked his friend Jerome K. Jerome for a pretty actress to play a role in his play Walker, London. The two became friends, and she helped his family to care for him when he fell very ill in 1893 and 1894.  They married in Kirriemuir on 9 July 1894, shortly after Barrie recovered, and Mary retired from the stage. The wedding was a small ceremony in his parents’ home, in the Scottish tradition. The relationship was reportedly unconsummated, and the couple had no children.

Here is an excerpt from the play;

We are dreaming now of the Never Land a year later. It is bed-time on the island, and the blind goes up to the whispers of the lovely Never music. The blue haze that makes the wood below magical by day comes up to the tree-tops to sleep, and through it we see numberless nests all lit up, fairies and birds quarrelling for possession, others flying around just for the fun of the thing and perhaps making bets about where the little house will appear to-night. It always comes and snuggles on some tree-top, but you can never be sure which; here it is again, you see John’s hat first as up comes the house so softly that it knocks some gossips off their perch. When it has settled comfortably it lights up, and out come Peter and Wendy.

Wendy looks a little older, but Peter is just the same. She is cloaked for a journey, and a sad confession must be made about her; she flies so badly now that she has to use a broomstick.

WENDY (who knows better this time than to be demonstrative at partings). Well, good-bye, Peter; and remember not to bite your nails.

PETER. Good-bye, Wendy.

WENDY. I’ll tell mother all about the spring cleaning and the house.

PETER (who sometimes forgets that she has been here before). You do like the house?

WENDY. Of course it is small. But most people of our size wouldn’t have a house at all. (She should not have mentioned size, for he has already expressed displeasure at her growth. Another thing, one he has scarcely noticed, though it disturbs her, is that she does not see him quite so clearly now as she used to do.) When you come for me next year, Peter—you will come, won’t you?

PETER. Yes. (Gloating) To hear stories about me!

WENDY. It is so queer that the stories you like best should be the ones about yourself.

PETER (touchy). Well, then?

WENDY. Fancy your forgetting the lost boys, and even Captain Hook!

PETER. Well, then?

WENDY. I haven’t seen Tink this time.

PETER. Who?

WENDY. Oh dear! I suppose it is because you have so many adventures.

PETER (relieved). ‘Course it is.

WENDY. If another little girl—if one younger than I am—(She can’t go on.) Oh, Peter, how I wish I could take you up and squdge you! (He draws back.) Yes, I know. (She gets astride her broomstick.) Home! (It carries her from him over the tree-tops.

In a sort of way he understands what she means by ‘Yes, I know,’ but in most sorts of ways he doesn’t. It has something to do with the riddle of his being. If he could get the hang of the thing his cry might become ‘To live would be an awfully big adventure!’ but he can never quite get the hang of it, and so no one is as gay as he. With rapturous face he produces his pipes, and the Never birds and the fairies gather closer, till the roof of the little house is so thick with his admirers that some of them fall down the chimney. He plays on and on till we wake up.)

Today is the birthday of Ralph Goings (Corning, California May 9, 1928 – September 4, 2016 Sacramento); painter closely associated with the Photorealism movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. He was best known for his highly detailed paintings of hamburger stands, pick-up trucks, and California banks, portrayed in a deliberately objective manner.

Gallery

Nude (Sunburned Backside)

One Eleven Diner, 1980

Booth group

On this day In 1958 the film Vertigo has its world premiere in San Francisco.  Vertigo is a psychological thriller film directed and produced by Alfred Hitchcock.  The story was based on the 1954 novel D’entre les morts (From Among the Dead) by Boileau-Narcejac.  The screenplay was written by Alec Coppel and Samuel A. Taylor.  The film stars James Stewart as former police detective John “Scottie” Ferguson.  Scottie is forced into early retirement after an incident in the line of duty has caused him to develop acrophobia, an extreme fear of heights, and vertigo, a sensation of false, rotational movement.  Scottie is hired by an acquaintance, Gavin Elster, as a private investigator to follow Gavin’s wife Madeleine (Kim Novak), who he says has been behaving strangely.  The film was shot on location in San Francisco, California.  One of my all-time favorite movies.  Love, suspense, Jimmy and Kim; this movie has it all.  Selected dialogue from Vertigo:

Scottie: Don’t you think it’s a waste, to wander separately?

Madeleine: Only one is a wanderer. Two together are always going somewhere.

Scottie: No, I don’t think that’s necessarily true.

Scottie: Madeleine, Madeleine where are you now?

Madeleine: Here with you.

Scottie: Where?

Madeleine: Tall trees.

Scottie: Have you been here before?

Madeleine: Yes.

Scottie: When? When? When were you born?

Madeleine: Long ago.

Scottie: Where? When? Tell me. Madeleine, tell me!

Madeleine: [shaking her head back and forth] No.

Scottie: Madeleine, tell me where? Where do you go? What takes you away? When you jumped into the bay, you didn’t know where you were. You guessed but you didn’t know.

Madeleine: I didn’t jump, I didn’t jump, I fell, you told me I fell.

Scottie: Why did you jump? Why did you jump?

Madeleine: Oh I can’t tell you.

Scottie: Why did you jump? What was there inside that told you to jump?

Madeleine: No please. Please.

Scottie: What? What?

Madeleine: Please don’t ask me. Please don’t ask me. Get me away from here.

Scottie: Shall I take you home?

Madeleine: Somewhere in the light. Promise me something? Promise you won’t ask me again? Please promise me that.

Madeleine: Why did you run?

Scottie: Well, I’m responsible for you now. You know, the Chinese say that once you’ve saved a person’s life, you’re responsible for it forever. So, I’m committed. I have to know.

Madeleine: There’s so little that I know.

Madeleine: It’s as though I-I were walking down a long corridor that once was mirrored. And fragments of that mirror still hang there. And when I come to the end of the corridor, there’s nothing but darkness. And I know that when I walk into the darkness, that I’ll die. I’ve never come to the end. I’ve always come back before then, except once.

Scottie: Yesterday? [She nods agreement.] And you didn’t know. You didn’t know what happened till you found yourself in the…you didn’t know where you were. But the small scenes, the fragments of the mirror, do you remember those?

Madeleine: Vaguely.

Scottie: What do you remember?

Madeleine: There’s a room and I sit there alone, always alone.

Scottie: What else?

Madeleine: A grave.

Scottie: Where?

Madeleine: I don’t know. It’s an open grave, and I, I stand by the gravestone looking down into it. It’s my grave.

Scottie: But how do you know?

Madeleine: I know.

Scottie: Is there a name on the gravestone?

Madeleine: No. It’s new and clean and waiting.

Madeleine: There’s a tower and a bell and a garden below. It seems to be in Spain, a village in Spain, it clicks off, it’s gone.

Scottie: A portrait. Do you see a portrait?

Madeleine: No.

Scottie: If I could just find the key, the beginning and put it together…

Madeleine: …to explain it away? There is a way to explain it you see. If I’m mad, that would explain it, wouldn’t it?

…

Madeleine: Oh Scottie. I’m not mad. I’m not mad. I don’t want to die. There’s someone within me and she says I must die. Oh Scottie, don’t let me go.

Scottie: I’m here. I’ve got you.

Madeleine: I’m so afraid. [They kiss] Don’t leave me. Stay with me.

Scottie: All the time.

Madeleine: [describing her dream] It was so very clear for the first time, all of it…It was a village square in a green with trees and an old white-washed Spanish church with a cloister. Across the green, there was a big gray wooden house with a porch and shutters and a balcony above, a small garden, and next to it a livery stable with old carriages lined up inside…At the end of the green, there was a white-washed stone house with a lovely pepper tree at the corner…

Scottie: And an old wooden hotel from the old California days? And a saloon, dark, low ceilings, with hanging oil lamps?

Madeleine: Yes.

Scottie: It’s all there. It’s no dream. You’ve been there before. You’ve seen it.

Madeleine: No never!

Scottie: Madeleine, where are you now?

Madeleine: Here with you.

Scottie: And it’s all real. It’s not merely as it was 100 years ago, or a year ago, or six months ago, or whenever it was you were here to see it. Now, Madeleine, think of when you were here.

Scottie: I love you, Madeleine.

Madeleine: I love you too. It’s too late.

Scottie: No, no, we’re together.

Madeleine: It’s too late, there’s something I must do.

Scottie: No, there is nothing you must do. There is nothing you must do. No one possesses you. You’re safe with me.

Madeleine: No, it’s too late.

…

Madeleine: Look, it’s not fair. It’s too late. It wasn’t supposed to happen this way. It shouldn’t have happened.

Scottie: But it had to happen. We’re in love. That’s all that counts.

Madeleine: Look. Let me go. Please let me go.

Scottie: Listen to me. Listen to me.

Madeleine: You believe I love you?

Scottie: Yes.

Madeleine: And if you lose me, then you’ll know I, I loved you. And I wanted to go on loving you.

Scottie: I won’t lose you.

Madeleine: Let me go into the church – alone.

Scottie: Why?

Judy: Why are you doing this? What, what good will it do?

Scottie: I don’t know. I don’t know. No good, I guess, I don’t know.

Judy: I wish you’d leave me alone. I want to go away.

Scottie: You can, you know.

Judy: No, you wouldn’t let me. And I don’t want to go.

Scottie: Judy, Judy, I’ll tell you this. These past few days have been the first happy days I’ve known in a year.

Judy: I know. I know because, ’cause I remind you of her and not even that very much.

Scottie: No, no Judy, Judy, it’s you, too. There’s something in you…

Judy: You don’t even want to touch me.

Scottie: Yes. Yes, I do.

Judy: Couldn’t you like me, just me the way I am? When we first started out, it was so good. We had fun. And then you started in on the clothes. Well, I’ll wear the darn clothes if you want me to – if-if you’ll just, just like me.

Scottie: I made it. I made it. So this is where it happened. The two of you hid back there and waited for it to clear, and then you sneaked down and drove into town, is that it? And then, you were his girl, huh? Well, what happened to ya? What happened to ya? Did he ditch ya? Oh Judy, with all of his wife’s money and all that freedom and that power and he ditched you. What a shame! But he knew he was safe. He knew you couldn’t talk. Did he give you anything?

Judy: Money.

Scottie: And the necklace, Carlotta’s necklace, there was where you made your mistake, Judy. You shouldn’t keep souvenirs of a killing. You shouldn’t have been, you shouldn’t have been that sentimental. I loved you so, Madeleine!

Judy: I was safe when you found me. There was nothing that you could prove. When I saw you again, I couldn’t run away. I loved you so. I walked into danger, let you change me because I loved you and I wanted you. Oh, Scottie, oh Scottie please. You love me. Please keep me safe, please…

Scottie: It’s too late. It’s too late.

Random Quotes:

I am still of opinion that only two topics can be of the least interest to a serious and studious mood – sex and the dead.

– WB Yeats

Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,

And the rocks melt wi’ the sun;

And I will luve thee still, my dear,

While the sands o’ life shall run.

Robert Burns

To pity those that know her not

Is helped by the regret

That those who know her, know her less

The nearer her they get.

Emily Dickinson

As for Dickinson; this goes both ways.  I know you felt like the closer you got to me the less you knew me.  Ed Bruce wrote it and Willie sang it best; “If you don’t understand him and he don’t die young, he’ll probably just ride away.”

I agree with Yeats and I like to think that I am of a serious and studious mind, yet I just do not have the strength to go their yet.

So I will close with a nod to Burns, one of my favorite Scots:

Lovin’ thee still, my dear

Mac Tag

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cowboy coleridge, ed bruce, j m barrie, Love, love letter, muse, robert burns, scots, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle, vertigo, wb yeats, willie nelson

Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  You can follow us on Twitter @cowboycoleridge.  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

this one came from somethin’
Sylvia Plath wrote, about
how we need someone
and what she needed
“No better inspiration,
such beauty and sadness”
the poems that stir me
are the ones where the poet
opens up what is inside their heart
and spreads it across the page
”And the ones that remind us”
yes, to cling to each other

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

to another
the one
to pour yourself into someone
the one
no greater need
nor want
nor greater fulfillment

and this certainty
as it should be
these words flowin’
across the page
for you

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a certain,
lack thereof
goin’ on here
by choice

funny how, you never can figure
who you will meet, and care for
here in this vision, come read

the verse, yours really, while
outside mist and rain continue
and inside seekin’ the answers

and this
certainty
as it should be

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

cling to this
dances in dreams
stars in the sky

dangit…
this was gonna be
a poem about
waltzin’ the night away
with you under the big
starlit High Plains sky
or perhaps in a ballroom,
the McGregor,
with me in my tux & boots
& you in an evenin’ dress
but i ran outta time

so this will have to do

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

To cling to another
the one
To keep each other warm
To pour yourself into someone
the one
There can be no greater need
nor want
There can be no greater fulfillment
This is what I need.  Short of that
I have these letters, these words
These words I pour onto the page
for you

© copyright 2013 mac tag all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Bertalan Székely (8 May 1835, Kolozsvár, Hungary – 21 August 1910, Budapest); history and portrait painter who worked in the Romantic and Academic styles.

 Self-portrait (1860)

Gallery

“Donna dai capelli rossi”.

“Red Haired Girl” (1870)
Magyar Nemzeti Galéria

Japanese Woman

• 

  The Women of Eger (1867)

• 

  Thunderstorm (1875)

  

  Leda

Portrait of a Woman 1880

And today is the birthday of Alphonse Legros (Dijon, France; 8 May 1837 – 8 December 1911 Watford, Hertfordshire, England); painter, etcher, sculptor, and medallist.  He moved to London in 1863 and later took British citizenship. He was important as a teacher in the British etching revival.

Gallery

Photograph of Legros by David Wilkie Wynfield

“Cupid and Psyche” Alphonse Legros (1837–1911), Tate Britain, London

Death and the Maiden, 1895

“Femmes en Prière.” Tate

Mac Tag

How we need another soul to cling to, another body to keep us warm. I need this, I need someone to pour myself into. – Sylvia Plath

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Bertalan Székely, cowboy coleridge, Love, love letter, muse, sylvia plath, the lovers almanac, the lovers chronicle

Dear Zazie, Today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag to his muse.  Anyone knockin’ at your chamber?  Rhett.

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

we can and we should
oh, which do you prefer
to venture forth or go
“The less dramatic way”
ha i agree
but, i have no song for this
“Me either”
it is a place where our minds
are free to roam, where words
are arranged, not randomly,
not in dreary dead habit
but purposely beyond

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

we can and we should

venture forth or go,
which do you prefer

where the mind is free to roam
where fine words arranged
in whichever way we please
lead not in dreary dead habit
nor from the depth of truth
or perfection, the tireless
strivin’ stretches of whatever

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

provocation towards
lookin’ for somethin’ other

transformin’ encounters
with verse, art, music

you

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

what dreams
are made of
strive ever so
to catch the light
to write verse
tryin’ to come close
to what you achieve
simply by bein’
the way you are

for that is what i seek
to exceed the reach
beyond ordinary

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

you come knockin’
at my chamber
in my dreams
every night
if only it were more
than just in my dreams

© copyright 2016 mac tag all rights reserved

It was on this day in 1718, that the city of New Orleans was founded by Jean-Baptiste Le Moyne, Sieur de Bienville.  One of our favorite cities.  Rhett has loved some beautiful women there.  As you know, New Orleans features prominently in my verse.  Would it were that we were in New Orleans when midnight comes.

Olympe de Gouges
Late-18th century portrait of Gouges by Alexander Kucharsky

Today is the birthday of Olympe de Gouges (Marie Gouze; Montauban, Guyenne-and-Gascony, France 7 May 1748 – 3 November 1793 Place de la Révolution, Paris); playwright and political activist whose feminist and abolitionist writings reached a large audience.

She began her career as a playwright in the early 1780s. As political tension rose in France, de Gouges became increasingly politically engaged. She became an advocate against the slave trade in the French colonies in 1788. At the same time, she began writing political pamphlets. Perhaps best known as an early feminist who demanded that French women be given the same rights as French men. In her Déclaration des droits de la femme et de la citoyenne (Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen (1791)), she challenged the practice of male authority and the notion of male-female inequality. She was executed by guillotine during the Reign of Terror for attacking the regime of the Revolutionary government and for her association with the Girondists.

In 1765 aged 16 she was married against her will to Louis Aubry, a caterer.  De Gouges said in a semi-autobiographical novel (Mémoire de Madame de Valmont contre la famille de Flaucourt), “I was married to a man I did not love and who was neither rich nor well-born. I was sacrificed for no reason that could make up for the repugnance I felt for this man.” Her husband died a year later, and in 1770 she moved to Paris with her son to live with her sister. She never married again, calling the institution of marriage “the tomb of trust and love”.

In Paris she started a relationship with the wealthy Jacques Biétrix de Rozières, but refused his marriage proposal. She remained close to Rozières throughout the French Revolution. With the support of Rozières she established a theatre company. De Gouges attended the artistic and philosophical salons of Paris, where she met many writers, including La Harpe, Mercier, and Chamfort, as well as future politicians such as Brissot and Condorcet. She usually was invited to the salons of Madame de Montesson and the Comtesse de Beauharnais, who also were playwrights.

In 1788 she published Réflexions sur les hommes négres, which demanded compassion for the plight of slaves in the French colonies. For de Gouges there was a direct link between the autocratic monarchy in France and the institution of slavery, she argued that “Men everywhere are equal… Kings who are just do not want slaves; they know that they have submissive subjects.” She came to the public’s attention with the play l’Esclavage des Noirs, which was staged at the famous Comédie-Française in 1785. Her stance against the slavery in the French colonies made her the target of threats. De Gouges was also attacked by those who thought that a woman’s proper place was not in the theatre. The influential Abraham-Joseph Bénard remarked “Mme de Gouges is one of those women to whom one feels like giving razor blades as a present, who through their pretensions lose the charming qualities of their sex… Every woman author is in a false position, regardless of her talent”. Gouges was defiant, she wrote “I’m determined to be a success, and I’l do it in spite of my enemies.” The slave trade lobby had mounted a press campaign against her play and she eventually took legal action, forcing Comédie-Française to stage l’Esclavage des Noirs. But the play closed after three performances, the lobby had paid hecklers to sabotage the performances.

A passionate advocate of human rights, de Gouges greeted the outbreak of the Revolution with hope and joy, but soon became disenchanted when égalité (equal rights) was not extended to women. In 1791 de Gouges became part of the Society of the Friends of Truth, also called the “Social Club,” an association with the goal of equal political and legal rights for women. Members sometimes gathered at the home of the well-known women’s rights advocate, Sophie de Condorcet. Here de Gouges expressed, for the first time, her famous statement:

“Si la femme a le droit de monter sur l’échafaud, elle doit avoir également celui de monter à la tribune.”

(A woman has the right to mount the scaffold. She must possess equally the right to mount the speaker’s platform. {The Declaration of the Rights of Women})

1791, in response to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, she wrote the Déclaration des droits de la Femme et de la Citoyenne (“Declaration of the Rights of Woman and the Female Citizen“). This was followed by her Contrat Social (“Social Contract,” named after a famous work of Jean-Jacques Rousseau), proposing marriage based upon gender equality.

As the Revolution progressed, she became more and more vehement in her writings. On 2 June 1793, the Jacobins arrested the Girondins, imprisoned them, and sent them to the guillotine in October. Finally, her poster Les trois urnes, ou le salut de la Patrie, par un voyageur aérien (“The Three Urns, or the Salvation of the Fatherland, by an Aerial Traveller“) of 1793, led to her arrest. That piece demanded a plebiscite for a choice among three potential forms of government: the first, unitary republic, the second, a federalist government, or the third, a constitutional monarchy.

After she was arrested, the commissioners searched her house for evidence. When they could not find any in her home, she voluntarily led them to the storehouse where she kept her papers. It was there that the commissioners found an unfinished play titled La France Sauvée ou le Tyran Détroné (“France Preserved, or The Tyrant Dethroned“). In the first act (only the first act and a half remain), Marie-Antoinette is planning defence strategies to retain the crumbling monarchy and is confronted by revolutionary forces, including Gouges herself. The first act ends with Gouges reproving the queen for having seditious intentions and lecturing her about how she should lead her people. Both Gouges and her prosecutor used this play as evidence in her trial. The prosecutor claimed that Gouges ‘ depictions of the queen threatened to stir up sympathy and support for the Royalists, whereas Gouges stated that the play showed that she had always been a supporter of the Revolution.

She spent three months in jail without an attorney, trying to defend herself. The presiding judge denied Gouges her legal right to a lawyer on the grounds that she was more than capable of representing herself. It seems as though the judge based this argument on Gouges’ tendency to represent herself in her writings. Through her friends, she managed to publish two texts: Olympe de Gouges au tribunal révolutionnaire (“Olympe de Gouges at the Revolutionary tribunal“), in which she related her interrogations; and her last work, Une patriote persécutée (“A [female] patriot persecuted“), in which she condemned the Terror.

The Jacobins sentenced her to death on 3 November 1793, and she was executed the following day for seditious behaviour and attempting to reinstate the monarchy. De Gouges was executed only a month after Condorcet had been proscribed, and just three days after the Girondin leaders had been guillotined. Her body was disposed of in the Madeleine Cemetery. Olympe’s last moments were depicted by an anonymous Parisian who kept a chronicle of events:

“Yesterday, at seven o’clock in the evening, a most extraordinary person called Olympe de Gouges who held the imposing title of woman of letters, was taken to the scaffold, while all of Paris, while admiring her beauty, knew that she didn’t even know her alphabet…. She approached the scaffold with a calm and serene expression on her face, and forced the guillotine’s furies, which had driven her to this place of torture, to admit that such courage and beauty had never been seen before…. That woman… had thrown herself in the Revolution, body and soul. But having quickly perceived how atrocious the system adopted by the Jacobins was, she chose to retrace her steps. She attempted to unmask the villains through the literary productions which she had printed and put up. They never forgave her, and she paid for her carelessness with her head.”

 Gallery

Unknown

The execution of de Gouges

Today is the birthday of Robert Browning (Camberwell 7 May 1812 – 12 December 1889 Venice); poet and playwright whose mastery of the dramatic monologue made him one of the foremost Victorian poets.  His poems are known for their irony, characterization, dark humour, social commentary, historical settings, and challenging vocabulary and syntax.  In 1846 Browning married the older poet Elizabeth Barrett, who at the time was considerably better known than himself.  So started one of history’s most famous literary marriages.  They went to live in Italy, a country he called “my university”, and which features frequently in his work.

Men and Women (1855)

• I do what many dream of, all their lives,
  — Dream? strive to do, and agonize to do,
  And fail in doing. I could count twenty such
  On twice your fingers, and not leave this town,
  Who strive — you don’t know how the others strive
  To paint a little thing like that you smeared
  Carelessly passing with your robes afloat —
  Yet do much less, so much less, Someone says,
  (I know his name, no matter) — so much less!
  Well, less is more, Lucrezia: I am judged.
  There burns a truer light of God in them,
  In their vexed beating stuffed and stopped-up brain,
  Heart, or whate’er else, than goes on to prompt
  This low-pulsed forthright craftsman’s hand of mine.
  • “Andrea del Sarto”, line 70

• Ah, but a man’s reach should exceed his grasp,
  Or what’s a heaven for?
  • “Andrea del Sarto”, line 98.

• Take away love, and our earth is a tomb!
  • “Fra Lippo Lippi, line 54.

• If you get simple beauty and naught else,
  You get about the best thing God invents.
  • “Fra Lippo Lippi”, line 217.

For I say this is death and the sole death,—
When a man’s loss comes to him from his gain,
Darkness from light, from knowledge ignorance,
And lack of love from love made manifest.

And today is the birthday of Archibald MacLeish (Glencoe, Illinois, May 7, 1892 – April 20, 1982 Boston); poet, writer, and the Librarian of Congress.  He is associated with the Modernist school of poetry.  He received three Pulitzer Prizes for his work.

A poem should be motionless in time~

A poem should be wordless~

A poem should not mean, but be~

• “Ars Poetica”, Collected Poems, 1917-1982 (1985)

So mirrored in thy heart are all desires,
Eternal longings, Youth’s inheritance,
All hopes that token immortality,
All griefs whereto immortal grief aspires.

If you commit yourself to the art of poetry, you commit yourself to the task of learning how to see, using words as elements of sight and their sounds as prisms. And to see means to see something worth all the agony of learning how to see.

Mac Tag

When midnight comes, knock at my chamber-window.

– Shakespeare

A little while and – red eve dies –

Our love shall be of yesterday, 

Ah, let us kiss each other’s eyes,

And laugh our love away.

WB Yeats

For it is love that I am seeking for,

But of a beautiful, unheard-of kind

That is not in the world.

WB Yeats

Now, mistress, profit you in what you read?

– Shakespeare

I feel no love, only the Idea of Love.

– Sylvia Plath

To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all. 

– Oscar Wilde

We should meet in another life, we should meet in air, me and you.

– Sylvia Plath

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  Do you have all of that?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Almanac

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

inspiration
wrung from experience
pain and pleasure, words
flung about, the only remedy
nothin’ comes from nothin’

the night
to wake to,
our dreams,
variations

on the way it could be

a scene on a canvas,
verse in a letter
sealed for us

the reason for it all

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

all
of you, for you,
about you

callin’ to you
and a feelin’
you must be callin’ too

your voice, a song
not a phantom…

all about followin’
the inspiration
come what may

all the words
to be written
all the unfound
melodies

all the moments
to stop and try
to capture the light

all the time
that is left
to be spent
goin’ wherever
the muses take us

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Yet another from the archives.  I once had it.  I wish I still had……

All of That

Trust and belief
And hope and faith
Beauty and truth
And all of that

Dreams and passion
And awe and bliss
Magic and light
And all of that

Fun and wonder

And lust and laughs
Rapture and love
And all of that

Man and woman
Lovers and friends
Lucky are they
Who have all that

© Copyright 2011 Cowboy Coleridge All rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “All That I Am” by Parachute.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

 

Today is the birthay of Gaston Leroux (Gaston Louis Alfred Leroux, Paris, 6 May 1868 – 15 April 1927 Nice); journalist and author.  In the English-speaking world, perhaps best known for writing the novel The Phantom of the Opera (Le Fantôme de l’Opéra, 1910). Le Fantôme de l’Opéra was first published as a serialization in Le Gaulois from 23 September 1909, to 8 January 1910. It was published in volume form in late March 1910 by Pierre Lafitte. The novel is partly inspired by historical events at the Paris Opera during the nineteenth century and an apocryphal tale concerning the use of a former ballet pupil’s skeleton in Carl Maria von Weber’s 1841 production of Der Freischütz. It has been successfully adapted into various stage and film adaptations, most notable of which are the 1925 film depiction featuring Lon Chaney, and Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 1986 musical.  The love story triangle between the Phantom, Christine and Raoul, is one of my favorite books.  His 1907 novel Le mystère de la chambre jaune (The Mystery of the Yellow Room) is one of the most celebrated locked-room mysteries.

Le Mystère de la chambre jaune, 1907

Il n’existe pas d’arts mineurs. Seules existent les noces étranges du conscient et de l’inconscience, la foudre exquise produite par le contact de la sagesse et de ce schizophrène que chacun porte en soi et dont il a généralement honte.
La poésie, c’est le monstre, né de ces noces mystérieuses, de ce mariage brutal entre la surprise et les habitudes. Et peu importe la taille et la force musculaire du monstre.
L’essentiel est qu’il naisse. Je n’en demande pas davantage.

Today is the birthday of Ernst Ludwig Kirchner (Aschaffenburg 6 May 1880 – 15 June 1938 Frauenkirch-Wildboden, Switzerland); expressionist painter and printmaker.  One of the founders of the artists group Die Brücke or “The Bridge”, a key group leading to the foundation of Expressionism in 20th-century art.  In 1933, his work was branded as “degenerate” by the Nazis and in 1937 over 600 of his works were sold or destroyed.  In 1938 he died by suicide (gunshot).

Photographic self-portrait 1919

Gallery

 Marzella (1909–10)

Vier Holzplastiken, 1912, Dallas Museum of Art

 Kirchner’s Berlin studio in 1915

 Self-Portrait as a Soldier (1915)

 Standing Nude with Hat, 1910

 Landscape in Graubünden with Sun Rays

 Archers, 1935-1937

 Böhmischer Waldsee, 1911

• 

  Dancers, 1906, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Sitting Woman, 1907

• 

  Dodo and her brother, c. 1908, Smith College Museum of Art

• 

  Nudes, ca. 1908, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Woman with Black Hat, 1908, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Head of a Woman, ca. 1909, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Tavern, 1909

• 

  Naked Playing People, 1910

• 

  Fränzi in front of Carved Chair, 1910, Museo Thyssen-Bornemisza, Madrid

  
• 

  Nollendorfplatz, 1912

• 

  Berlin Street Scene, 1913

• 

  Street, Berlin (1913), one of a series on this theme, depicting prostitutes

• 

  Potsdamer Platz, 1914

• 

  Brandenburger Tor, 1915

• 

  1916, Königstein Station, Städel

• 

  At the Table, 1916, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  Self-portrait as a
  Sick Person, 1918

• 

  Two Brothers, 1921

• 

  Old Woman and Young Woman, 1921, Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum

• 

  ‘View of Basel and
  the Rhine, 1921

• 

  The Visit–Couple and Newcomer, 1922

• 

  The Sleigh Ride, 1923, Germanisches Nationalmuseum

• 

  Self portrait, 1925

• 

  Snowy landscape, 1930

• 

  Violett House in Front of a Snowy Mountain, 1938

  Today is the birthday of Randall Jarrell (Nashville May 6, 1914 – October 14, 1965 Chapel Hill); poet, literary critic, children’s author, essayist, novelist, and the 11th Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, a position that now bears the title Poet Laureate.  

  Blood for a Stranger (1942)

  • I see at last that all the knowledge
  • I wrung from the darkness — that the darkness flung me —
  • Is worthless as ignorance: nothing comes from nothing,
    The darkness from the darkness. Pain comes from the darkness
    And we call it wisdom. It is pain.
    • “90 North,” lines 28-32

  • The nurse is the night
    To wake to, to die in: and the day I live,
    The world and its life are her dreams.
    • “Variations,” lines 31-33

  • And the world said, Child, you will not be missed.
    You are cheaper than a wrench, your back is a road;
    Your death is a table in a book.
    You had our wit, our heart was sealed to you:
    Man is the judgment of the world.
    • “Variations,” lines 40-44

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  Do you know?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboycoleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2022 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

i still can
though so much has passed…

between those sad letters
and what was known
vanishin’ i could not

name any god
worth worshipin’,
belief bein’ impossible
for the devoutly miserable
unable to bear the masks
of their own faces

with words, seekin’ to shape
an alternate to the one ruined,
for it cannot be refuted, inscribed
as it is ruthlessly in my memories

the sad heft of what was left behind

more than once, asked for breath
that i might believe in another
however improbable way

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

and you
what do you know…

know… ha
helluva thing

come full circle
from knowin’ for certain
to not knowin’ a damn thing
and back to knowin’ again

to know
desire, intimacy
what some never know

to know, said softly
lookin’ from the canvas
inward to the memories
really a simple question
the revelation comin’
after years of makin’ do
with only flames struck
unexpectedly in the dark

to know…
your name
repeated
in the silence
owe it all
to you

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Another from the archives.  I used to know.  Do you know……

They Know

© Copyright 2011 Cowboy Coleridge All rights reserved

The Song of the Day is “Do You Know (The Theme from Mahogany)“ by Diana Ross.  We do not own the rights to this song.  All rights reserved by the rightful owner.  No copyright infringement intended.

Today is the birthday of Fabián de la Rosa (Fabián Cueto de la Rosa; Manila, May 5, 1869 – December 14, 1937 Manila); painter.  He was an uncle and mentor to the Philippines’ national artist in painting, Fernando Amorsolo, and to his brother Pablo.  He is regarded as a “master of genre” in Philippine art.

Gallery

Woman reading a book

Women Weaving Hats, (1930).

To the Lighthouse

First edition

And on this day in 1927, To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf is first published. The novel centres on the Ramsay family and their visits to the Isle of Skye in Scotland between 1910 and 1920.

Following and extending the tradition of modernist novelists like Marcel Proust and James Joyce, the plot of To the Lighthouse is secondary to its philosophical introspection. Cited as a key example of the literary technique of multiple focalization, the novel includes little dialogue and almost no action.  Most of the novel is written as thoughts and observations. It recalls childhood emotions and highlights adult relationships. Among the book’s themes are those of loss, subjectivity, the nature of art and the problem of perception.

To the Lighthouse (1927)

• Could loving, as people called it, make her and Mrs Ramsay one? for it was not knowledge but unity that she desired, not inscription on tablets, nothing that could be written in any language known to men, but intimacy itself, which is knowledge, she had thought, leaning her head on Mrs Ramsay’s knee.
  • Part I, Ch. 9

• A light here required a shadow there.
  • Part I, Ch. 9

• She felt this thing that she called life terrible, hostile, and quick to pounce on you if you gave it a chance. There were the eternal problems: suffering; death; the poor. There was always a woman dying of cancer even here. And yet she had said to all these children, You shall go through with it.
  • Part I, Ch. 10

• She had done the usual trick – been nice. She would never know him. He would never know her. Human relations were all like that, she thought, and the worst (if it had not been for Mr Bankes) were between men and women. Inevitably these were extremely insincere.
  • Part I, Ch. 17

• For our penitence deserves a glimpse only; our toil respite only.
  • Part II, Ch. 3

• “Like a work of art,” she repeated, looking from her canvas to the drawing-room steps and back again. She must rest for a moment. And, resting, looking from one to the other vaguely, the old question which transversed the sky of the soul perpetually, the vast, the general question which was apt to particularise itself at such moments as these, when she released faculties that had been on the strain, stood over her, paused over her, darkened over her. What is the meaning of life? That was all — a simple question; one that tended to close in on one with years. The great revelation had never come. The great revelation perhaps never did come. Instead there were little daily miracles, illuminations, matches struck unexpectedly in the dark; here was one. This, that, and the other; herself and Charles Tansley and the breaking wave; Mrs. Ramsay bringing them together; Mrs. Ramsay saying, “Life stand still here”; Mrs. Ramsay making of the moment something permanent (as in another sphere Lily herself tried to make of the moment something permanent) — this was of the nature of a revelation. In the midst of chaos there was shape; this eternal passing and flowing (she looked at the cloud going and the leaves shaking) was struck into stability. Life stand still here, Mrs. Ramsay said. “Mrs. Ramsay! Mrs. Ramsay!” she repeated. She owed it all to her.
  • Part III, Ch. 3

• Mrs Ramsay sat silent. She was glad, Lily thought, to rest in silence, uncommunicative; to rest in the extreme obscurity of human relationships. Who knows what we are, what we feel? Who knows even at the moment of intimacy, This is knowledge? Aren’t things spoilt then, Mrs Ramsay may have asked (it seemed to have happened so often, this silence by her side) by saying them?
  • Part III, Ch. 5

• But one only woke people if one knew what one wanted to say to them. And she wanted to say not one thing, but everything. Little words that broke up the thought and dismembered it said nothing. ‘About life, about death; about Mrs Ramsay’ – no, she thought, one could say nothing to nobody.
  • Part III, Ch. 5

• She alone spoke the truth; to her alone could he speak it. That was the source of her everlasting attraction for him, perhaps; she was a person to whom one could say what came into one’s head.
  • Part III, Ch. 9

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Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag.  What can we call you?  Can we call you?  Rhett

The Lovers’ Chronicle

Dear Muse,

© copyright 2021 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

oh sorry,
have to avoid
the “L” word

call it, a search
for unresolved years
time left in the rear view
through which now i see,
connectin’ you and me

when you are near,
across lost chances
always, to be near you,
when we dream and so
believe, which leads to
here, where we are

for this we live
for this we, well
you know, the “L” word

© copyright 2019 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

“Do you collect anything?”
books, words, photographs,
dreams, memories of you

“Do you want me?”

call me
i will tell you

if two outta three ain’t bad,
what would one outta three be

oh, nice try, need
but thank you, no
not havin’ any
somethin’ inside
will not let it be

to find that
would require
openin’ up
and pourin’ out
but be careful
if you go there

how it will end
is well known

© copyright 2018 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Another from the archives.  Written in the days when only you spoke to me.  Before the Dark Muse took control.  If only you could……

Call Me

Call me a Renaissance Man – Thank you.
Call me a gentleman – Of course
Call me a scoundrel – Well…
Call me a cowboy – Proudly
Call me a poet – You know it
Call me a philosopher – I think, therefore…
Call me a flirt – Probably
Call me a dreamer – Decidedly
Call me a lover – That is what I was meant to be
Call me a man for all occasions – Count on it

Call me old fashioned – Really
Call me romantic – Hopelessly
Call me funny – Hopefully
Call me wonderful – Would you
Call me woeful – At times
Call me lonely – Only most of the time
Call me spiritual – I am tryin’
Call me friend – Always
Call me flawed – Without a doubt
Call me ordinary – Them’s fightin’ words! ! !

© Copyright 2012 Cowboy Coleridge All rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Frederic Edwin Church (Hartford, May 4, 1826 – April 7, 1900 New York City); landscape painter.  He was a central figure in the Hudson River School of American landscape painters, perhaps best known for painting large panoramic landscapes, often depicting mountains, waterfalls, and sunsets, but also sometimes depicting dramatic natural phenomena that he saw during his travels to the Arctic and Central and South America.  Church’s paintings put an emphasis on light and a romantic respect for natural detail.  In his later years, Church painted classical Mediterranean and Middle Eastern scenes and cityscapes.

Frederic Edwin Church

Gallery 

L’Arche naturelle (1852)

Aurora Borealis (1865), Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.

Tropical Scenery (1873), Brooklyn Museum

El Río de Luz (The River of Light (1877), National Gallery of Art 

Cotopaxi, 1855

Heart of the Andes (1859), Metropolitan Museum of Art

Cotopaxi, (1862)

• 

  The Andes of Ecuador, c. 1855, Honolulu Museum of Art – this image is a sketch for the final work – which is at the Reynolds

• 

  Cotopaxi, (1855)

• 

  Cross in the Wilderness, 1857

• 

  Morning in the Tropics, ca. 1858, The Walters Art Museum, Baltimore

• 

  Twilight in the Wilderness, (1860), Cleveland Museum of Art

• 

  Oosisoak, (1861)

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  Rainy Season in the Tropics, 1866, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco

• 

  Niagara Falls, from the American Side, 1867

• 

  Passing Shower in the Tropics, 1872, Princeton University Art Museum

• 

  Aegean Sea, c. 1877, Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 

  Parthenon, 1871, The Metropolitan Museum of Art

• 

  Jerusalem from the Mount of Olives, 1870, The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

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  El Khasne Petra, 1874, Olana State Historic Site

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  Niagara Falls,1857, Frederic Edwin Church, National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC.

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  The Icebergs, 1861, Dallas Museum of Art

Today is the birthday of Thomas Wilmer Dewing (Boston, May 4, 1851 – November 5, 1938 New York City); painter working at the turn of the 20th century.  Schooled in Paris, Dewing was noted for his figure paintings of aristocratic women.  He was a founding member of the Ten American Painters and taught at the Art Students League of New York.  The Art Museum at the Smithsonian Institution has a room dedicated to his works. He was the husband of fellow artist Maria Oakey Dewing.

Gallery

The Days, 1886/1887

Reclining nude

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