No.20

APRIL LOVE

1855/6

oil on canvas

89 cm x 50 cm

Arthur Hughes

1832-1915

Nationality - British

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A NOVICE

Dollie Radford 1858-1920

What is it, in these latter days, 
Transfigures my domestic ways, 
And round me, as a halo, plays? 
My cigarette. 

For me so daintily prepared, 
No modern skill, or perfume, spared, 
What would have happened had I dared 
To pass it yet? 

What else could lighten times of woe, 
When some one says 'I told you so,' 
When all the servants, in a row, 
Give notices? 

When the great family affairs 
Demand the most gigantic cares, 
And one is very ill upstairs, 
With poultices? 

What else could ease my aching head, 
When, though I long to be in bed, 
I settle steadily instead 
To my 'accounts?' 

And while the house is slumbering, 
Go over them like anything, 
And find them ever varying, 
In their amounts! 

Ah yes, the cook may spoil the broth, 
The cream of life resolve to froth, 
I cannot now, though very wroth, 
Distracted be; 

For as the smoke curls blue and thin 
From my own lips, I first begin 
To bathe my tired spirit in 
Philosophy. 

And sweetest healing on her pours, 
Once more into the world she soars, 
And sees it full of open doors, 
And helping hands. 

In spite of those who, knocking, stay 
At sullen portals day by day, 
And weary at the long delay 
To their demands. 

The promised epoch, like a star, 
Shines very bright and very far, 
But nothing shall its lustre mar, 
Though distant yet. 

If I, in vain, must sit and wait, 
To realize our future state, 
I shall not be disconsolate, 
My cigarette!

Caroline Maitland was an English poet who, using her married name, wrote as Dollie Radford. Her friends included Eleanor Marx the youngest daughter of Karl Marx.

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SUMMER EVENING AT SKAGEN

Peder Severin Kroyer

1851-1909

Nationality - Danish

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Three Poems by Thomas Hardy

THE VOICE

Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,
Saying that now you are not as you were
When you had changed from the one who was all to me,
But as at first, when our day was fair.

Can it be you that I hear? Let me view you, then,
Standing as when I drew near to the town
Where you would wait for me: yes, as I knew you then,
Even to the original air-blue gown!

Or is it only the breeze, in its listlessness
Travelling across the wet mead to me here,
You being ever dissolved to wan wistlessness,
Heard no more again far or near?

Thus I; faltering forward,
Leaves around me falling,
Wind oozing thin through the thorn from norward,
And the woman calling.

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A SPELLBOUND PALACE
(Hampton Court)

On this kindly yellow day of mild low-travelling winter sun
The stirless depths of the yews
Are vague with misty blues:
Across the spacious pathways stretching spires of shadow run,
And the wind-gnawed walls of ancient brick are fired vermilion.

Two or three early sanguine finches tune
Some tentative strains, to be enlarged by May or June:
From a thrush or blackbird
Comes now and then a word,
While an enfeebled fountain somewhere within is heard.

Our footsteps wait awhile,
Then draw beneath the pile,
When an inner court outspreads
As ’twere History’s own asile,
Where the now-visioned fountain its attenuate crystal sheds
In passive lapse that seems to ignore the yon world’s clamorous clutch,
And lays an insistent numbness on the place, like a cold hand’s touch.

And there swaggers the Shade of a straddling King, plumed, sworded, with sensual face,
And lo, too, that of his Minister, at a bold self-centred pace:
Sheer in the sun they pass; and thereupon all is still,
Save the mindless fountain tinkling on with thin enfeebled will.

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THE OXEN

Christmas Eve, and twelve of the clock.
‘Now they are all on their knees,’
An elder said as we sat in a flock
By the embers in hearthside ease.

We pictured the meek mild creatures where
They dwelt in their strawy pen,
Nor did it occur to one of us there
To doubt they were kneeling then.

So fair a fancy few would weave
In these years! Yet, I feel,
If someone said on Christmas Eve,
‘Come; see the oxen kneel,

‘In the lonely *barton by yonder #coomb
Our childhood used to know,’
I should go with him in the gloom,
Hoping it might be so.

* barton = a farm
# coomb = a small valley

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SARA WITH HER DOG IN AN ARMCHAIR

1901

Mary Cassatt

1844-1926

Nationality - American 
but spent most of her adult life in France working with the Impressionists.

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THINE AM I

Robert Burns
1759-96

Thine am I, my faithful Fair,
Thine, my lovely Nancy;
Ev'ry pulse along my veins,
Ev'ry roving fancy.

To thy bosom lay my heart,
There to throb and languish;
Tho' despair had wrung its core,
That would heal its anguish.

Take away those rosy lips,
Rich with balmy treasure;
Turn away thine eyes of love,
Lest I die with pleasure!

What is life when wanting* Love?
Night without a morning:
Love's the cloudless summer sun,
Nature gay adorning.

*lacking

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Some Sayings by Franklin P. Jones 1879-1967

Nothing makes you more tolerant of a neighbour's noisy party than being there.

It's a strange world of language in which skating on thin ice can get you into hot water.

Experience is that marvellous thing that enables you to recognize a mistake when you make it again.

You are what you eat. For example, if you eat garlic you're apt to be a hermit.      

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THE PLEASURES OF THE BALL

1715/7

Jean-Antoine Watteau

1684-1721
Nationality - French

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UPDATED EVERY WEEKEND

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