Author: Christian

Author for Pigtails in Paint since September 2014; associate editor since November 2015. Administrator of the late Agapeta on WordPress (2015/01/09 - 2019/03/01), and now of Poets and Lovers.

Deux enfants au soleil, par Jean Ferrat

Couverture du premier album de Jean Ferrat
Couverture du premier album de Jean Ferrat – provient de Discogs

Jean Ferrat (1930–2010), de son vrai nom Jean Tenenbaum, est un auteur-compositeur-interprète français. Fils d’un immigré juif d’origine Russe déporté puis assassiné en 1942 à Auschwitz, il vécut le reste de la guerre caché d’abord par des militants communistes, puis par sa famille. Ces événements le marquèrent fortement, ce qui se manifestera plus tard par le caractère social et engagé de beaucoup de ses chansons, ainsi que par ses sympathies pour le PCF. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Love Lives Beyond the Tomb, by John Clare

Jana Brike
Jana Brike

Today, I present another beautiful little piece from the collection Asylum Poems that John Clare wrote while he was interned in a lunatic asylum. It is a message of hope, he tells us that love is everlasting, it “lives beyond the tomb, the earth, the flowers, and dew,” and it can be found with “the fond, the faithful, young and true.” The genuine heart-love of a young maiden brings the poet eternal happiness. The secret of a fruitful life is a young heart full of love. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Plus belle, par Jean Aicard

Sophie Gengembre Anderson - La tourterelle
Sophie Gengembre Anderson – La tourterelle – The Athenaeum

Voici un beau poème d’amour, que j’ai choisi dans Le Livre d’Heures de l’Amour. L’auteur s’adresse à sa bien-aimée, qui reste insensible à ses sentiments et lui semble d’une beauté orgueilleuse. Il l’enjoint de se transformer de bien-aimée en amoureuse, elle en deviendrait plus heureuse, et cela ne pourrait qu’accroître sa beauté. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Ad Domnulam Suam, by Ernest Dowson

Pierre-Auguste Renoir - Irène Cahen d’Anvers
Pierre-Auguste Renoir – Irène Cahen d’Anvers (ca.1880) – from Wikimedia Commons

This beautiful poem, whose title means “to his little lady” (or “mistress”), expresses the poet’s love for a young girl, and at the same time a desire to stop before this love could grow too strong. Anyway, the girl will soon leave the “fairy-land” of childhood and grow into adulthood, and this could spell the end of that love’s magic. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Trois ans de liberté

Richard Müller - Liebesbotschaft
Richard Müller – Liebesbotschaft (1921)

Poets and Lovers vit depuis trois ans, et c’est un petit miracle. Partout se met en place une censure « préventive » d’Internet, où divers opérateurs invoquent toutes sortes de raisons pour bloquer des sites, tandis que des lobbies réactionnaires avides de pouvoir et de subsides publics, sous couvert de « protection des enfants », exigent des opérateurs la censure de divers contenus qu’ils qualifient arbitrairement de « maltraitance d’enfants ».

Dans un climat de haine, de chauvinisme et de militarisme, Poets and Lovers continuera à défendre la poésie, la liberté et l’amour. C’est la seule voie pour faire apparaître le merveilleux dans nos existences. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Arisen

Napoleon Sarony - The Birth of Venus
Napoleon Sarony – The Birth of Venus (ca.1900) – from Erotische Fotografie 1890–1920

Poets and Lovers exists since three years, having been through many difficulties. One year ago, our host provider in the UK, after repeated persecution by the police, was railroaded into a guilty plea (for possessing or having possessed material totally legal in any other country in Western Europe), then his server was forcibly closed down after a police raid. Fortunately, we soon found another host provider in another country. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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A Love Letter

Bob-Byerley - The love letter
Bob-Byerley – The love letter

All the Year Round was a weekly literary magazine founded and owned by Charles Dickens, published between 1859 and 1895 throughout the United Kingdom. It was edited by Dickens until shortly before his death in 1870, and then his eldest son Charles Dickens, Jr. took over the magazine.

The following poem was published anonymously in its issue of August 21, 1886. It is a beautiful declaration of love addressed to a child. Although the author does never tell the child’s gender, the words “like a Queen” make it clear that it is a girl. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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A une jeune amie, par Jean Aicard

Felice Casorati - Bambina che gioca su un tappeto rosso
Felice Casorati – Bambina che gioca su un tappeto rosso (1912)

Dans ce poème provenant du recueil de vers Le Livre d’Heures de l’Amour, l’auteur s’adresse à une jeune fille, il lui demande de se détourner de lui, devenu trop vieux : « J’ai l’âge triste où l’on est sage, / Mon âme est une fleur fanée / Où ta lèvre boirait des pleurs ». Il lui recommande plutôt de suivre un papillon, de chercher les nids d’oiseaux, ou de cueillir des fleurs. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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Yvonne of Brittany, by Ernest Dowson

In his lifetime, Ernest Dowson published two volumes of poetry, Verses in June 1896, and Decorations: in Verse and Prose in December 1899, two months before his death. Except the poems in prose at the end of Decorations, they were included in The Poems and Prose of Ernest Dowson, With a Memoir by Arthur Symons, available on the web as a Project Gutenberg Ebook, and they can also be seen on ELCore.Net, Website of E. L. Core.

The volume Verses is dedicated to Adelaide Foltinowicz, a Polish girl born in 1878, with whom Dowson was in love. Having had hopes for a common future, many poems have a light and happy side, contrasting with the dark ones at the end of Decorations, written in bitter disappointment after Adelaide’s marriage with another man. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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John Clare’s Asylum Poems

William Hilton - John Clare
William Hilton – John Clare (1820) – National Portrait Gallery, London, NPG 1469

John Clare (b. July 13, 1793; d. May 20, 1864) was an English farm labourer and poet. According to his biographer Jonathan Bate, Clare was “the greatest labouring-class poet that England has ever produced. No one has ever written more powerfully of nature, of a rural childhood, and of the alienated and unstable self.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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