Sorrows, by Brooke Boothby

Thomas Banks – monument to Penelope Boothby
Thomas Banks – monument to Penelope Boothby (1793) – from Wikimedia Commons

Sir Brooke Boothby (1743–1824), seventh Baronet, and his wife Susanna (1755–1822) had a daughter, Penelope, born on April 11, 1785, their only child. The little girl is renowned for her portrait made by Sir Joshua Reynolds in July 1788. As writes Estelle Hurll in her booklet about Sir Joshua Reynolds: CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Drinking song, by Eric Stenbock

The Idiot Club of Kolk
Photograph by Frederick Hollyer – The Idiot Club of Kolk; left to right: Karin Stenbock, Eric Stenbock with his dachshund Trixie, Richard von Wistinghausen, Theophile von Wistinghausen – from Of Kings and Things, D. Tibet editor

My second choice from Myrtle, Rue and Cypress (1883), Stenbock’s second collection of verses, is a poem in the spirit of carpe diem, honouring love, youth and wine. Here he joins Baudelaire, who also extolled wine and drunkenness, and indeed both authors experienced the pleasures of alcohol and drugs. As in many of Stenbock’s poems, the gender of the beloved young person is left unknown, but it was most probably a boy. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time, by Robert Herrick

Robert Herrick
Robert Herrick – from Halleck’s New English Literature (1913), via Wikimedia Commons

Robert Herrick (1591–1674) was an English poet and cleric who lived through the Stuart dynasty, then the civil war and finally the Restoration. In 1648 he published Hesperides: Or, The Works Both Humane & Divine, a huge collection of poetry, to which he appended a shorter collection of religious poems, His Noble Numbers: Or, His Pious Pieces, apparently dated 1647; together, they make over 1400 poems. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Flavia, by Aleister Crowley

Noctivagant - brabikate.blogspot.fr
Noctivagant – brabikate.blogspot.fr

The eighth poem of Rosa Mundi, and other love-songs tells us that the beauty, the kisses and caresses of the loved Italian girl will not last, in the same way as night must soon end with sunrise. There is no salvation in an afterlife, so we must enjoy the pleasures of earthly life without delay, thus live the bliss of the short love night. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Vermeer’s Little Girl, by Adam Zagajewski

Johannes Vermeer - Meisje met de parel / Girl with a pearl earring
Johannes Vermeer – Meisje met de parel / Girl with a pearl earring (c.1665) – from Mauritshuis via Wikimedia Commons

Adam Zagajewski (born in 1945) is a famous Polish poet, essayist, novelist and translator. In his youth, he became well-known as one of the leading poets of the “Generation of ’68” or “New Wave” writers in Poland, and throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s he supported through his writings the opposition to the Polish regime. Later he took some distance from politics and his writings assumed an increasingly philosophical and existential nature. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Le château de sable, par Minou Drouet

Roger Hauert - Minou Drouet
Roger Hauert – Minou Drouet – dans Poèmes (1956)

Dans un précédent article, j’ai décrit comment Minou Drouet fit la connaissance d’un garçon de quinze ans, Philippe, amoureux d’elle, qu’elle finit par aimer. Dans ce poème de son deuxième recueil, Le Pêcheur de lune, publié en 1959, elle parle de la relation tendre qu’elle noua à huit ans avec un garçon de douze ans, avec qui elle jouait sur la plage. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

Le Panneau, by Oscar Wilde

Woman with little girl, Mankayen Garden
Woman with little girl, Mankayen Garden (c.1890)

Under the title “Fantaisies Décoratives,” Oscar Wilde published in Lady’s Pictorial, Christmas Number 1887, two poems: “Le Panneau” and “Les Ballons.” In a letter to the illustrator John Bernard Partridge, postmarked September 24, 1887, he wrote that the poem “Le Panneau” is “a suggestion for a design for a Japanese panel” and that “the girl under the rose tree is Japanese.” CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…