Tag: love

Elegy, by Brooke Boothby

Cicely Mary Barker - The Blackthorn Fairy
Cicely Mary Barker – The Blackthorn Fairy – from Etsy

In 1796, Brooke Boothby published Sorrows. Sacred to the Memory of Penelope, a collection of poems in memory of his deceased daughter Penelope. The collection consists of 24 numbered sonnets, two longer poems both called Elegy, and a final 12-verse poem called Stanzas. In two previous posts I transcribed 7 of the 24 sonnets. Now I reproduce one of its two elegies. In this sad poem, Boothby longs to die and to have his body deposited by a friend into Penelope’s tomb, so that his ashes can mix with hers. Then, being rid of his body, he imagines his daughter greeting him in heaven, taking him by the hand and crowning him with a wreath of flowers. CONTINUE READING / CONTINUER LA LECTURE…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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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…

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