 |
| William Blake The Circumcision ca. 1799-1800 tempera on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
 |
| William Blake Allegory of the Spiritual Condition of Man ca. 1811 tempera on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
 |
| Joseph Mallord William Turner Cassiobury Park - Reaping ca. 1807 oil on panel Tate Gallery, London |
 |
| Marguerite Gérard The Reader before 1806 oil on canvas Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
To Any Reader
As from the house your mother sees
You playing round the garden trees,
As you may see, if you will look
Through the windows of this book,
Another child, far, far away,
And in another garden, play.
But do not think you can at all,
By knocking on the window, call
That child to hear you. He intent
Is all on his play-business bent.
He does not hear; he will not look,
Nor yet be lured out of this book.
For, long ago, the truth to say,
He has grown up and gone away,
And it is but a child of air
That lingers in the garden there.
– Robert Louis Stevenson (1885)
 |
| James Stephanoff Fête champêtre with characters in 16th-century costumes 1812 watercolor British Museum |
 |
| William Dyce The Infant Hercules 1824 oil on canvas National Galleries of Scotland |
 |
| William Bell Scott Académie 1827 drawing National Galleries of Scotland |
Uninvited Reader
She notes in the poem she's reading where the disembodied
voice speaking encounters "an ugly old woman"
just momentarily, in part of a single line, in one
of the many long corridors and sharp turnings of the poem,
so that she's quickly lost to view. That's me, she thinks,
I'm an ugly old woman, I who sit here reading this poem
and its ugly old woman phrase and the poet, when he stumbled
over her splayed, swollen legs, registered her presence,
her inheritance, her baggage of limitations – ugly, old,
woman – but never knew, couldn't, because who could
know, who can stop and know her . . . And this reader keeps
thinking, loving, understanding, trapped in her eye
following the voice on and on while somewhere back in the poem
in a blank passage an ugly old woman sits against a wall.
– A.F. Moritz (2000)
 |
| David Wilkie The Burial of the Scottish Regalia ca. 1835-36 oil on panel Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
 |
| David Wilkie Group of Oriental Figures ca. 1840-41 drawing with watercolor Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
 |
| Charles Howard Hodges Study of Right Hand before 1837 drawing on blue paper Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
 |
| Giuseppe Benaglia Portrait of Leon Batista Alberti (1404-1488) before 1830 engraving National Galleries of Scotland |
 |
| William Linnell Study of the écorché plaster figure known as The Dying Gaul or Smugglerius originally cast by William Pink in 1775 from the corpse of an executed smuggler 1840 drawing Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge |
 |
| Johan Daniël Koelman Study of standing man and left arm ca. 1840 drawing Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam |
 |
| Carlo Ponti Fondaco de' Turchi, Venice ca. 1850 albumen print National Galleries of Scotland |
To the Reader: If You Asked Me
I want you with me, and yet you are the end
of my privacy. Do you see how these rooms
have become public? How we glance to see if –
who? Who did you imagine?
Surely we're not here alone, you and I.
I've been wandering
where the cold tracks of language
collapse into cinders, unburnable trash.
Beyond that, all I can see is the remote cold
of meteors before their avalanches of farewell.
If you asked me what words
a voice like this one says in parting,
I'd say, I'm sweeping an empty factory
toward which I feel neither hostility nor nostalgia.
I'm just a broom, sweeping.
– Chase Twichell (1998)
– poems from the archives of Poetry (Chicago)
(For those who read to the bottom of these things, here is a local tidbit – this present screen marks the 5,000th post since the start of Spencer Alley in 2008)