Unreconciled

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of painter Gaspard Rigaud
 (younger brother of Hyacinthe)
ca. 1690
oil on canvas
Musée Hyacinthe Rigaud, Perpignan

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Henri-Louis de La Tour d'Auvergne, comte d'Evreux
1703
oil on canvas
Museumslandschaft Hessen Kassel

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of Jean Le Juge with Wife and Daughter
1699
oil on canvas
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Hyacinthe Rigaud
Portrait of bronze-founder Balthasar Keller
1685
oil on canvas
Kunsthaus Zürich

Francis Frith
Concert Hall, Baden-Baden
ca. 1865
albumen silver print
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, New York

Francis Frith
Drummond Castle Avenue, Crieff
ca. 1860
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Francis Frith
Rock Temple, Petra
ca. 1857-60
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Francis Frith
The Great Temple, Philae
ca. 1856-60
albumen silver print
National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa

Friedrich von Amerling
Portrait of Amelie Julie Sidonie Marie de Questiaux
ca. 1885
oil on canvas
(painted at age 82, evoking fashions of the artist's youth) 
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Friedrich von Amerling
Portrait of Elise Kreuzberger
1837
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Friedrich von Amerling
Self Portrait
ca. 1830-40
watercolor on paper
Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna

Friedrich von Amerling
Young Woman with Straw Hat
1835
oil on canvas
Liechtenstein Museum, Vienna

Rockwell Kent
Let me look back upon thee, O thou Wall
(Shakespeare's Timon of Athens)
1936
lithograph
Dallas Museum of Art

Rockwell Kent
Beowulf and the Dragon
1931
lithograph
Loeb Art Center, Vassar College,
Poughkeepsie, New York

Rockwell Kent
The Old Bookshop
ca. 1948
linocut
North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh

Rockwell Kent
Ex Libris
ca. 1930
wood-engraving
Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

from Part One of The Age of Anxiety 

Rosetta said:

     Lies and lethargies police the world
     In its periods of peace. What pain taught
     Is soon forgotten; we celebrate

     What ought to happen as if it were done,
     Are blinded by our boasts. Then back they come,

     The fears that we fear. We fall asleep
     Only to meet the idiot children of
     Our revels and wrongs; farouche they appear,
     Reluctant look-behinds, loitering through
     The mooning gate, menacing or smiling,
     Nocturnal trivia, torts and dramas,
     Wrecks, arrivals, rose-bushes, armies,

     Leopards and laughs, alarming growths of 

     Moulds and monsters on memories stuffed
     With dead men's doodles, dossiers written
     In lost lingos, too long an account
     To take out in trade, no time either, 
     Since we wake up. We are warm, our active

     Universe is young; yet we shiver

     For athwart our thinking the threat looms,

     Huge and awful as the hump of Saturn
     Over modern Mimas, of more deaths

     And worse wars, a winter of distaste

     To last a lifetime. Our lips are dry, our

     Knees numb; the enormous disappointment
     With a smiling sigh softly flings her

     Indolent apron over our lives

     And sits down on our day. Damning us,

     On our present purpose the past weighs
     Heavy as alps, for the absent are never 
     Mislaid or lost: as lawyers define
     The grammar of our grief, their ghosts rise,

     Hanged or headless, hosts who disputed

     With good governors, their guilty flesh

     Racked and raving but unreconciled,

     The punished people to pass sentence
     On the jolly and just; and, joining these

     Come worse warlocks, the wailing infants
     Who know now they will never be born,

     Refused a future. Our failings give
     Their resentment seizin; Our Zion is

     A doomed Sodom dancing its heart out
     To treacly tunes, a tired Gomorrah

     Infatuated with her former self
     Whose dear dreams though they dominate still

     Are formal facts which refresh no more. 

– W.H. Auden (1944-46)