TOM CLARK: Ron Padgett: On Fire / Jane Cooper: Vermont, 1974 / Jack Delano: At the Vermont State Fair, 1941 / In the Vale

Bliss Pond, Calais, Vermont | by krisknow

Bliss Pond, Calais, Vermont: photo by krisknow, 10 October 2014

wood nettle 1, Calais, Vermont. Wood nettle, Laportea canadensis. You can see the flowers underneath. It does sting, but the sting goes aaway in 10-20 Minutes.: photo by Charles Wohlers, 6 July 2015

Ron Padgett: On Fire

The afternoon light across the pond

is doing a good job today, the sky

behind them a gray smudge

with a trace of puffery

but the trees stand out in perfect clarity

and here I am, and if I weren’t

I wouldn’t know the difference,

just as, say, Shelley wouldn’t.

“O sky and song entwinèd in a wild embrace

and hid asleep inside the human race,”

he might have said.

It’s good to think of Shelley

as a person and not

the great Romantic poet

who died at thirty tragically,

Percy a young man gifted and serious

with a big heart and an open mind

who wrote some mediocre poems

and a few truly great ones.

Every day I read a few and try

to see him writing them, but

all I get is a dim view of the back

of a man at a table in a chilly room in Italy,

his arm moving slightly,

and in the flickering candlelight a woman

with a sleeping baby in her arms.

From time to time the baby says “Umph”

and another sheet of paper flutters down

with flowing glistening words in black.

Shelley is on fire tonight.

Vermont2016-125 [Calais, Vermont): photo by krisknow, 5 October 2016

fournier, louis edouard - The Funeral of Shelley | by Amber Tree

Louis Edouard Fournier (Frankrijk, 1857-1917) -- The Funeral of Shelley: photo by Amber Tree, 9 May 2015

Percy Bysshe Shelley: illustration by Culture Club, 2015

Autumn Evening, Calais, Vermont | by Artistic Approach Photography

Autumn Evening, Calais, Vermont: photo by Cynthia Davis, 10 October 2015

Calais, Vermont: photo by krisknow, 3 October 2015

Vermont2016-143 [Calais, Vermont): photo by krisknow, 5 October 2016

Vermont2016-49 [Calais, Vermont): photo by krisknow, 3 October 2016

Vermont2016-119 [Calais, Vermont): photo by krisknow, 5 October 2016

Calais, Vermont: photo by krisknow, 2 October 2014

Jane Cooper: Vermont, 1974

This area Is known as Gay Hill near Stockbridge, Vermont. The farm was originally built in the 1800's by Ephraim Twitchell, the famous Vermont bridge builder.: photo by Jane Cooper for the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA Project, March 1974 (U. S. National Archives)

Early morning mist from a river carpets the length of the East Randolph, Vermont, valley: photo by Jane Cooper for the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA Project, May 1974 (U. S. National Archives)

The village of East Randolph, Vermont, where buildings only change with the weight of years and heavy snows, is seen shortly after the dawn mist has risen: photo by Jane Cooper for the Environmental Protection Agency's DOCUMERICA Project, May 1974 (U. S. National Archives)

Jack Delano: At the Vermont State Fair, 1941

Barker at the grounds of the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

On the ferris wheel at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

View of the grounds of the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

At the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

At the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

"Backstage" at the "girlie" show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Poster for a side show at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

Side shows at the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress

Barker at the grounds of the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsac/1a33000/1a33900/1a33922v.jpg

Barker at the grounds of the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

At the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsac/1a33000/1a33900/1a33921v.jpg

At the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

http://lcweb2.loc.gov/service/pnp/fsac/1a33000/1a33900/1a33924v.jpg

At the Vermont state fair, Rutland: photo by Jack Delano, September 1941 (Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)

In the Vale

The Vale: Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot (1796-1875), 1855-60, oil on wood, 35 x 53 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris)
There is a cool pleasure in the very sound of vale. The English word is of the happiest chance.
-- John Keats, notes on Paradise Lost

The shadow beneath the trees, the cool dappled
Days, marking time passing. Light and shade
No longer so easy to keep apart, the dark
Parts invading the bright parts making gray
This moment, always just a moment away
From that moment, the moments bleeding
Into one another until at last they stop.

Fontainebleau, the Bas Breau Road: Camille Corot (1796-1875), c. 1830-35, oil on canvas (private collection)

Landscape at Castiglioncello: Claudio Abbati (1836-1868), 1863, oil on canvas, 10 x30 cm (Galleria dell'Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence)

Landscape at Castiglioncello: Claudio Abbati (1836-1838), 1863, oil on canvas, 10 x30 cm (Galleria dell'Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence)

Country Road with Cypresses: Claudio Abbati (1836-1868), c. 1860, oil on canvas, 28 x37 cm (Galleria dell'Arte Moderna, Palazzo Pitti, Florence)

5 comments:

Sandra23 April 2017 at 06:07
el paraíso perdido siempre nos espera...en la belleza que algunos saber ver !
TC23 April 2017 at 07:23
Los afortunados!
TC23 April 2017 at 07:28
We were so sure RP was thinking about the postmortem ignition issues with Shelley's heart that we went ahead and showed The Slow Burn on The Beach, gruesome scene that it was -- Oh, those Romantics!

But RP is not THAT kind of person, it turns out.

Quoting from Fiona MacCarthy: Byron: Life and Legend:

Shelley's body had been buried... on the beach near Massa. The markings were unclear, and it took about an hour to locate it, by which time Byron and Leigh Hunt had arrived from Pisa, accompanied by two mounted dragoons and four foot soldiers to keep prospective sightseers at bay. The corpse was by then putrid and stinking. Shelley's outer garments were now black. His flesh was of a dingy blue. [Edward] Trelawny started the fire under Shelley's body and, carried away by the grandeur of the scene, offered up his own incantations. 'I restore to nature through fire and the elements of which this man is composed, earth, air, water; everything is changed, but not annihilated; he is now a portion of that which he worshipped.' Byron, standing beside him, said: 'I knew you were a Pagan, not that you were a Pagan Priest; you do it very well.'

Byron requested that Trelawney should keep Shelley's skull for him, as a memento. Trelawny, remembering that Byron had had a Newstead skull transformed into a drinking cup, had apparently been anxious that Shelley's skull 'should not be so profaned'. In fact the skull disintegrated as Trelawny attempted to remove it from the pyre: 'it broke into pieces -- it was unusually thin and strikingly small.'

There was further controversy over Shelley's heart, which again was particularly small and, in Byron's words, 'would not take the flame'. Trelawney's recollections of the scene provide more details: the heart 'although bedded in fire -- would not burn'. They waited an hour, continually adding fuel, until 'it becoming late we gave over by mutual conviction of its being unavailing -- all exclaiming it will not burn -- there was a bright flame round it occasioned by the moisture still flowing from it -- and on removing the furnace nearer to the sea to immerse the iron I took the heart in my hand to examine it -- after sprinkling it with water: yet it was still so hot as to burn my hand badly and a quantity of this fluid still flowed from it.'

Byron's presence at this agonising scene, which soon came to be regarded as a key moment in Romanticism, has been assumed. In Louis-Edouard Fournier's mid-nineteenth-century oil painting The Cremation of Shelley's Body, Byron is in the forefront of the mourners as a fully clothed, immaculately visaged Shelley is laid out on a bier of firewood on the beach... But in fact during the later stages of the funeral, while the heart of Shelley failed to conflagrate, Byron was almost certainly absent, swimming far out to sea...

While Byron was out of sight, swimming off towards the Bolivar which lay at anchor in the bay, Leigh Hunt had begged from Trelawney Shelley's by now heat-blackened heart. Byron decided, after his return, that Shelley's heart by rights belonged to Mary. Hunt, the next day, wrote indignantly to her: 'With regard to Ld B. he has no right to bestow the heart, & I am sure pretends to none. If he told you that you should have it, it could only have been from his thinking I could more easily part with it than I can.' However Hunt was finally shamed into giving it to Mary. When she died, the heart, by then dry and shrunken, was found in a copy of Adonais.
Skip Fox23 April 2017 at 08:00
"Until at last they stop." Indeed. Both the finality and the luminous interval between .
TC23 April 2017 at 16:54
Thanks, Skip.

The interval perhaps grows to seem more luminous the shorter it gets.

Sunday, 23 April 2017

Ron Padgett: On Fire / Jane Cooper: Vermont, 1974 / Jack Delano: At the Vermont State Fair, 1941 / In the Vale

5 comments: