Originally posted on Troubador of Verse:
(In the following poem, written today for a dear online friend ~ Louisa Zambrotta of WP’s Words and Music and Stories ~ the revolving rainbows resulted from the refractions of her crystal ring in the unaccustomed ray of sunshine made available by a slight loosening of the poet’s curtains,…
David Brin is an American author of science fiction who was born on 6 October 1950. He has also been both a NASA consultant and a physics professor. He is the author of “The Postman”, a post-apocalyptic dystopian novel on which a film of the same title was based, in 1997. It was produced and… Read More David Brin
➡️ Part 1 Amy Lyon, who was to become Admiral Nelson’s mistress, had a quite remarkable past. While she was a girl, in London, she worked for some time in the Pall Mall “Temple of Health and Hymen”, where she played the part of a sexy young goddess. It was run by the Scottish doctor… Read More Lady Hamilton’s Youth (Part 2)
Queen Elizabeth I was regarded as an icon to worship, whose beauty was a sign of her divine right to rule. As we know, she used ceruse, to make the skin appear paler and smoother and paler (see here) and red lipstick (see here), imitated by many other ladies of her time, whose beauty was… Read More Shakespeare: Sonnet 130
Here is another poem by Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940) , which was published in the Nassau Literary Magazine in April 1918 City Dusk Come out . . . . outTo this inevitable night of mineOh you drinker of new wine,Here’s pageantry . . . . Here’s carnival,Rich dusk, dim streets and allThe whispering of city… Read More Another Poem by Fitzgerald
American novelist, essayist, and short story writer Francis Scott Key Fitzgerald was born in Saint Paul, the capital of Minnesota, on 24 September 1896. “The Great Gatsby”, “Tender is the Night” and “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button”, are some of his best known works, from which various cinematographic transpositions have been obtained. Few people… Read More A Poem by Fitzgerald
🔵 Philip Stanhope, 4th Earl of Chesterfield better-known simply as Lord Chesterfield, British statesman and man of letters., was born on 22 September 1694 🔵 Even though for over thirty years he wrote his son Philip, letters full of advice to transform him into a perfect aristocrat, equipped with the essential skills of culture, taste… Read More Lord Chesterfield – Advice – Autumn
William Carlos Williams (born on 17 September 1883) was an American poet associated with the Imagist movement, who rejected traditional conventions of rhyme and meter, and used brusque, colloquial, and incisive American-English in his poetry. (see here) Here is a poem taken from one of his early collections, “Sour Grapes ” (1921) Arrival And yet… Read More WCW: “Arrival”
At the end of the post “White Lead & Ceruse” I wrote that in Puccini’s Manon Lescaut there is a reference to the “cerussa”. Manon Lescaut is an Italian-language opera in four acts composed by Giacomo Puccini between 1889 and 1892. based on the 1731 novel “Histoire du Chevalier des Grieux, et de Manon Lescaut… Read More Manon Lescaut’s Ceruse
This night’s full moon, the closest to the September equinox, is the Harvest Moon. Our friend Pat (e-Quips) published a lovely poem about it: you can read it here In the Northern Hemisphere the Harvest Moon is astronomically significant because even though the time between one moonrise and the next becomes shorter (typically, the Moon… Read More Harvest Moon 🌕
words and music and stories 