Glimpses

I made a plain cake with tinned pears in it on Friday night to take to dinner with my parents. All the pears sank into the middle of the cake! It tasted fine but I had actually hoped they would perch on top and look pretty like some sort of swish tarte tartin in a French bakery... I tried again on Sunday with tinned peaches and I was quite pleased.

I am reading a lot of Romantic poetry at the moment while researching my novel-in-progress and in doing so I stumbled across the film about John Keats which was made a couple of years ago, Bright Star. I love this scene, with a room full of butterflies. What a lovely notion.



We're having something of an Indian Summer here at the moment. Summer proper really seemed to have died away - I was putting extra blankets on the bed and getting the jumpers out of mothballs - and yet we're now having a spell of temperatures hovering around 30 degrees (celsius).

Ode to Autumn 2

Burne-Jones, The Seasons ~ Autumn

Having lately become addicted to Aputsiaq's beautiful site, A Polar Bear's Tale (http://polarbearstale.blogspot.com/), I thought I would continue my homage to Autumn with a little bit of art and a little bit of music.

Millais - Autumn

Such a beautiful meditative season.

If you could choose a piece of music to suit your favourite season what would it be? Or perhaps a poem?

To Autumn ~

John Keats

Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,

Close bosom-friend of the maturing sun;

Conspiring with him how to load and bless

With fruit the vines that round the thatch-eves run;

To bend with apples the moss'd cottage-trees,

And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;

To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells

With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,

And still more, later flowers for the bees,

Until they think warm days will never cease,

For Summer has o'er-brimm'd their clammy cells.

Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?

Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find

Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,

Thy hair soft-lifted by the winnowing wind;

Or on a half-reap'd furrow sound asleep,

Drows'd with the fume of poppies, while thy hook

Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep

Steady thy laden head across a brook;

Or by a cyder-press, with patient look,

Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.

Where are the songs of Spring? Ay, where are they?

Think not of them, thou hast thy music too,--

While barred clouds bloom the soft-dying day,

And touch the stubble-plains with rosy hue;

Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn

Among the river sallows, borne aloft

Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;

And full-grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn;

Hedge-crickets sing; and now with treble soft

The red-breast whistles from a garden-croft;

And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.

Things I once knew

Keats

In the early 90s, I did a Bachelor of Arts degree with a major study in English Literature. Reams of essays I wrote on Shakespeare and Marlowe, Keats, Shelley and Byron, Tennyson and Arnold. And then I moved onto other things, decided my major study should be history, and that was kind of that. But lately I have been remembering all the beautiful poetry that I read then and I am beginning to rediscover it. The wonderful series, "The Romantics" (hosted by Peter Ackroyd) has helped me to revisit these poems and, actually, to get a bit more out of them than I did twenty years ago! My favourite at the moment is Keats. Do you read poetry? Or is there something you once immersed yourself in and then forgot?