Sonnet 110 and The Kiss

Gustav Klimt
Klimt, The Kiss, 1907
Sonnet 110
WIlliam Shakespeare
Alas! 'tis true I have gone here and there 
And made myself a motley to the view, 
Gor'd mine own thoughts, sold cheap what is most dear,
Made old offences of affections new. 
Most true it is that I have look'd on truth
Askance and strangely: but, by all above, 
These blenches gave my heart another youth, 
And worse essays prov'd thee my best of love. 
Now all is done; have what shall have no end: 
Mine appetite I never more will grind 
On newer proof, to try an older friend, 
A god in love, to whom I am confin'd. 
Then give me welcome, next my heaven the best,
Even to thy pure and most most loving breast. 

Editor's Note: Students were asked to match a poem to a picture. They could do so with or without comment; they could be serious or playful. We will leave it to our dear readers to make the connection.
  • 7:00 AM

Pygmalion and Galatea and Twelfth Night

Jean-Léon Gérôme
Jean-Léon Gérôme, Pygmalion and Galatea, 1890

From Twelfth Night
By William Shakespeare

If music be the food of love, play on;
Give me excess of it, that, surfeiting,
The appetite may sicken, and so die.
That strain again! it had a dying fall:
O, it came o'er my ear like the sweet sound,
That breathes upon a bank of violets,
Stealing and giving odour! Enough; no more:
'Tis not so sweet now as it was before.
O spirit of love! how quick and fresh art thou,
That, notwithstanding thy capacity
Receiveth as the sea, nought enters there,
Of what validity and pitch soe'er,
But falls into abatement and low price,
Even in a minute: so full of shapes is fancy
That it alone is high fantastical.

Editor's Note: Students were asked to match a poem to a picture. They could do so with or without comment; they could be serious or playful, profound or goofy. We will leave it to our dear readers to make their own connections.
  • 7:00 AM

Landscape Near Menton - Midsummer's Night Dream

Emma Krasnopoler

Pierre Auguste Renoir, Landscape Near Menton, 1883

I know a bank where the wild thyme blows,
Where oxlips and the nodding violet grows,
Quite over-canopied with luscious woodbine,
With sweet musk-roses and with eglantine.
--William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, in which Oberon describes the Fairy Queen Titania's bower, where she sleeps.

At first glace, Renoir’s Landscape Near Menton is a calm, picturesque bank, much like Queen Titania’s in Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream. However, much like Midsummer, nothing is really as it seems. The violent brushstrokes give the painting a frenzied sense of movement. Wind whips through the turbulent grasses, flowers bend against their will, even the way the colors seem to crash against each other in a permanent state of agitation. The dark blues, greens, and blacks rebel against their pastel counterparts. This painting lives in polarity, constantly contradicting itself. A typically placid view suddenly transforms into a colossal mess.

And that brings us to Midsummer, the love story gone so wrong, it’s actually right. Midsummer admits that love is tumultuous, chaotic even. Throughout the whole play, Shakespeare mocks the concept of true love. He plays games with the actors and the audience and leaves both groups helpless against his will. The play moves swiftly, but leaves us unsettled. It never progresses, just wavers back and forth for three acts, a whirlwind of plot, until finally Shakespeare gives us the happy ending we were hoping for.  Like Landscape Near Menton, Midsummer is not static. We like to think we know what we are seeing, be it a love story or a landscape, but we probably don’t. I chose Landscape Near Menton because I thought it portrayed Titania’s bower, but it did so much more. The painting is the essence of the play: a pretty picture full of chaos, making you appreciate it so much more once you realize you didn’t understand it at all.

  • 3:09 PM

The Palace at 4 a.m. and Shakespeare Sonnet 30

Giacometti
Alberto Giacometti, Palace at 4 a.m., 1932
My dear friend and mentor Robert Demeritt lies in a hospital struggling with cancer and pain. I want to speak to him. I want to tell him bad jokes from the Borscht Belt. I want to read to him passages from Wallace Stegner's The Angle of Repose, which he gave me several years ago. I want to gripe about my day. I want him to explain the intricacies of the Chinese language to me, tell me that story again about cutting high school and running into his dad at a burlesque theatre. I want him to, as he always does about five minutes after setting foot into his home, offer me the good scotch. And then we will talk and laugh. 

Alberto Giacometti constructed Palace at 4 a.m. in 1932, and at one point he called it, "a fragile palace of matchsticks." While the structure's outlines remain set, even sturdy, the interior openness strikes me as particularly isolated. Some may take that as speaking to the distance that we feel from each other, but I do not. Instead the sculpture contains its figures, in fact even celebrates their enclosure. The human condition may be frail, Giacometti tells us, but we do share that fragility with each other. 

In his novel So Long, See You Tomorrow, William Maxwell uses Giacometti's sculpture as a controlling metaphor for his protagonist (really Maxwell) and his feelings towards his childhood and an old friend, focussing particularly on the two boys climbing and playing on a still-being-framed house. But Maxwell's novel goes so much deeper, exploring how we remember and what that memory - whether real or created - means. He writes: 

"What we, or at any rate what I, refer to confidently as memory - meaning a moment, a scene, a fact that has been subjected to a fixative and thereby rescued from oblivion - is really a form of storytelling that goes on continually in the mind and often changes with the telling.  Too many conflicting emotional interests are involved for life ever to be wholly acceptable, and possibly it is the work of the storyteller to rearrange things so that they conform to this end.  In any case, in talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw."

The passage proffers a hard truth in pillow-soft rhythms. We all may change our stories from time to time; we all may feel sorry for ourselves because something doesn't go as we envisioned. However, we also get to live in that palace of matchsticks with others. And that abiding friendship helps salve our pains. 

As I sit here with the house quiet, worried about my friend, I am somewhat comforted by Bob's earlier admission of being at peace with what he faces. Bob and I love words, and those words often bring us to the Bard, who in Sonnet 30 wrote:

When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night,
And weep afresh love's long since cancell'd woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanish'd sight:
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone,
And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er
The sad account of fore-bemoaned moan,
Which I new pay as if not paid before.
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.

My dear friend and mentor Bob lies in a hospital bed, but I shall not moan this sad account. I shall be happy he's my dear friend. 

  • 11:23 PM