CHARLOTTE MEW'S "SONG" ("SORROW")

Oh ! Sorrow, Sorrow, scarce I knew.

    Your name, when shaking down the may

In sport, a little child I grew

    Afraid to find you at my play.

I heard it ere I looked at you;

    You sang it softly as you came

Bringing your little boughs of yew

    To fling across my gayest game.

Oh!  Sorrow, Sorrow, was I fair 

    That when I decked me for a bride,

You met me stepping down the stair 

    And led me from my lover’s side?

Was I so dear you could not spare 

    The maid to love, the child to play,

But coming always unaware, 

    Must bid and beckon me away?

Oh! Sorrow, Sorrow is my bed

    So wide and warm that you must lie

Upon it; toss your weary head

    And stir my slumber with your sigh?

I left my love at your behest,

    I waved your little boughs of yew,

But Sorrow, Sorrow let me rest,

    For oh! I cannot sleep with you!

Sorrow -- David Bowie (from Pin-Ups) (Link)

Paintings by Algernon Newton (1880-1968) :

A. Summer Afternoon Over Bayswater

B. Evening Sky Over Church Street

C. Canal Scene, Maida Vale

D. In Kensington

True Dat

   Yet, one ‘can' also apply the proposition to itself and try to depict it in its turn.


    One ‘can’ do that,  just as one can walk on one’s hands and stand on one’s head , though this is contrary to the ‘grammar,” as it were , of heads, hands and feet.


    We ‘can’  of course do such a thing by way of experiment, to see what happens, and the result may be interesting for some specialized branch of knowledge.  But what we must not do is to generalize the result and derive from it new rules of grammar about those modes of behavior.  Yet this is precisely what is involved in the attempt to evaluate such an experiment philosophically.  

 

Text:  Paul Engelmann, Letters from Ludwig Wittgenstein,  Oxford, Basil Blackwell, 1957, p.  102.


Paintings by Eliot Hodgkin.  Top:  Two Large Flints, 1963.  Bottom: Four Flints, 1939.


Dreams: The Kinks (Link).

FASCISM STARTS HERE

The paranoid great movie queen

Sits idly fully armed

The powder and mascara there

A warning light for charm

We see her every movie night

The strong against the weak

The lines come out and struggle with

The empty voice that speaks 

Her heart is oh so tired now

Of kindnesses gone by

Like broken glasses in a drain

Gone down but not well spent

The road from Barbary to here

She sold then stole right back

The vanity, insanity her hungry heart forgave

The fading bride’s dull beauty grows

Just begging to be seen

Beneath the magic lights that reach from

Barbary to here

Her schoolhouse mind has windows now

Where handsome creatures come to watch

The anaesthetic wearing off 

Antarctica starts here

John Cale -- Antarctica Starts Here (Link) 

Images:  (1)  Frederick Bailey Deeming (1853-92); (2)  Walter Richard Sickert, Ennui (1917-18); (3)  Eric Ravilious, Persephone pattern for Wedgewood (ca. 1950); (4)  Eric Ravilious, The Wilmington Giant (1939).