The Lovers’ Chronicle 19 October – rememberin’ you; reprise – verse by Leigh Hunt – art by Theodoros Vryzakis & Umberto Boccioni

Dear Zazie,  Here is today’s Lovers’ Chronicle from Mac Tag dedicated to his muse.  Who are you rememberin’?  Rhett

The Lover’s Chronicle

Dear Muse,

you know i have a weakness
for hard rock and metal bands,
and power ballads in particular,
so you know the song i picked;
“Woke up to the sound of pouring rain”
hell yeah, Skid Row baby
but again we are where the theme
does not match where we are
“Right, don’t need to remember each other”
but we can take a moment
to remember
how far we have come
and be grateful,
take it away
“Remember yesterday walking hand in hand
Love letters in the sand I remember you”

© copyright 2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

a recollectin’ mood i s’pose, which way; memories a part of the journey that began in one of the actual middle of nowhere places, windy, dry, big skies, nights filled with stars, long sunrises and sunsets, mostly flat but does have mesas and canyons, and little chance of a tree fallin’ on anything cuz there ain’t very many, figured this out; you can take the boy out of the High Plains but you cannot take the High Plains out of the boy

© copyright 2022.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

have no need of that
as you are lyin’ near
perhaps a younger self,
now that would be
fascinatin’

he was as backwards
and ignorant as any
will give some credit
to his readin’ habits,
his love of music
and movies

want to shout across the decades;
pick up a pencil and a brush, then
calmly say, remember this,
you can bench press your way
out of some situations
but you can write or draw
your way out of anything

© copyright 2021.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

Pale Love, Pale Rider

of course i knew
there would be time
for what i sought and what
i could imagine would come

how was i to know
what i thought, when
i thought back then

there is time,
yet it grows short,
once with becomes,
arrivin’ unannounced

then i hear the sound
of you sleepin’ near me

© copyright 2020 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

several friends come to mind
when this topic comes up

i am not the best at keepin’
up with those out of sight
so let this be an apology
for that, not a good excuse,
but i git lost in my day to day
and assumptions that
preclude action

to all of you
i have neglected
i remember you

© copyright 2019.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

reminded on this day of a line
from “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
after Ichabod Crane disappears…
“As he was a bachelor,
and in nobody’s debt,
nobody troubled their head
about him anymore.”

no, not into pity
and i promise
if you offer sympathy
i will come through this page
and have a fit

only layin’ down real feelin’s
not sure rememberin’ matters

© copyright 2018.2023 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

for Tamela

i walked into that room
not knowin’ i was walkin’
into a life changin’ moment

you stood up from the chair
you were sittin’ in,
and smiled
and i was slayed

i may git weary,
i sure git sad,
and there is much
that i have missed

but i have this

i met you

© copyright 2017 mac tag/cowboy coleridge all rights reserved

funny thing about time
sometimes it brings relief
sometimes, it enhances the pain
to say that i miss you
is to not say enough

to say that i want you
is the only truth i know

all that was
remains heaped
in my memories
and old dreams abide

so that now
in solitude
that which reigns…
so rememberin’ you

i stand stricken, often,
so rememberin’ you

© copyright 2016 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Deja vu, one more
random rendezvous
Fallin’ in love from
bar light to first light
Always lookin’ for
clues, for different views

© copyright 2015 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

From sunup to
Sundown and in
My dreams. Matters
Not where I ride
Or roam; there is
But one constant:
You on my mind
And in my heart

© copyright 2014 mac tag/cowboy Coleridge all rights reserved

Today is the birthday of Leigh Hunt (James Henry Leigh Hunt; Southgate, London 19 October 1784 – 28 August 1859 Putney, London); essayist, poet, and writer.

Hunt co-founded The Examiner, a leading intellectual journal expounding radical principles. He was the centre of the Hampstead-based group that included William Hazlitt and Charles Lamb, known as the “Hunt circle”. Hunt also introduced John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, Robert Browning and Alfred Tennyson to the public.

Perhaps best remembered for being sentenced to prison for two years on charges of libel against the Prince Regent (1813–1815).

Hunt’s presence at Shelley’s funeral on the beach near Viareggio was immortalised in the painting by Louis Édouard Fournier. Hunt inspired aspects of the Harold Skimpole character in Charles Dickens’ novel Bleak House.

In 1809, Hunt married Marianne Kent. Marianne, in ill health for most of her life, died 26 January 1857, aged sixty-nine.  Hunt made little mention of his family in his autobiography.  Marianne’s sister, Elizabeth Kent (Hunt’s sister-in-law), became his amanuensis.

Hunt’s financial affairs were in confusion, and only Percy Bysshe Shelley‘s generosity saved him from ruin.  In return he showed sympathy to Shelley during the latter’s domestic distresses, and defended him in the Examiner.  He introduced Keats to Shelley and wrote a very generous appreciation of him in the Indicator.

Quotes

• Jenny kissed me when we met,
  Jumping from the chair she sat in;
  Time, you thief, who love to get
  Sweets into your list, put that in.
  Say I’m weary, say I’m sad,
  Say that health and wealth have missed me;
  Say I’m growing old, but add
  Jenny kissed me.
  • “Jenny Kissed Me”, in The Monthly Chronicle (November 1838)
• Oh for a seat in some poetic nook,
  Just hid with trees and sparkling with a brook!
  • Politics and Poetics
• The two divinest things this world has got,
  A lovely woman in a rural spot!
  • Poem The Story of Rimini, iii, 257
• With spots of sunny openings, and with nooks
  To lie and read in, sloping into brooks.
  • The Story of Rimini
• She dropped her glove, to prove his love, then looked at him and smiled;
  He bowed, and in a moment leaped among the lions wild:
  The leap was quick, return was quick, he has regained his place,
  Then threw the glove, but not with love, right in the lady’s face.
  “By God!” said Francis, “rightly done!” and he rose from where he sat:
  “No love,” quoth he, “but vanity, sets love a task like that.”
  • The Glove and the Lions
• Stolen sweets are always sweeter,
  Stolen kisses much completer,
  Stolen looks are nice in chapels,
  Stolen, stolen, be your apples.
  • Song of Fairies Robbing an Orchard.
  • Confer Colley Cibber: “Stolen sweets are best.”

• It flows through old hushed Egypt and its sands,
  Like some grave mighty thought threading a dream,
  And times and things, as in that vision, seem
  Keeping along it their eternal stands.
  • A Thought of the Nile
• and then we wake,
  And hear the fruitful stream lapsing along
  Twixt villages, and think how we shall take
  Our own calm journey on for human sake.
  • A Thought of the Nile
• That there is pain and evil, is no rule
  That I should make it greater, like a fool.
  • A Thought or Two on Reading Pomfret’s “Choice”, in The Poetical Works of Leigh Hunt, London: Edward Moxon, 1846, p. 147.

Theodoros Vryzakis

Today is the birthday of Theodoros Vryzakis (Thebes; 19 October 1819- 6 December 1878 Munich); painter, known mostly for his historical scenes.  He was one of the founders of the “Munich School”, composed of Greek artists who had studied in that city.

He grew up during the years of the Greek War of Independence. His father was hanged by the Ottoman Army near the very beginning of the war, in 1821, and he had to flee with his mother into the mountains.

By 1832, he was in an orphanage, where his artistic talent was discovered by Friedrich Thiersch, a scholar who had played a significant role in making a Bavarian prince (Otto) the new King of Greece. Thiersch took him to Munich, where he attended the “Panhellenion”, a school for orphans of the Greek revolution, founded by King Ludwig I. After completing his studies, he returned to Greece and enrolled at the Athens School of Fine Arts.

Gallery 

Umberto Boccioni

Today is the birthday of Umberto Boccioni (Reggio Calabria, Italy 19 October 1882 – 17 August 1916 Verona); painter and sculptor.  He helped shape the revolutionary aesthetic of the Futurism movement as one of its principal figures.  Despite his short life, his approach to the dynamism of form and the deconstruction of solid mass guided artists long after his death.  His works are held by many public art museums, and in 1988 the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York organized a major retrospective of 100 pieces.

Gallery 

And on this day in 1950, poet Edna St. Vincent Millay died at her home, Steepltop, in Austerlitz, New York.  In my opinion she wrote some of the best sonnets of the century.  She was also well known for her affairs with both men and women.  In 1923 she married Eugen Jan Boissevain (1880–1949), the widower of the labor lawyer and war correspondent Inez Milholland, a political icon Millay had met during her time at Vassar.  Both Millay and Boissevain had other lovers throughout their twenty-six-year marriage.  Millay’s most significant such relationship during this time was with the poet George Dillon for whom she wrote a number of her sonnets.  Milly and Dillon collaborated on translations from Charles Baudelaire‘s Les Fleurs du Mal in 1936.  Of course, the Poem of the Day is a Sonnet from Millay.  It is typically called “Sonnet No. 2: Time does not bring relief; you all have lied.”  I changed him/his to her and I call it:

Rememberin’ Her

Time does not bring relief; you all have lied
Who told me time would ease me of my pain!
I miss her in the weeping of the rain;
I want her at the shrinking of the tide;
The old snows melt from every mountain-side,
And last year’s leaves are smoke in every lane;
But last year’s bitter loving must remain
Heaped on my heart, and my old thoughts abide

There are a hundred places where I fear
To go,— so with her memory they brim
And entering with relief some quiet place
Where never fell her foot or shone her face
I say, “There is no memory of her here!”
And so stand stricken, so remembering her!

The Song of the Day is “Remembering” by Avishai Cohen Trio.

I stand stricken, often, so rememberin’ you.

Mac Tag