Friday 1 October 2010

Brains and Beauty


Normally, the posts under this heading are of the living but recently I came across a drawing by D G Rossetti of his sister Christina Georgina. Before I had only ever seen pictures of her as an older woman to whom time had not, through illness and sadness, been very kind. Here is the drawing and it shows her to have been very beautiful as well as the wonderful poetess who gave us poems such as Uphill, Goblin Market, Remember and Last Prayer; not to mention being the very person who started FitzGerald's translation of the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam on its road to fame and so helped to give it to the world.

2 comments:

  1. May I suggest a bloke for the next Brains and Beauty slot; Robert Frost, Red Ed, Brad Pitt? Surely any one of these excellent all-performing, all-singing, all damned good looking candidates has all that it takes to make it (here)?

    Here's a present for you

    A BIRTHDAY

    by: Christina Rossetti (1830-1894)

    Y heart is like a singing bird
    Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;
    My heart is like an apple-tree
    Whose boughs are bent with thick-set fruit;
    My heart is like a rainbow shell
    That paddles in a halcyon sea;
    My heart is gladder than all these,
    Because my love is come to me.

    Raise me a daïs of silk and down;
    Hang it with vair and purple dyes;
    Carve it in doves and pomegranates,
    And peacocks with a hundred eyes;
    Work it in gold and silver grapes,
    In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;
    Because the birthday of my life
    Is come, my love is come to me.

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  2. Yo! You may suggest anything that you like but whose blog is this, anyway? Thanks for the additional poem.

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