Born today was he who painted this portrait of a young woman with a water jug.
The blue is rich, the geometry superb, and light flowing in from the window a miracle of air and sky.
The painting hangs at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City.
As for the other fellow born on this day, consider this “Next Line, Please” prompt from 2017:
I would like readers to write a line—or a four-line stanza—in the manner of the Keats who gave us such touchstones as “With beaded bubble winking on the brim” (to describe wine) and “the murmurous haunt of flies on summer eves” in “Ode to a Nightingale.” The finale of “Ode on Melancholy” may be the finest single stanza in English poetry since “Lycidas”:
She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shalt taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.
I know, I know: it would be madness to expect to be able to duplicate such sensual intelligence and mastery of sound, meter, and rhyme. But take lines 1-2, 3-4 or 7-8 and see what you can do in translating these observations about Beauty, Pleasure, and Melancholy into your own idiom.
Deadline: Saturday, April 29, 2017, midnight any time zone.
https://theamericanscholar.org/building-on-byron-and-keats/
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Author: The Best American Poetry
