Signe Maene

‘Often when I imagine you,
your wholeness cascades into many shapes.
You run like a herd of luminous deer,
and I am dark;
I am forest.’ ~ Rainer Maria Rilke. #BookWormSat

Yes, it is. And it can be read here: sites.pitt.edu/~dash/grimm0...

Yup. All's well that ends with the tiger and lady being happy.

Illustration of a woman walking beside a lion. Two more lions walk behind them.

'There was great joy when she arrived, for they all believed that she had been torn to pieces by the lion, and was no longer alive. But she told them what a handsome husband she had, and how well off she was.'
-The Singing, Springing Lark, Brothers Grimm.

🎨Arthur Rackham
#BookWormSat

Painting title: A Distinguished Member of the Humane Society. Painting of a dog. Birds and sea in the far background.

'A snarl! A scruffle round the room!
A sense that Death is drawing near!'
-To a Lady with an Unruly and Ill-mannered Dog Who Bit several Persons of Importance, Sir Walter Raleigh.

@signemaene.com and unruly dogs everywhere welcome you to #BookWormSat.

🎨Edwin Landseer

“Don Giovanni a cenar teco
m'invitasti e son venuto!”

(Don Giovanni, you invited me to dinner
and I have come!)

(Lorenzo Da Ponte / Mozart)

🎨 Otto Fikentscher (1880)

#phantomsfriday

🌷❤️‍🔥🌷"Wrong will be right, when Aslan comes in sight,
At the sound of his roar, sorrows will be no more,
When he bares his teeth, winter meets its death,
And when he shakes his mane, we shall have spring again."

📖C.S. Lewis - The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe.
#BookWormSat

Moor Hawk is a watercolour painting by Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775–1851), created around 1816. It is part of The Farnley Book of Birds, a series of ornithological studies Turner produced while visiting his friend Walter Fawkes

The sun is behind me.
Nothing has changed since I began.
My eye has permitted no change.
I am going to keep things like this.

Hawk Roosting
Ted Hughes 1960

🖼️ Turner
#BookWormSat

An old, old being amidst beeches, beasts and barrows in the New Forest...

Our 7th #darkspringtide tale brings us to Hampshire during the Wars of the Roses where we meet our Lady of the Stags, which makes this a proper #bookwormsat story today!

Read it below.

🎨 Warwick Goble

A white cat playing with a coloured ball with a long red string. A black cat lies nearby. Background is silver.

'Playing cats' - Takahashi Hiroaki, ca. 1930.
#Caturday #JapaneseArt

Damme! But, unfortunately, the folktale doesn't mention where exactly.

Painting of a woman with red hair seated. She wears a green dress on which are red roses. Dark background with more roses and yellowish sky.

'The breezes pause and die,
Letting the rose-leaves fall:
But the solemn oak-tree sigheth,
Thick-leaved, ambrosial,
With an ancient melody
Of an inward agony'
- Lord Tennyson

🎨Thomas Edwin Mostyn

“I am unbody’d by thy books, and thee,
and in thy papers finde my extasie.”

Henry Cornelius Agrippa (1531)

🎨 Giuseppe Arcimboldo “The Librarian” (c 1570)

#WorldBookDay #booksky

Painting of a woman with black hair and wearing a purple dress stroking a leopard between the grass and purple flowers. More big cats behind her.

The Enchantress, Arthur Wardle (1864–1949).

Painting of a swamp

According to a Flemish folktale, a creek is haunted by a water devil who drowns people. There's also the ghost of an enchantress, and it was whispered that if she raised her hand above the water, all the animals in the area would die.

🎨Gustav Klimt
#PhantomsFriday

“Mythic Uther's deeply-wounded son”

(Illustration for "The Palace of Art" in “Tennyson's Poems”, New York, 1903)

🎨 after Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1857)

#booksky #bookillustration

🖤

In 2013 archaeologists uncovered the skeleton of a large dog at Leiston Abbey- locals claimed it as the remains of Black Shuck. However, scientific analysis indicated the skeleton belonged to an elderly male farm dog from the 18th century, carefully buried rather than feared… 🐾
#PhantomsFriday

Painting of Abelard visiting his wife, Héloïse in the Abbey of the Paraclete where she is abbess. They're sitting outside on a bench.

Abelard and Héloïse at the Paraclete, Vittorio Calegari (1893).

On the 6th of March, a composer returns to his home town. Without melodies, but a memory. Of the kind that haunts you.

Quite literally.

Our 6th #darkspringtide tale is a ghost story for #phantomsfriday.

Read it below.

🎨 Alphonse Inoue

'The soldier's memorial' Lithograph, hand colored Published by Currier & Ives, New York, c. 1863. A woman in black Victorian dress mourning at tomb of Civil War soldier.

Dear as remember'd kisses after death,
And sweet as those by hopeless fancy feign'd
On lips that are for others; deep as love,
Deep as first love, and wild with all regret;
O Death in Life, the days that are no more!

– Alfred Tennyson, 'Tears, Idle Tears' 1847

#booksky #MorbidMarch

Detail from Landseer’s Man Proposes, God Disposes, 1864. A dark scene of one of two polar bears in the remains of the Franklin expedition. Arctic scene of fallen mast with ice and polar bear with a rib in his mouth. Painting. 

‘He once told me about polar bears - what solitary animals they are.’…
'Then what do polar bears exist for?’
‘Then what do we exist for?’ ~ Haruki Murakami.

Tomorrow for #BookWormSat we celebrate Landseer’s birthday with literature’s horses, dogs, deer, falcons and lions. Oh, and Polar Bears.

Picture of the flowers on a pearl tree blooming.

A most welcome sign of spring approaching.

Painting title: Discovering Daisies. A woman with red hair admiring daisies in a grassy field.

'Bright flower! whose home is everywhere
Bold in maternal nature's care
And all the long year through the heir
Of joy or sorrow,
Methinks that there abides in thee
Some concord with humanity,
Given to no other flower I see
The forest through.'
-Wordsworth

🎨Henry John Stock

“The writer has felt and experienced the wonder of things—the beauty of the sun and the hieroglyphic mystery of the figures that the birds make in the air—and he feels, quite rightly, that to describe wonders one must suggest wonder by words.”

(A. Machen “Hieroglyphics”)

🎨 Oorchach

#wyrdwednesday

Painting of a nun from a window gazing outside. Birds.

Far Away Thoughts, Eugene de Blaas (1843 -1931).

Artwork of a lady stroking a Tiger, adorned with a flower garland. Forest background.

Lady and the Tiger, Frederick Stuart Church (1842–1924).

Today is St Piran's Day, feast day of the patron of tin miners and of Cornwall herself.

So, we go out west and hear a story of Jan Tregeagle, Cornwall’s own Faust, who rose from doing penance for his sins in Dozmary Pool, with hellhounds on his trail.

Read our 5th #darkspringtide below

🎨 Minns

I looked with amazement at the absurd hieroglyphics upon the paper.

"Why, Holmes, it is a child's drawing," I cried.

The Adventure of the Dancing Men
Arthur Conan Doyle
#WyrdWednesday

Yes. I feel like I shall have to go looking for ghost deer and hopefully solve that mystery!