I Will Go Into A Hare : 無料・フリー素材/写真
I Will Go Into A Hare / Giles Watson's poetry and prose
| ライセンス | クリエイティブ・コモンズ 表示-継承 2.1 |
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| 説明 | Among my first experiments in watercolour illustrations for poems... The title of the painting comes from Isobel Gowdie, who confessed at her trial for witchcraft that she had sometimes transformed herself into a hare.THE LUNATICTwenty-seven years ago, Before the stars fell - all but two -I killed a running hare.The ground was bare where she bled;The blood made gritted ballsOn the powdered dirt,Her head swung, when ILugged her by her lucky feet,Her eyes glazed as though dead:But now I know, and knowingStrikes me blind. I have seen comets,And the fall of all mankind.She was no common hare,But a being of infinite power.I cower to relate.Now, the Devil has converseWith my unfamiliar spirits.He is rat-sized and brown,My manacles are his running wheel;My hair and beard, his nest,And I am haunted by white haresIn my cell at night. No oneWill believe me. The moonHas blanched my fate.She was no common hare,But a being of infinite power.I cower to relate.Source material: John Monro, a eighteenth century doctor and a specialist in treating the mentally ill, ran the Bethlehem Hospital, a “lunatic asylum” better known as Bedlam from 1728 to 1853. In his journal, he records the case of a Mr Walker, who “told me that the Devil left him this morning about four o’clock that he had been with him seven years, was brown and of a size between a mouse and a rat. He inform’d me that there were but two starrs left, the rest having fallen when he had seen them; ...that about 27 years ago he saw the fall of all mankind, in company with a very good man, who keeps the Sun Tavern in Westminster, that many years ago he kill’d a hare which he did not think to be a common hare but was something he knew not of what infinite power.” See Jonathan Andrews and Andrew Scull, Customers and Patrons of the Mad-Trade: the Management of Lunacy in Eighteenth-Century London, California, 2003.THE SILVER COINTurn, in your pocket,A crooked silver coin,For the moon hangs redOpposite the setting sunOn a wide horizon.Turn, in your pocket,A crooked silver coin.The hare leaps sidewaysFrom her form, her earsBlack against the moon.Turn, in your pocket,A crooked silver coin.The hare in flight is fleet.Through russet, fading lightShe strikes out for the moon.Source material: A variety of cultures, both eastern and western, have legends about the hare in the moon. In the west, there are connections between these legends and witchcraft, since witches were commonly thought to shape-shift into hares. Silver coins represent the moon, as gold coins represent the sun, and it is commonly thought that one should turn the silver over in one’s pocket when either seeing a new moon or a full moon. Likewise, it was often thought that a witch-hare could only be shot if the gun was loaded with a silver coin, and preferably a crooked sixpence. As John Layard, The Lady of the Hare, London, 1944, p. 201, points out, “This is presumably an allusion to the ‘crooked’ nature of the witch’s negative intuition, but the insistence on the round silver object representing the moon is quite clearly due to the kind of symbolism which speaks of ‘paying a man out in his own coin’, that is to say, that in order to counteract the negative moon-knowledge of the witch an equally powerful moon symbol must be used.”Poems by Giles Watson, 2004. |
| 撮影日 | 2008-10-27 14:09:03 |
| 撮影者 | Giles Watson's poetry and prose , Oxfordshire, England |
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