The Prisoner of Chillon

Who was the prisoner of Chillon? One would think by the tone of Lord Byron's lyric poem that he was a heroic, romantic, chivalrous figure...perhaps that and then some. To give him even more of an historic appeal, he was a bit of a libertine.

Francois Bonivard.

His uncle was prior of a monastery outside of Geneva, and Bonivard received an early education from the monks. His later education in Italy was marked more by amusement. After the Duke of Savoy captured his family lands, he began a life of political activism and became a partisan of the Protestant Reformation.

These actions landed him in prison several times, once in the famed dungeon of Chillon, where he was immortalized by Byron.

He was also married four times, threw extravagant parties, and scandalized the neighbors.

Amid all this, he wrote a history of Geneva up to 1530.

Quite a figure to immortalize, after all.

Lord Byron's Daughter

I knew of Medora, one of Byron's daughters. But I didn't know of the other one - Ada. Nor did I know she was a mathematical genius, of sorts. That came from her mother, Annabella. Anabella and Bryon were married only a short time, but from their union came Byron's only legitimate child. Ada called herself a "poetical scientist," which is perhaps the best blending of the two. Perhaps it's what gave her such an incredible legacy, even if I am just now learning about it.

Working with Charles Babbage, a mathematician and inventor who had come up with the idea of an "analytical engine," she came up with her own ideas for codes of letters and numbers and looping ~ things that current computers use today! For her thoughts she is known as one of the first computer "programmers." All this in the mid 1800s!

A child's book about her has been beautifully illustrated:

And a science fiction independent film of her life took several awards from film festivals. It's in my queue.

Baudelaire, Rimbaud, or Verlaine

I hate to admit I know all their names, but who they are as individuals somehow blends together under the amalgam "French poet." I discovered there is a book with all three of their works combined (so maybe I'm not alone in this phenomenon). The synopsis on Goodreads gives a wonderful initial orientation to their styles...

"Here, for the first time, the work of three of Frances greatest poets has been published in a single volume: the sensual and passionate glow of Charles Baudelaire, the desperate intensity and challenge of Arthur Rimbaud, and the absinthe-tinted symbolist songs of Paul Verlaine."

Joseph Bernstein, translator and interpreter of note, says, "Not to know these three poets, is to deprive oneself of a pleasure as rare as it is indispensable to any real understanding of the aims and direction of modern literature."

Their lives overlapped, not all quite so intensely and stormily as Rimbaud and Verlaine, but they all lived between 1821 - 1896. Baudelaire was oldest, and the one whose work inspired the others. Rimbaud has been credited with influencing modern literature.

"To say the word Romanticism is to say modern art -- that is, intimacy, spirituality, color, aspiration towards the infinite, expressed by every means available to the arts." Baudelaire

"The poet is a madman lost in adventure." Verlaine

"I saw that all beings are fated to happiness: action is not life, but a way of wasting some force, an enervation." Rimbaud

The Postman

I just heard of the bride from Il Postino referred to as "a classical figure of femininity." What is this "El Postino" I wondered? It looks like an artistic and endearing movie I need to see!

And, as one thing leads to another, the trailer made me wonder about the poet Pablo Neruda. I've learned he was a Chilean poet, known most for his highly romantic verses. They ranged from surreal to historic, and he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1971 ~ the year I was born! He always wrote in green ink, to symbolize hope.

I noticed even an excerpt of one of his poems is "trending" today.

“You can cut all the flowers but you cannot keep Spring from coming.”

― Pablo Neruda

Indeed.

Georges Braque

I came across Georges Braque's name today in A Moveable Feast. Not knowing who he was, I went off on a search. It turns out he was a major 20th century artist - impressionist turned fauvist turned founder of cubism along with Picasso! While fauvism favored strong, lurid color, many of Braque's cubism paintings seem to favor browns and siennas, a fact which made Hemingway compare Paris's sanitary horse-drawn wagons to his work.

A screenshot from the Google search for "Braque"

"The tank wagons were painted brown and saffron color and in the moonlight when they worked the rue Cardinal Lemoine their wheeled, horse-drawn cylinders looked like Braque paintings."

I suppose the take-away is that this is a good lesson on "place." Even the seemingly basest or non-descript parts of life can add to knowing the nuances of a time. Even the mundane can be elevated by the artistic eye.

Quince

Quince. Have you heard of it? I've heard of the flowering quince, a beautiful bright red blooming bush that shocks our senses in early spring with its burst of color. But research just "quince" and you get an explosive panoply of yellow fruit ~ 

It turns out, the flowering quince is an ornamental, fruitless variety ~ a hybrid to please gardeners. The fruited quince is a cousin of the apple and pear, and part of the pome fruit family. According to HomeGuides SFGate website, "This 'golden apple' of Greek mythology, and perhaps the apple of Adam and Eve, grows well in a Mediterranean climate." Now that's a discovery indeed...

A bright screen-shot from a Google search for Quince

Adelaide Crapsey

The sad yet moving and fascinating story of the woman who invented the Cinquain style of poetry...because things like that just seemed synonymous with the Victorian era:

 https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poets/detail/adelaide-crapsey