Friday, July 22, 2011

Breakfast for One



A recent drawing in pen, markers, and pastel.

As for narrative, it's a morning after picture. I could say more, but there's a poem that suits it:


Blue, blue is the grass about the river
And the willows have overfilled the close garden.
And within, the mistress, in the midmost of her youth,
White, white of face, hesitates, passing the door.
Slender, she puts forth a slender hand;
And she was a courtezan in the old days,
And she has married a sot,
Who now goes drunkenly out
And leaves her too much alone.


It's Pound's The Beautiful Toilette, a very free adaptation of a poem by Mei Sheng (枚乘, died 140 B.C.  Not, of course, to be confused with Mei Sheng (美生) the well-known Panda). The poem first appeared  in Pound's Cathay in 1915.

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