Sketch
✦ Read about this
This graphite drawing is a preparatory sketch for a proposed design for United States currency, developed during the administration of President William Howard Taft. Kenyon Cox made it in 1912.
Cox (American, 1856–1919) was a painter, muralist, illustrator, writer, and teacher. He was among the influential early instructors at the Art Students League of New York, and designed the League's logo, which carries the motto Nulla Dies Sine Linea—"No Day Without a Line."
The sheet measures roughly 39 by 37 cm. It entered the Cleveland Museum of Art in 1916 as a gift from J. D. Cox.
Background drawn from Cleveland Museum of Art & Wikipedia
Today's poem
The Flowers
All the names I know from nurse: Gardener's garters, Shepherd's purse, Bachelor's buttons, Lady's smock, And the Lady Hollyhock. Fairy places, fairy things, Fairy woods where the wild bee wings, Tiny trees for tiny dames-- These must all be fairy names! Tiny woods below whose boughs Shady fairies weave a house; Tiny tree-tops, rose or thyme, Where the braver fairies climb! Fair are grown-up people's trees, But the fairest woods are these; Where, if I were not so tall, I should live for good and all.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Public domain
✦ Read about this
Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–?) — Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer — is best known for the novels Treasure Island (1883), Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Kidnapped (1886). Alongside this fiction he produced A Child's Garden of Verses (1885), a poetry collection written from a child's perspective, from which "The Flowers" is drawn.
The poem takes the folk and common names of flowers — gardener's garters, shepherd's purse, bachelor's buttons, lady's smock, hollyhock — and treats them as evidence of a hidden fairy world. It is built in four rhymed quatrains of short couplets, matching the simplicity of the child speaker.
Its central conceit is scale: the flowers and their low boughs become tiny woods and houses for fairies, and the speaker imagines that, were he not so tall, he would live among them. The verse turns ordinary garden plants into an enchanted miniature landscape.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia