Poppy Field (Giverny)
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In July 1890, Claude Monet began four almost identically scaled canvases showing poppy fields near his home in Giverny. Although he did not consider these to be a series, like the 25 paintings of stacks of wheat that he began shortly after the harvest that same summer, the works certainly show his growing interest in developing several canvases at once. They also demonstrate a far more homogeneous touch than the freely brushed landscapes of his earlier career, with surfaces that have a tapestry-like materiality.
Background drawn from Art Institute of Chicago
Today's poem
To Homer
Standing aloof in giant ignorance, Of thee I hear and of the Cyclades, As one who sits ashore and longs perchance To visit dolphin-coral in deep seas. So thou wast blind;--but then the veil was rent, For Jove uncurtain'd Heaven to let thee live, And Neptune made for thee a spumy tent, And Pan made sing for thee his forest-hive; Aye on the shores of darkness there is light, And precipices show untrodden green, There is a budding morrow in midnight, There is a triple sight in blindness keen; Such seeing hadst thou, as it once befel To Dian, Queen of Earth, and Heaven, and Hell.
John Keats · Public domain
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John Keats was an English poet of the second generation of Romantic poets, alongside Byron and Shelley. His poems had been in publication for less than four years when he died of tuberculosis at 25. Indifferently received in his lifetime, his fame grew rapidly after his death, and by the end of the century he was placed in the canon of English literature, influencing the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood.
"To Homer" is a sonnet addressed to the ancient Greek poet, whom tradition held to be blind. Keats, who did not read Greek, opens by confessing his own "giant ignorance" of Homer and the Greek islands, comparing himself to someone longing from the shore to see the sea's depths.
The poem's central conceit turns Homer's blindness into a form of heightened vision: "on the shores of darkness there is light." Keats invokes Jove, Neptune, and Pan, and closes by likening Homer's "triple sight" to Diana, goddess of earth, heaven, and hell.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia