Den sidste Kaffepunch. Vesterjysk Markedsscene
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This wood engraving (xylografi) depicts a West Jutland market scene, centered on "the last coffee punch" — a mixture of coffee and spirits that was a fixture of rural Danish social life. The work is by an unknown artist and dates from between 1870 and 1881.
Xylography was a reproductive technique in which an image was cut into the end grain of hardwood blocks, allowing fine detail and large print runs. It was the standard method for illustrating newspapers and periodicals in the later nineteenth century, which accounts for much anonymous work of this kind: engravers often reproduced others' designs for mass publication rather than signing their own.
The print is held by the SMK — National Gallery of Denmark.
Background drawn from SMK — National Gallery of Denmark
Today's poem
Lines Written in Early Spring
I heard a thousand blended notes, While in a grove I sate reclined, In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind. To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think What man has made of man. Through primrose tufts, in that green bower, The periwinkle trailed its wreaths; And 'tis my faith that every flower Enjoys the air it breathes. The birds around me hopped and played, Their thoughts I cannot measure:-- But the least motion which they made It seemed a thrill of pleasure. The budding twigs spread out their fan, To catch the breezy air; And I must think, do all I can, That there was pleasure there. If this belief from heaven be sent, If such be Nature's holy plan, Have I not reason to lament What man has made of man?
William Wordsworth · Public domain
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William Wordsworth was an English Romantic poet who, together with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped launch the Romantic Age in English literature with their joint publication Lyrical Ballads (1798), in which this poem appeared.
"Lines Written in Early Spring" is built from six quatrains with a simple, song-like rhyme scheme, in keeping with the accessible, ballad-derived manner Wordsworth and Coleridge cultivated. The speaker sits reclined in a grove, listening to birdsong and observing primroses, periwinkle, and budding twigs, convinced that every living thing takes pleasure in its existence.
That sense of natural joy, however, sharpens rather than soothes the poem's central feeling. The pleasure the speaker finds in nature leads him to "sad thoughts," and the repeated lament over "what man has made of man" sets the harmony of the natural world against human failings. The contrast gives the short lyric its argument: nature's "holy plan" is reason to mourn how far human society falls short of it.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia