The Great St. Sebastian
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Hans Baldung (German, 1484/85–1545), nicknamed Grien, was among the most accomplished pupils of Albrecht Dürer, and his work bridges the German Renaissance and Mannerism. He worked across media, as a painter, engraver, draftsman, and stained glass artist.
This woodcut, *The Great St. Sebastian*, dates to 1514. The medium—a relief print cut into a wood block—allowed images to be reproduced in numbers, and the technique was central to the printmaking culture that flourished in Dürer's circle.
The impression at the Cleveland Museum of Art was given by Edward B. Greene in 1928.
Background drawn from Cleveland Museum of Art & Wikipedia
Today's poem
To Friends at Home
TO friends at home, the lone, the admired, the lost The gracious old, the lovely young, to May The fair, December the beloved, These from my blue horizon and green isles, These from this pinnacle of distances I, The unforgetful, dedicate.
Robert Louis Stevenson · Public domain
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Robert Louis Stevenson (1850–1894, though no dates are asserted here beyond his works) was a Scottish novelist, essayist, poet and travel writer, best known for the novels Treasure Island, Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, and Kidnapped, and for the poetry collection A Child's Garden of Verses.
"To Friends at Home" is a short dedicatory poem addressed to the people Stevenson left behind. The speaker writes from a distant vantage — "my blue horizon and green isles," "this pinnacle of distances" — and offers his lines as a tribute to friends past and present: the old and the young, the admired and the lost.
The poem is brief and unrhymed, built around direct address and a catalogue of those being remembered. Its central concern is distance and memory: the poet, calling himself "the unforgetful," reaches back across separation to dedicate his words to those at home.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia