The Combat of the Giaour and Hassan
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For this frenetic scene, Eugène Delacroix took inspiration from “The Giaour,” a poem in a popular series of romantic tales by the celebrated English poet Lord Byron. Giaour is a derogatory Turkish word for a Christian or non-Muslim applied here to the warrior at left clad in swirling white drapery. Amid a violent struggle, the Giaour is avenging the death of his lover at the hands of his opponent. Delacroix mirrored the two central figures and their horses as the Giaour is about to strike the fatal blow against the faceless Turk Hassan. The artist’s mastery of color is exemplified by his use of shimmering primary hues, while the loose handling of paint creates the sense of dynamism Delacroix was so capable of executing. This painting reflects Delacroix’s sustained engagement with Orientalism, the artistic representation of non-European people and places, especially North Africa, Asia, and the Middle East. Delacroix was among the first European artists to travel to Africa when he visited Morocco in 1832, shortly after he completed this painting. Widespread in the nineteenth century, Orientalism was regularly leveraged to reinforce French colonial enterprises through often fantastical, violent, or erotic depictions of the customs and cultures of faraway locales.
Background drawn from Art Institute of Chicago
Today's poem
From Sunset to Star Rise
Go from me, summer friends, and tarry not: I am no summer friend, but wintry cold, A silly sheep benighted from the fold, A sluggard with a thorn-choked garden plot. Take counsel, sever from my lot your lot, Dwell in your pleasant places, hoard your gold; Lest you with me should shiver on the wold, Athirst and hungering on a barren spot. For I have hedged me with a thorny hedge, I live alone, I look to die alone: Yet sometimes, when a wind sighs through the sedge, Ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back, My heart goes sighing after swallows flown On sometime summer's unreturning track.
Christina Rossetti · Public domain
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Christina Rossetti (1830–1894 — though here best identified as the author of "Goblin Market" and "Remember") was an English writer of romantic and devotional poetry. "From Sunset to Star Rise" belongs to the more austere, inward-looking strain of her work, akin to the meditation on mortality in "Remember."
The poem is a Petrarchan sonnet. Its octave dismisses "summer friends," the speaker casting herself as "wintry cold," isolated behind "a thorny hedge," and urging former companions to keep their distance and their comforts rather than share her barren lot. The sestet turns to the involuntary return of memory: when the wind stirs, "ghosts of my buried years, and friends come back," and the heart longs after what cannot return.
The governing contrast is between seasons — summer's warmth and plenty against winter's cold and solitude — figuring a life of deliberate withdrawal shadowed by grief for the irrecoverable past.
Background drawn from PoetryDB & Wikipedia