the end and aim of all travelling
looking out into the dark
dimly lit with the infrequent lamp
This is a picture I’ve liked for a long time. This kind of poetry is often called found/redacted/blackout/erasure poetry. I can’t remember who made it, or even where I found it. Reverse image searches have yielded nothing. I have, however, done some digging and figured out the following:
The torn page is from a 1905 novel called The Travelling Thirds by Gertrude Atherton. A distant relative of Benjamin Franklin, Atherton was an American suffragist and prolific author uncommonly educated for the time. She met Oscar Wilde (she thought him over-civilised and decadent, lowercase d) and Winston Churchill (she upset him by not being familiar with his writings) and was friends with Ambrose Bierce (of the annoying The Devil’s Dictionary).
I wonder whether this means:
– anything can come from anything1 through (a particular kind of) seeing
– a thing can become quite another when seen through the eyes of another
– the connections are what the ones seeing make
Or maybe it means I like pretty pictures with colours and words and the digging was entirely unnecessary.
Image © ???
#image #word #poetry
Subtitle from Something Good, The Sound of Music, Rodgers & Hammerstein