Illustration of new moon on third day of lunar cycle showing detail of craters on moon surface.
Goodnight.
‘The moon is my mother.
She is not sweet like Mary.
Her blue garments unloose small bats and owls.
How I would like to believe in tenderness—
The face of the effigy, gentled by candles,
Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.’ ~Plath
The Moon: third day, Secrets of the stars, 1922.
"The town lay hollow under the new moon.
The old mines had emptied.
The hearths had grown cold.
The young had gone to seek coin in far cities, and the old had gone to dust.
Only the owl returned."
www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...
Frances Featherstone
“The contemplation of beauty causes the soul to grow wings.”
(Plato, attr.)
🎨 “Contemplation” (1847) - Franz Xaver Winterhalter, #BOTD 1805
Wyrdlings!
#EarthDay falls on a #WyrdWednesday this year and we celebrate the planet with:
“Wyrdly Beautiful Places, Wyndrous Creatures and Wynderful Plants!"
as this week’s topic!
Come, share your tales and celebrate with us 🌍🌏🌎
Queen of the Hum. An owl with big green-pupilled eyes looking out at the viewer, an electricity pylon behind the owl. Oak leaves and oak flowers surround the owl on their left and right. Linocut, white, black and green, Maria Strutz
3.05 am
Owl eyes
Bat wings
Moon dance
Night things
- Siana Bangura
#OwlishMonday
In the week before Walpurgis Night, the owl came one last time to the lost town of Stolberg on the foot of the Harz mountains to remember.
Our 51st #arkstringtide story is a little tale for #owlishmonday.
Read it below.
🎨 Craig Kosak
One barn owl perched on a stone, one in flight over a landscape, illustration. 🖼️ H Weir, 1877.
Goodnight.
‘Mostly it is a pale
face hovering in the afterdraught
of the spirit, making both ends meet
on a scream. It is the breath
of the churchyard, the forming
of white frost in a believer,
when he would pray; it is soft
feathers camouflaging a machine.’ ~ R S Thomas, Barn Owl.
#OwlishMonday
New moon seen between trees on night sky. Painting.
Goodnight.
‘I stand beneath the mystic moon.
An opiate vapor, dewy, dim,
Exhales from out her golden rim,
And softly dripping, drop by drop,
Upon the quiet mountain top,
Steals drowsily and musically
Into the universal valley.’ ~ Poe.
🖼️ New Moon, Isaak Brodsky.
“I shall be pinch’d to death.”
(“The Tempest” 5.1)
🎨 Arthur Rackham, from Tales from Shakespeare, by Charles and Mary Lamb, 1909
#shakespearesunday
On the second Sunday after Easter, Misericordias Domini, the artist met a hare outside Nuremberg. In a way, the hare would stay with him for the rest of his life.
Read more about Albrecht and the hare in our 50th #darkstpringtide tale below.
🎨 Hans Hoffmann (after 1576)
Michael Caine as Harry Palmer on a penguin paperback cover for Funeral in Berlin.
"I'm not being horrible Edmond Dorf," I said a little louder. "You don't have to shout," said Jean, "and I'm afraid the travel vouchers and tickets are ordered. Berlin has been told to expect Edmond Dorf." ~ Funeral in Berlin (1964), Len Deighton.
#BookWormSat #Berlin #MichaelCaine
Clare and Tess at Stonehenge in the 2009 adaptation.
‘The eastward pillars and their architraves stood up blackly against the light, and the great flame-shaped Sun-stone beyond them; and the Stone of Sacrifice midway.’ — Thomas Hardy, 'Tess of the d'Urbervilles' (1891) #BookWormSat
Lunar phase illustration on dark blue background.
‘Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.
The lamp hummed:
'Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.’ ~ Eliot
🖼️ Maria Clara Eimmart, 1697.
"Girls had met the Virgin Mary in the grove talking to them and only the bravest boys would gather twigs there on the eve of May Day. One or the other did not return from that venture over the years, so the stories went. And neither did Elin."
www.tumblr.com/whatthecrowt...
'The Wave' by Ivan Aivazovsky 1889. An oil painting with a storm at sea. The hues are greenish blue, as the huge waves fill the majority of the image. A sailship is being swallowed by the sea, and the crew is escaping in a small boat. Some have drowned.
As if ocean had sunk from beneath them: they pass
To their graves in the deep with an earthquake of sound,
And the waves and the thunders, made silent around,
Leave the wind to its echo.
– P. B. Shelley, 'A Vision Of The Sea' 1820. He died in shipwreck in 1822.
#booksky
#art Ivan Aivazovsky
There is a birch grove near a village by the Klarälven in Värmland and it is considered uncanny, because a Skogsrå is said to dwell there.
Young Elin Vinter seems to have met her one evening in April, a long time ago - read her story in our 49th #darkspringtide tale below.
🎨 Lisa van Meter
🖼 The Fall of the House of Usher, Arthur Rackham, 1935. Illustration of house set back behind a moat and pollarded trees, in the foreground, a man in a top hat rides by on a brown house as he looks up at the house, dark sky in background.
‘(A)nd at length found myself…within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was --but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit.’ ~ Poe, The Fall of the House of Usher. #BookWormSat
#BookWormSat
"Truth has many faces and the truth is like the old road to Avalon; it depends on your own will, your own thoughts, whither the road will take you, and whether, at the end, you arrive at the Holy Isle of Eternity ..."
Marion Zimmer Bradley - The Mists of Avalon
🎨Kimsol [DeviantArt]
Doc standing in front of his arctic Fortress
"buildings or places of note...real or imagined" #bookwormsat
Fortress of Solitude, Doc Savage no.23. By Kenneth Robeson. April 1968, cover art by James Bama. #booksky
"It was also too bad that John Sunlight was destined to be the man who found the Strange Blue Dome."
Creature holding fainted woman in arm
"places of note" #bookwormsat - certainly not a safe place to go swimming alone
Creature from the Black Lagoon by Vargo Statten. 1954, cover by John Richards. #booksky
#BookWormSat
"They [Marabar Caves] are like nothing else in the world, a glimpse of them makes the breath catch. They rise abruptly, insanely, without the proportion that is kept by the wildest hills elsewhere, they bear no relation to anything dreamt or seen ..."
E M Forster - A Passage to India
6:30pm TODAY on @BBCRadio4Extra
From 2023, Omnibus 📻 “A Tomb with a View”
The 2020 book “A Tomb With a View – The Stories & Glories of Graveyards” by Peter Ross, abridged by Anna Magnusson
Read by Andy Clark
#BookchatWeekly #BookwormSat #BookSky
Photo of the 1883 second Empire Mansion, Glanmore House taken by Jeffrey Kerplunking.
#WorldHeritageDay & #BookWormSat: Glanmore National Historic Site—ornate, historic, and quietly haunted. Whispers of Harriet Phillips, unseen footsteps, and shadowy figures keep this Belleville landmark steeped in folklore.
Link to my #GlanmoreHouse blog niftybuckles.wordpress.com/2022/10/13/g...
Photo by John Sylvester
The image is a promotional photograph for Green Gables Heritage Place, a Parks Canada site in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, which inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic novel Anne of Green Gables.
For #WorldHeritageDay & #BookWormSat: Green Gables Heritage Place, PEI—where Anne of Green Gables first bloomed and Avonlea still feels just around the bend. I’ve returned time and again; the charm never fades.
Photo of 18th century, Fort Luisbourg located in Cape Breton, Nova Scotia Canada. Photo credit Parks Canada.
#BookWormSat #WorldHeritageDay
Fortress of Louisbourg, Cape Breton NS
18th-century French fortress (reconstructed); site of sieges in Anglo-French wars; local ghost folklore (White Lady on ramparts, sorrowful French soldier). Visited every summer as a child; my dad, a #WW2 Navy Veteran, loved it!
“... heaven did not seem to be my home; and I broke my heart with weeping to come back to earth; and the angels were so angry that they flung me out into the middle of the heath on the top of Wuthering Heights; where I woke sobbing for joy.”
(Emily Brontë)
🎨 Greenwood
#bookwormsat
The (Great) Tower of Babel by Pieter Bruegel the Elder, c. 1563, Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna, via Daily Art Magazine
I asked Hank Williams 'how lonely does it get?'
Hank Williams hasn't answered yet.
But I can hear him coughing
all night long
about a hundred floors above me
in the Tower of Song
-Leonard Cohen
#BookWormSat
#BookWormSat
„Im ganzen entsprach das Schloss, wie es sich hier von der Ferne zeigte, K.s Erwartungen.“
***
„Altogether the castle, as seen in the distance, lived up to K.'s expectations.“
✍️Kafka, Das Schloss / The Castle
A wide landscape view shows a fortified stone castle built into a rugged mountain valley, surrounded by dense pine forest. High walls and towers stretch across a rocky gorge, with a long defensive wall connecting different sections of the stronghold. The main keep rises against a sheer cliff on the right, its tall, rectangular towers overlooking the valley. A bridge-like wall spans a drop between cliffs, emphasizing the fortress’s strategic position. In the distance, jagged mountains fade into a hazy blue sky, while birds circle overhead. The scene feels expansive and secluded, capturing a remote, well-defended stronghold nestled deep in the wilderness.
In Andrzej Sapkowski's "The Witcher" book series, Kaer Morhen (corruption of Elder Speech: Caer a'Muirehen, meaning Keep of the Elder Sea) is an old keep where witchers of the School of the Wolf used to be trained.
#BookWormSat 🧵