Monday, February 29, 2016

Arlene Corwin writes



Little Poem 
 
The light, the light, 
The Swedish light! 
It’s on till qvart i tolv tonight. 
June sixteen, year ‘ninety-one: 
I must congratulate the sun.
 
 White Night -- Edvard Munch
 

3 comments:

  1. A "white night" never gets completely dark. It is a phenomenon of the high latitudes outside the Arctic and Antarctic Circles and occurs around the summer solstice. Fyodor Dostoyevsky wrote a short story, "Belye nochi," about a nameless, lonely man who fell in unrequited love with a young woman. "Goo Lord," the narrator ends, "only a moment of bliss? Isn't such a moment sufficient for the whole of a man's life?"

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  2. "Qvart i tolv," of course, is a quarter til 12. 16 June 1991 would have been the 444th birthday of Sweden's foremost statesman Axel Gustafsson Oxenstierna, who rhetorically asked, "Do you not know, my son, with how little wisdom the world is governed?"

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  3. Wonderful to read Arlene's poem. Also coincidental that I read review of an exhibit of Munch paintings at the Neue Gallery in NYC. The White Night painting was mentioned, I was going to Google it but now I don't need to.

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