Website review: Nordic Signs works
poitka discovered this in Photography
•4 reviews since Nov 15, 2007
photography
•joakimeskildsen.com/default.asp
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Reviews of this website
poitka discovered 8 months ago- A little "Hitchcockian"!
- Frannyy rated 4 months ago
- I do prefer blue, but something in me now wants to go North. Puffins The Sea
- jack-black rated 4 months ago
Love from the Ashes
'The end of the world rising out of the sea'
13th July , 1871
Such was William Morris's apocalyptic Journal entry on first sighting Iceland.
Fiona McCarthy, his best bigrapher, sees Wm Morris' trips to Iceland as crucial to his later heroic socialism. How amazing too that he roused himself from his London life (interior decorating, the feminized 'cult of the south', and the Rossetti-- Burne-Jones circle with its painful tangle of relationships) to go adventuring in the frozen North. On his trip to Iceland, he gave his wife Jane tacit consent to see the treacherous unstable Rossetti, whilst he himself was more than half in love with Burne-Jones's wife.
But here, in this poem, he dreams of returning to patch things up with his beloved Janey. The verse is a little monotonous, but the imagery is lively. The icy blasts seem to have opened his artistic eye as never before and his Iceland journal records of volcanoes amid ice are better and more immediate than even his best poems and sagas, presaging titanic struggles and awakenings of powers within.
Iceland First Seen
Lo from our loitering ship a new land at last to be seen;
Toothed rocks down the side of the firth on the east guard a weary wide lea,
And black slope the hillsides above, striped adown with their desolate green:
And a peak rises up on the west from the meeting of cloud and of sea,
Foursquare from base unto point like the building of Gods that have been,
The last of that waste of the mountains all cloud-wreathed and snow-flecked and grey,
And bright with the dawn that began just now at the ending of day.
Ah! what came we forth for to see that our hearts are so hot with desire?
Is it enough for our rest, the sight of this desolate strand,
And the mountain-waste voiceless as death but for winds that may sleep not nor tire?
Why do we long to wend forth through the length and breadth of a land,
Dreadful with grinding of ice, and record of scarce hidden fire,
But that there 'mid the grey grassy dales sore scarred by the ruining streams
Lives the tale of the Northland of old and the undying glory of dreams?
* * *
Ah! when thy Balder comes back, and bears from the heart of the Sun
Peace and the healing of pain, and the wisdom that waiteth no more;
And the lilies are laid on thy brow 'mid the crown of the deeds thou hast done;
And the roses spring up by thy feet that the rocks of the wilderness wore:
Ah! when thy Balder comes back and we gather the gains he hath won,
Shall we not linger a little to talk of thy sweetness of old,
Yea, turn back awhile to thy travail whence the Gods stood aloof to behold?
Balder: Norse god of light, joy, beauty, and reconciliation. Murdered by the treacherous Loki. After the final conflict when a new world arises from its ashes, Balder will be reborn.
