Poetry (ii): Words & Music for Egon

Egon Schiele, Pregnant Woman and Death, 1911. Oil on canvas, 100 x 100 cm. Narodni Gallery, Prague.

Embrace (Lovers II), 1917. Oil on canvas, 39 3/8 x 67 in. (100 x 170.2 cm) Osterreichische Galerie, Vienna.


Given that you’re present right to your
fingertips, that you’re seized with desire,
and given the way you bend your knees
and show me your hair,
and given your temperature
and your darkness;
as well as your subordinate clauses,
the insubstantial weight of your elbows,
and also the material soul
that’s gleaming in the little hollow
up above your collar-bone;
given that you’ve gone
and come, and given all
the things that I don’t know about you,
my monosyllabic syllables
are not enough, or too much.

~Hans Magnus Enzensberger


Fighter, 1913. Gouache and pencil on paper, 19 1/4 x 12 5/8 in. (48.8 x 32.2 cm) Private collection.

Agony, 1912. Oil on canvas, 70 x 80 cm. Neue Pinakothek, Munich.


Against Constancy

Tell me no more of constancy,
That frivolous pretense,
Of cold age, narrow jealousy,
Disease and want of sense.

Let duller fools on whom kind chance
Some easy heart has thrown,
Despairing higher to advance,
Be kind to one alone.

Old men and weak, whose idle flame,
Their own defects discovers,
Since changing can
but spread their shame,
Ought to be constant lovers;

But we, whose hearts do justly swell,
With no vainglorious pride,
Who know how we in love excel,
Long to be often tried.

Then bring my bath, and strew my bed,
As each kind night returns,
I'll change a mistress till I'm dead,
And fate change me for worms.

~John Wilmot


Death and the Maiden, 1915/16. Oil on canvas, 150 x 180 cm. Oesterreichische Galerie, Vienna.

Freundschaft (Friendship), 1913.


Daffodils (1804)

I WANDER'D lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host, of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the Milky Way,
They stretch'd in never-ending line
Along the margin of a bay:
Ten thousand saw I at a glance,
Tossing their heads in sprightly dance.

The waves beside them danced; but they
Out-did the sparkling waves in glee:
A poet could not but be gay,
In such a jocund company:
I gazed -- and gazed -- but little thought
What wealth the show to me had brought:

For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils.

~William Wordsworth (1770-1850).
For biography and works, visit this website.


Two Women, 1915. Gouache and pencil, 32.8 x 49.7 cm. Graphische Sammlung Albertina, Vienna.


Music for Egon Schiele, by Rachel's.