It’s strange that when things are thought to be greatest they are described at being at their height; their apogee, perhaps. Yet the moon, when at its perigee, that is, when it is lowest in the sky, looks greater, fuller, brighter, and generally lovelier to us on earth; who feel its pull on our tides, our blood, and the creative seeds of our unconscious.
Two years ago, I blogged a year-long sequence of poems about the moon. Without wishing to revisit that theme, tonight the moon is what can be described as ‘super-full’ – as if there can be degrees of fullness. Of course, we know there can; at least when it comes to the battle between the supposedly opposite poles of optimism and pessimism, which give us differing-sized half-glasses. Six of one, half a baker’s dozen of the other.
So it is with the hour-glass, which, when spent, can only have one of its chambers filled, and then, not even fully. Sir Walter Scott used this half-hour-glass, apparently, to give himself a word-count-target for every turn of the time-piece. Perhaps he should have attempted a simple sestute. Here, then, is my 62-word attempt at a potted history of yet another great artist who died in poverty.
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