Monday, July 23, 2012

Ophelia

Here are some examples of paintings being inspired by poetry, in this case lines describing the 
death of Ophelia in Shakespeare's Hamlet.

Gertrude:
There is a willow grows aslant a brook,
That shows his hoar leaves in the glassy stream;
There with fantastic garlands did she come
Of crow-flowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples
That liberal shepherds give a grosser name,
But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them:
There, on the pendent boughs her coronet weeds
Clambering to hang, an envious sliver broke;
When down her weedy trophies and herself
Fell in the weeping brook. Her clothes spread wide;
And, mermaid-like, awhile they bore her up:
Which time she chanted snatches of old tunes;
As one incapable of her own distress,
Or like a creature native and indued
Unto that element: but long it could not be
Till that her garments, heavy with their drink,
Pull'd the poor wretch from her melodious lay
To muddy death. (IV.vii)


John Everett Millais's Ophelia (1852)
W.G. Simmonds, The Drowning of Ophelia (1910)







Eve Mero's Ophelia  (2001)

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