Graffiti

Love sows the wind and reaps the whirlwind.

-—Byron, Childe Harold 4.123

In Westwood here, an Aurignacian train

thunders through, a love-sick rhino herd

painted by numb fingers, stiff with stain,

though not a flintstone's struck a word.

"Said the Lion to the Lioness— 'When you are amber dust,— "

Who sows the wind,

The whirlwind's troubled brain?

" . . . bless with a benison

Alfred Lord Tennyson"

graffitiing the old What-name

on Shakespeare's daunting fame.*

At Poseidon's temple, Sounion in Greece:

Hark! A sign? Could be some peace!

*At Stratford-upon-Avon in 1841, "Tennyson—'seized with a sort of enthusiasm'—scribbled his name on the wall in Shakespeare's house, 'though a little ashamed of it' afterwards" (Richard Holmes, The Boundless Deep: Young Tennyson, Science, and the Crisis of Belief [New York: Pantheon Books, 2026], 172).

Tip 'o the topknot to the memory of Dame Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), whose poems "Heart and Mind" and "Sir Beelzebub" are quoted here. I recall her as an old lady exotically got up at a Sviatoslav Richter concert—or was it Rostropovich?—in the Royal Festival Hall, London, ca. 1962/3.

Saturday, August 22, 2026