‘Frieze Frame' Review: The Case of the Parthenon Marbles
Keats's 1817 visit to the British Museum, where the Marbles had been recently installed, inspired his rapturous sonnet 'On Seeing the Elgin Marbles' ('My spirit is too weak—Mortality / Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep'). His companion at the museum, the history painter and diarist Benjamin Haydon, encouraged the British government to purchase from Elgin the portions of the Parthenon frieze that he had acquired, and it is not unreasonable to suppose Keats agreed. He returned to examine them 'again and again,' his friend Joseph Severn remembered, 'and would sit for an hour or more at a time beside them rapt in revery.' Keats's reflections on mortality were not merely for effect—his death, of tuberculosis, came four years later.
Hashtags
Try Our AI Features
Explore what Daily8 AI can do for you:
Comments
No comments yet...
Related Articles
Washington Post
12 hours ago
- Washington Post
How a fluke trivia question at age 17 changed the course of my life
The world looks different through older eyes. I thought about this on a drive recently through a rolling English countryside. Patches of pasture were quilted together by stone walls stretching beyond the horizons. As a young man, I perceived such walls as picturesque. But 40 years later, the stacked stones felt weighty with history and saturated with the meaning of life. For I saw among those stones the lives of countless human beings. Before there were fences, there were only stones, millions of stones, and each one had to be wrenched and lifted from the earth, then carried or dragged to the place where it was stacked. Some fences were a mile or more apart. I pictured children barely old enough to lift them, and the long walks they made each day under their burdens of stone. I imagined these children growing into adults who shivered in the rain and sweated in the sun as they moved those stones, year in and year out, until the earth's bottomless harvest of rock finally broke them, and more took their places. 'No arts; no letters; no society; and which is worst of all, continual fear and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short,' wrote the philosopher Thomas Hobbes of the existence implicit in those fences. It was a melancholy thought. But it was followed immediately by a delirium of gratitude. Against all odds, by an inexplicable series of lucky breaks, my life has been different. Of all the places and times for a human being to be born, I've enjoyed the little window, the sliver of history, in which there has been a comfortable living available for a perpetual student who likes making sentences. The only stones I've carried have been the ones I chose. Forty-seven years ago, on the advice of a teacher, I pestered the sports editor of the Denver Post into letting me apply for a part-time job covering high school football. I was 17, several years younger than the people he had hired before for the same job. After several phone calls, he allowed me to take a three-hour battery of tests to judge my grammar, spelling and general knowledge skills. When I was done, I sat for my interview with the editor, who asked a single question. Referring to a test that challenged applicants to identify various names, he said, 'What did you put for Charles Russell?' By a fluke, I happened to know that this was an American painter of Western scenes. 'Be here on Friday at 4 o'clock,' my new boss instructed. The skein of improbabilities in that story staggers me now. That I had a teacher who encouraged me to pursue such an unlikely idea. That the editor asked that particular question. That I knew the right answer, amid the ocean of facts of which I was ignorant. Together, these unlikely events unlocked a way of being that has allowed me the privilege of gratifying my curiosity in exchange for a paycheck. Because I live in this flicker of time on this magical planet, and because I chanced to know the right trivia, I found my way to a campaign bus in 1992, where I met the beautiful reporter who became my wife of 28 years. And that lagniappe granted me the four children who are my greatest blessings. I do not believe putting words together is more meaningful or more admirable than putting stones together. Some of those fences are older than Shakespeare, and they will still be marking those fields centuries after I'm gone. By contrast, few commodities are as perishable as old journalism. What I do know is that learning things and making sentences as a daily journalist, and doing it in the company of people who share the same passion, has been a grand occupation for me, and the fact that such a thing is possible feels miraculous. Forty-seven years of it also feels like enough. My cup runneth over. Time to turn off the tap. Thanks for reading.
Yahoo
2 days ago
- Yahoo
Your Voice, Your BBC News: Do you have a story to share with a local BBC journalist?
What stories would you like BBC News to cover in the Highlands and Islands? We want to hear about the big issues affecting your community, the local people doing remarkable things, as well as quirky tales that will intrigue and entertain. Use the form below to upload photographs and documents, and to get in touch with your local BBC journalists.
New York Times
2 days ago
- New York Times
Finland's Short, Precious Summers Are Plagued by Goose Poop
Each summer, sun-starved Finns flock to Hietsu Beach, a sandy stretch in Helsinki, to exercise, splash and attempt to tan. Amid a late July, record-breaking heat wave, a very different flock has also been stalking the surf around Finland's capital: barnacle geese — white-faced, black-backed and ever-present. At night, they roost by the water's edge. Come daytime, as people spread out their towels, they waddle away, leaving small mountains of excrement in their tracks. 'There can be a shocking amount of poop,' acknowledged Jukka Lundgren, the manager of Helsinki's public beaches, who has spent 15 of his 18 years on the job trying to keep the sand from looking like a goose litter box. Now, after Sisyphean summers facing down the fowl's feces, he thinks that he just may have found a solution: a wheeled cage with a strong resemblance to an old-fashioned hand lawn mower that is meant to sift the dirtied sand and whisk up only the offending feces. The contraption may be Helsinki's most innovative poop-fighting effort yet. It is being tested this summer on about half the city's 25 public beaches. It was designed in-house by beach staff members, who drew inspiration from a public competition last year meant to crowdsource poop-scooping ideas. Want all of The Times? Subscribe.
