Liefdesbrief vir R1.1 miljoen verkoop
John Keats (1795 - 1821)
Nou ja, kyk. Indien jy aan die ontvangkant van ‘n briefskrywende minnedigter is, is dit dalk raadsaam om alle korrespondensie van jou ontluikende liefling te bewaar, want eendag kan dit perdalks vir jou (of jou nageslag) ‘n gemaklike leefstyl besorg.
Soos dit nou die geval is met een van John Keats se liefdesbriewe wat hy in 1820 aan die groot liefde van sy lewe, Fanny Brawne, geskryf het en wat verlede week teen ‘n rekordbedrag van £96,000 (ongeveer R1.1 miljoen) verkoop is op ‘n veiling in London.
Volgens The Independent se berig, die volgende: “Keats penned the letter to Fanny Brawne in 1820 – a year before he died, aged 25, from tuberculosis. Brawne lived next door to Keats in Hampstead, north London, but their love was never consummated because of the poet’s contagious illness. In the letter, Keats writes about not being able to kiss his fiancée, calling himself ‘a poor prisoner’ who will ‘not sing in a cage’. Brawne’s letters to Keats were buried with the poet after he died in a room near the Spanish Steps in Rome. The letter auctioned yesterday was the last of Keats’s 30 surviving love letters to Brawne still in private hands.”
As leestoegif volg Keats se gedig, “Bright Star“, onder aan die Nuuswekker.
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Sedert gister het daar vier nuwe blogs bygekom: sowel Andries Bezuidenhout en Desmond Painter skryf oor The National; Pieter Odendaal vertel van die Russiese filmregisseur Andrei Tarkovsky terwyl Vrouwkje Tuinman dit weer oor verhuising het.
Lekker lees aan dit alles.
Mooi bly.
LE
Bright Star
Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art –
Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night
And watching, with eternal lids apart,
Like nature’s patient, sleepless Eremite,
The moving waters
At their priestlike task
Of pure ablution round earth’s human shores,
Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask
Of snow upon the mountains and the moors –
No – yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,
Pillow’d upon my fair love’s ripening breast,
To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,
Awake for ever in a sweet unrest,
Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath,
And so live ever – or else swoon to death.
© John Keats
