Autumn Days - properly finished

Plus cat ....

....... spot the tabby.

Keats House in Autumn

Autumn Days ..... finished.

 

Here is the uncropped photo, taken by me, with my cheapo camera, on the terrace, in the shade .... yeah, I know, I need to get it properly scanned.

To Autumn is one of my favourite Keats poems. We had to learn it by heart at school and it was no chore, I date my Keats obsession from then.

 

I got in the maturing sun, the bees that think warm days will never cease, the soft-dying day and the gathering swallows twittering in the skies...

No full-grown lambs, stubble plains, river sallows or cider-presses - well this IS Hampstead and not Winchester where it was written.

 

I have substituted a thrush for the redbreast of the poem too.

Keats, who lived in the left part of what was then known as Wentworth Place, referred to the thrush in the garden in some of his letters to his great love, Fanny Brawne, who lived on the right hand side of the house. In one letter to her he mentioned "your new black dress which I like so much", so I have given her exactly that.

 

This afternoon I am collecting a large batch of cards and prints of Virginia Woolf's house (Monk's House) to send off to the shop at ..... Monk's House. I will be delivering this picture for scanning at the same time and cards and prints of it will be in my online shop next month.

A Hampstead landscape

Hampstead Landscape: Letter from Naples

I know. I was meant to be "doing" Dove Cottage ... Well, I went to the library and drew a blank as far as Wordsworth goes. 

The closest was Wogan. 

And that's not exactly close. 

And I had a spare already made up Keats House going, plus I saw the EXACT match to the pathway in my Keats House guide in the shape of one of his last letters to Wentworth Place from Naples so I cut it out, played around, and decided to make a picture of it with a quiltish background. 

It fits in more with the evolved style of  my writers' houses. The brickwork is a nod to the building going on in Hampstead at the time. Indeed, Keats complains of the slowness of developers and the eternal building site opposite Wentworth Place in one of his letters. The colours are nice muted English ones - a contrast to the hectic, vivid vision Keats would have seen from the boat in Naples as he penned the letter.

I'll have to research my Wordsworth entirely online but I'm one of those stupid old-fashioned people who prefer to kick off my research by delving into an actual biography.

Ah well, c'est la vie.

Off to do a spot of googling ....