Lighthouse and Blog Post Number 800!

“Hope is the thing with feathers
that perches in the soul
And sings the tune without the words
And never stops at all.”

–Emily Dickinson

Copyright Beth Parker Art 2012

Lighthouse – 4″ x 6″ Watercolor – Blog Post Number 800!

Can you believe it?  800 blog posts?  Wow!  And each one came with a painting.   Interesting.   Where did all that time go?

This little postcard was from another reference from jlloren at WetCanvas.  This is what Joel had to say about the photo… “The northern most province of the Philippines is Batanes. Here is their light house courtesy of my friend, Irah.”

I almost didn’t use a sharpie on this one, but ended up doing part of it.  🙂

Emily Dickinson

While Dickinson was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. The first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890 and the last in 1955. She died in Amherst in 1886.

Upon her death, Dickinson’s family discovered 40 handbound volumes of nearly 1800 of her poems, or “fascicles” as they are sometimes called. These booklets were made by folding and sewing five or six sheets of stationery paper and copying what seem to be final versions of poems in an order that many critics believe to be more than chronological. The handwritten poems show a variety of dash-like marks of various sizes and directions (some are even vertical). The poems were initially unbound and published according to the aesthetics of her many early editors, removing her unusual and varied dashes and replacing them with traditional punctuation. The current standard version replaces her dashes with a standard “n-dash,” which is a closer typographical approximation of her writing. Furthermore, the original order of the works was not restored until 1981, when Ralph W. Franklin used the physical evidence of the paper itself to restore her order, relying on smudge marks, needle punctures and other clues to reassemble the packets. Since then, many critics have argued for thematic unity in these small collections, believing the ordering of the poems to be more than chronological or convenient. The Manuscript Books of Emily Dickinson (Belknap Press, 1981) remains the only volume that keeps the order intact.

Source:  www.poets.org