"Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May" wrote Shakespeare in his Sonnet XVIII. And while those words come to mind this first week of one of my favourite months, my mind turns mostly to my daughter Kari and other family members whose birthdays fall in May: my Dad, Louis; brother, Ron; Grandmother, Delphia; grandson, Brock; sister-in-law, Susan; nephew, Dale; Kari & Preston's Grandmother, Clara; as well as several cousins and friends. May is a lovely month in which to be born.
Kari had already started a collection of cobalt glass when I added to it for her on one of her twenty-something birthdays. This loving cup could illustrate one of her favourite verses:
"Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring
Your winter garment of repentance fling:
The bird of time has but a little way
To flutter - and the bird is on the wing."
The verse is from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam by Edward Fitzgerald. Pictured above is another of Kari's collections she began when she was in her twenties - twelve copies of The Rubaiyat. It started, according to her, just because she loved the music of the poetry and the philosophy behind it - that life is brief and precious: make the most of today.
At first she had a couple inexpensive copies then she found an edition with beautiful illustrations and she began to keep an eye out for the book in antique shoppes. Her purchases ranged in price between one and twenty-five dollars. If memory serves correctly, she was visiting me when she bought one of the editions at a book sale at the Corning Public Library. The large book in the middle is the only one which was a gift. It was from her friend, Carter, who found it in a bazaar in Mombai, India. It is written in Turkish.
The little book in the middle at the top is actually the humorous Rubaiyat of a Persian Kitten first published in 1904. According to Kari, it is a classic in its own right. It counts as the thirteenth in her collection. And while I no longer buy birthday presents for my kids, I know if I ever run across an affordable old copy of the Rubaiyat, I won't be able to resist getting it for her.
Another of Kari's favourite verses - and long one of mine:
"A book of verses underneath the bough,
A jug of wine, a loaf of bread - and thou
Beside me singing in the wilderness--
Oh, wilderness were paradise enow!"
Oh, the wine, bread and cheese picnics that verse recalls! Is anything more perfectly romantic?
The oldest editions in her collection, all from the 1890's, include Kari's two favourites: 1st, the pretty brown leather one lower right with the lyre/laurel/pen emblem in gold.
2nd, the green leather, palm-sized edition on the left which she found in Taos, New Mexico. The name and date are inscribed on the fly leaf: Eugenia Glauman, Dec.1898, Chicago. The bookseller told Kari that Eugenia had been a painter of some repute in her day.
Kari sent the pictures of her Rubaiyat collection along with some of her favourite verses and the information
about her collection for which I thank her. I'm using Pietro Rotari's Young Girl Writing a Love Letter to illustrate one of my favourite Omar Khayyam verses:
"The moving finger writes: and, having writ,
Moves on: nor all thy piety nor wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,
Nor all thy tears wash out a word of it."
(In tomorrow's blog, you will find the unlikely impetus which started me thinking about Omar Khayyam.)
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