#english epic poem

[artemlegere]

Sir Arthegal, the Knight of Justice, with Talus, the Iron Man (from Spenser’s ‘Faerie Queene’)

Artist: John Hamilton Mortimer (British, 1740–1779)

Date: Exhibited 1778

Medium: Oil paint on canvas

Collection: TATE Britain

Description

This painting refers to the courtly fantasy of British origins prevalent in the Elizabethan age and the seventeenth century. It illustrates Edmund Spenser’s The Fairie Queene 1590/6, a poem that claims Elizabeth I as heir to King Arthur’s British kingdom.

Arthegal was one of the Queene’s knights, trained by the immortal Astraea to be the champion of True Justice. She gave him the invincible sword, Chrysaor, which he holds here. Behind him is Talus, his squire. Talus was a man ‘made of iron mould, immoveable, resistlesse��. He carries an iron flail with which he threshes out falsehood.

[wronghands1]

[sictransitgloriamvndi]

[mythoughttherapy]

“The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

—John Milton, Paradise Lost

[mythologypaintings]

The Return of Ulysses

Artist: Frederick Trevelyan Goodall (English, 1848-1871)

Date: 1869

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Art Gallery of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Description

The Return of Ulysses is the story of Odysseus's return home from the Trojan War in Homer's Odyssey. The story is about Odysseus' struggles to return home, his reunion with his family, and his revenge against his wife's suitors

[kyathedino]

sitting in english class rn is a constant mix of 'what the fuck does that sentence mean' and 'everyone in this classroom telepathically can sense that i have read odyssey fanfiction'

[humanconditionpoetry]

Demeter’s Wrath:

The goodness of spring

A daughter’s bud

In the garden of heavenly sings

Till one day, a spilt in the mud

The daughter sank

Seeing the underworld and who ruled

The daughter’s love, choose her own rank

They were the impearled and the fooled

Demeter’s Warth was felt

Demanded her bud be returned

The bud was a flower in dead’s dealt

Zeus settled the matter, adjourned

Six months out of the year

Cold and snow appeared, due to the following of young hearts, her name was Persephone - Demeter’s and Hades dear.

Author Note: This is my first attempt at sonnet, let me know what you guys think. I also do not know if this poem is good, so I am just going to post it( I keep going back and forth in editing).

Thanks for reading and check out my blog for more!

[gennsoup]

My own experiences as a woman tell me it's very possible to be mistaken for monstrous when one is only doing as men do: providing for and defending oneself.

Maria Dahvana Headley (trans.), Beowulf (Introduction)

[pancakecat133]

(Please share this because my account has been restricted.🚫)

Please help me get my father out of Gaza for treatment. All he needs is $1200. His life is in your hands. Please don't ignore me. Your donation is great, no matter how small.

:3

[sweetflutereads]

“Somehow I pushed God from this place.… Dawn lights an emptied room.… Will you join our table, scarred as it is?”

— Meghan Purvis translation, Beowulf

[iwasntsatiated]

Oh I need escapism BAD today. But I specifically need whatever I watch or read to be about a hero’s journey as they encounter mythical creatures or something :)

[aguavivia]

[vulpinesaint]

sorry thinking about how i wrote an entirely lovecraft themed poem about transgenderism for my beginning creative writing class last semester and one single person besides the professor in that room full of english majors recognized that it was referencing lovecraft. i do not mean this in a way that shames people for not having read stuff or for not having the means to read stuff. but oh my god guys does anyone who is getting a higher level education in literature even look at the literary sources of common phenomena in media nowadays

[kecobe]

Don Juan George Gordon Byron, Baron Byron (British; 1788–1824) Autograph manuscript, unsigned First draft of Cantos I–V  (Venice and Ravenna, July 3, 1818–November 30, 1819 and October 16–November 27, 1820 The Morgan Library & Museum, New York

[mythologypaintings]

Lake Avernus: Aeneas and the Cumaean Sibyl

Artist: Joseph Mallord William Turner (English, 1775–1851)

Date: 1814-1815

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: Yale Center for British Art, New Haven, Connecticut, United States

Description

The Cumaean Sibyl occupied a cave complex above Lake Avernus, near Naples, and was highly respected in antiquity as an oracle of Apollo. In Virgil’s Aeneid, Aeneas consults the sibyl to seek guidance on his destiny after abandoning Dido in Carthage. J. M. W. Turner shows Aeneas sacrificing to Apollo before receiving the god’s answer through the sibyl. Dissatisfied, Aeneas then asks the sibyl to let him go down to Hades to speak with his dead father. This picture was made for Sir Richard Colt Hoare, the antiquarian and amateur artist who owned the celebrated landscape garden at Stourhead in Wiltshire, which was designed to evoke the ideal Italianate landscapes that Turner emulated in this painting. Since Turner did not visit Italy until 1819, Hoare supplied Turner with his own sketches of the landscape at Cumae. Hoare intended to pair Turner’s painting with Lake Nemi with Diana and Callisto (1758) by Richard Wilson, which was already at Stourhead.

The story of Aeneas and the Sibyl is from the sixth book of Virgil's "Aeneid." The Trojan hero and his men land on the Italian coast at Cumae, near Naples, a famous shrine to the god Apollo. Knowing there is an entrance to the underworld near by, he begs the Sibyl (Apollo's priestess and prophetess) to take him to see the shade of his dead father. She tells him he must first break off a golden bough from a tree in a neighboring grove to take as an offering for the queen of the underworld, Proserpine. Then she leads him to a cave near Lake Avernus, named from the Greek for "birdless" since the vapors rising from the underworld killed any birds flying overhead, and here they make their descent. As the tale of a hero who braves the unknown, leaving Apollo's realm of light and sun to follow his destiny in the nether regions, this was the kind of classical legend that appealed most powerfully to the Romantic imagination.

[semperardens-juli]

"History was preserved in the form of legends and mythologies that were passed down from one generation to the next, and offered answers to the mysteries of the universe and its creation."

The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton

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