illustration friday (king)

King Crab

You know by now how often the poetry of Robert Frost inspires my etegami. But, this week, I had an encounter with a Frost poem I'd never heard of before. It's titled (yes, titled) How Hard It Is To Keep From Being King When It's In You And In The Situation. It tells a story, and it's pretty long. It has a very different feel from his better-known work, at least from my inexpert perspective.

This is how it starts out:

The King said to his son: “Enough of this!

The Kingdom’s yours to finish as you please.

I’m getting out tonight. Here, take the crown.”

But the Prince drew away his hand in time

To avoid what he wasn’t sure he wanted.

So the crown fell and the crown jewels scattered.

And the Prince answered, picking up the pieces,

“Sire, I’ve been looking on, and I don’t like

The looks of empire here. I’m leaving with you.”

So the two making good their abdication

Fled from the palace in the guise of men.

The ex-king and his son, the ex-prince, go on to have some interesting adventures and conversations, and the ex-king ends up as a slave in the service of the Great King, who is well-pleased with him and frequently rewards him with food. In the end, the Great King sort of forces the ex-King to become king in his place. At least that's the best I can figure out. The story is told in a playful, tongue-in-cheek sort of way, with references and (apparently) private jokes that sometimes baffle me. But it also has some really insightful social criticism and some lovely phrases that I enjoy rolling around on my tongue.

I have a tendency to express love through cooking, so this exchange between the ex-King (the slave) and the Great King caught my particular attention:

"I'll bet you anything that's all as King

You think of for your people-- feeding them."

But the King said, "Haven't I read somewhere

There is no act more kingly than to give?"

"Yes, but give character and not just food.

A King must give his people character."

"They can't have character unless they're fed."

"You're hopeless," said the slave.

There are loads more interesting dialogues and monologues on themes like Progress and Freedom and Language and oh! oh! oh! ...please read it for yourself. I'm busy trying to illustrate more lines from this poem that I just can't get out of my head.

Royal Albatross

illustration friday (stretch)

Sometimes just one paragraph, or even one line, from a book or poem will inspire an etegami. This etegami collage was inspired by the following lines from the poem In the Home Stretch by Robert Frost. The rest of the poem hasn't grabbed me yet, but maybe it will someday:

When there was no more lantern in the kitchen,
The fire got out through crannies in the stove
And danced in yellow wrigglers on the ceiling,
As much at home as if they’d always danced there.

illustration friday (tall)

This etegami was inspired by The Tuft of Flowers, an early poem by Robert Frost. Like so many of my favorite Frost poems, it speaks of loneliness. But the second half of the poem refutes that loneliness, as the speaker (whose task is to toss the mowed grass) finds comfort in evidence of shared sensibilities and values with someone (the mower) who has left the scene. It is a long poem, so I'll just paste the second half here:

I looked for him behind an isle of trees;

I listened for his whetstone on the breeze.

But he had gone his way, the grass all mown,

And I must be, as he had been,—alone,

As all must be,' I said within my heart,

Whether they work together or apart.'

But as I said it, swift there passed me by

On noiseless wing a 'wildered butterfly,

Seeking with memories grown dim o'er night

Some resting flower of yesterday's delight.

And once I marked his flight go round and round,

As where some flower lay withering on the ground.

And then he flew as far as eye could see,

And then on tremulous wing came back to me.

I thought of questions that have no reply,

And would have turned to toss the grass to dry;

But he turned first, and led my eye to look

At a tall tuft of flowers beside a brook,

A leaping tongue of bloom the scythe had spared

Beside a reedy brook the scythe had bared.

I left my place to know them by their name,

Finding them butterfly weed when I came.

The mower in the dew had loved them thus,

By leaving them to flourish, not for us,

Nor yet to draw one thought of ours to him.

But from sheer morning gladness at the brim.

The butterfly and I had lit upon,

Nevertheless, a message from the dawn,

That made me hear the wakening birds around,

And hear his long scythe whispering to the ground,

And feel a spirit kindred to my own;

So that henceforth I worked no more alone;

But glad with him, I worked as with his aid,

And weary, sought at noon with him the shade;

And dreaming, as it were, held brotherly speech

With one whose thought I had not hoped to reach.

Men work together,' I told him from the heart,

   Whether they work together or apart.'

by Robert Frost

illustration friday (lonely)

Desert Places

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.

Robert Frost

fan-shaped etegami

Blueberries with a Robert Frost quote

Banana with a Groucho Marx quote

Ayu (sweetfish trout) with a haiku by Buson

I painted these etegami on fan-shaped washi cards and inserted them into "frames" that I made by gluing pretty paper onto stiff, rectangular cards cut out of file folders or cookie boxes.

These etegami could be removed from the frames and replaced with other  etegami in the same shape. You could use one frame for a whole pack of fan-shaped etegami if you made the frame a neutral color. Then you could change the etegami once a month, or at least once a season. What do you think?

illustration friday (yield)

Reluctance

by Robert Frost

Out through the fields and the woods
And over the walls I have wended;
I have climbed the hills of view
And looked at the world and descended;
I have come by the highway home,
And lo, it is ended.

The leaves are all dead on the ground,
Save those that the oak is keeping
To ravel them one by one
And let them go scraping and creeping
Out over the crusted snow,
When others are sleeping.

And the dead leaves lie huddled and still,
No longer blown hither and thither;
The last lone aster is gone;
The flowers of the witch-hazel wither;
The heart is still aching to seek,
But the feet question 'Whither?'

Ah, when to the heart of man
Was it ever less than a treason
To go with the drift of things,
To yield with a grace to reason,

And bow and accept the end
Of a love or a season?

illustration friday (scattered)

Rose Pogonias by Robert Frost

A saturated meadow,
Sun-shaped and jewel-small,
A circle scarcely wider
Than the trees around were tall;
Where winds were quite excluded,
And the air was stifling sweet
With the breath of many flowers, --
A temple of the heat.

There we bowed us in the burning,
As the sun's right worship is,
To pick where none could miss them
A thousand orchises;
For though the grass was scattered,
yet every second spear
Seemed tipped with wings of color,
That tinged the atmosphere.

We raised a simple prayer
Before we left the spot,
That in the general mowing
That place might be forgot;
Or if not all so favored,
Obtain such grace of hours,
that none should mow the grass there
While so confused with flowers.

illustration friday (boundaries)

Mending Wall has always been one of my favorite poems by Robert Frost, not only for the debate it provokes within me about walls and boundaries, but also for the humor in it.

Whenever I read the part about apple trees and pine cones, I picture a pine cone version of a horror movie in which apples go after the pine cones with a crazy hunger in their eyes and sharp, flashing teeth.

For this week's Illustration Friday, I only had time to throw together a collage using bits and pieces of etegami I've painted in the past. Mending Wall has so many other delicious lines that I'd like to use in etegami some day. Here are some more that I'm just itching to quote:

Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offence.

illustration friday (swarm)

dust of snow

A friend of mine, a fellow fan of the poetry of Robert Frost, challenged me to make an etegami illustrating Frost's poem "Dust of Snow." I tried one thing after another, and finally had to be satisfied with this etegami collage.

It shows a man's winter cap dusted with snow. I painted the cap on a washi postcard in the traditional Etegami manner, then cut it out and glued it to a sheet of paper which I'd printed all over with the words of the poem in very small blue type. The bold black words were typed over a different sheet of paper which I'd printed all over in very small pink type. Then I cut the bold black words out for gluing onto the card. I kind of like the effect, but you may feel it makes the card look too busy.

Here's a different sort of attempt, a straight etegami with the crow taking center stage. The words are written in the large, blotchy letters typically produced by a bamboo dip pen. The awkwardness of this one has a sort of appeal too.

Which do you prefer?

illustration friday (dusty)

This week's IF topic made me think of the "dust" from a butterfly wing, and then I found a poem by Robert Frost called My Butterfly that I'd never heard of before. It's actually just a little bit sad, but I loved the part I quoted on this etegami. I looked at lots of butterfly photos and found one that looked like it was patterned with little hearts. Really! Except that they were black, not red.

illustration friday (winter)

Harness bells accompanied by a quote from one of my favorite winter poems, Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening by Robert Frost. This poem always brings back fond memories from my childhood, before paved roads and snowplows became common in rural Hokkaido, and we rode in horse-drawn sleds to visit our friends during the New Year holiday.

illustration friday (afterwards)

This week's IF prompt brings to mind one of Robert Frost's early poems: After Apple-Picking. It speaks of winter, weariness, sleep (death?), and tasks not completed. Here are the first 13 lines of the 42-lined poem:

After Apple-Picking
My long two-pointed ladder’s sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there’s a barrel that I didn’t fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
Apples I didn’t pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple-picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I am drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.

frost berries

I enjoy many different kinds of fruit, but NOTHING beats berries. Here are three of my favorite berries in Etegami form. I drew the top one (blueberries) with a brush pen, and the lower two (blackberries and raspberries) with a bamboo quill pen. The accompanying words are all quotes from the same Robert Frost poem titled "Blueberries."