Posts Tagged ‘ tragedy ’
Alice Neel painted this portrait in 1970 on commission from TIME Magazine. It hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C. and is considered one of the finest examples of Neel’s work.
Your hair is scattered light:
The Greeks will bind it with petals.
And like a little beast,
Dappled and without horns,
That scampered on the hill-rocks,
They will leave you
With stained throat —
Though you never cropped hill-grass
To the reed-cry
And the shepherd’s note.
Some Greek hero is cheated
And your mother’s court
Of its bride.
And we ask this — where truth is,
Of what use is valour and is worth?
For evil has conquered the race,
There is no power but in base men,
Nor any man whom the gods do not hate.
H.D. (Hilda Doolittle) (1886-1961): Chorus to Iphigeneia, from Choruses from The Iphigeneia in Aulis and the Hippolytus of Euripides, The Egoist, London, 1919