THE SPHINX

BY JOHN DUNCAN

‘As the waters fail from the sea,
And the flood decayeth and drieth up,
So Man lieth down, and riseth not
Till the heavens be no more.’

Image is of a figure who is hunched over with his head down and his arm resting on the paw of a giant sphinx who towers over him. The sphinx’s face and headdress take up the majority of the picture space. The sphinx’s gaze is directed into the distance. Its eyes have no pupils and its nose eyebrows mouth ears and chin are drawn with clean simple lines. A pattern of six thick black lines decorate the bottom of the sphinx’s headdress. The figure beneath the sphinx has dark hair The figures hands are clasped together in front of him. His chest is bare but a garment is visible around his waist Behind the sphinx exaggeratedly large stars are visible in the night sky. The artists mark can be found on the lower right side of the image and the engraver’s signature Hare Sc is visible below it in the bottom right corner. Under the poem’s title on the previous page there is an epigraph from the book of Job which reads “As the waters fail from the sea and the flood decyeth and drieth up So Man lieth down and riseth not Till the heavens be no more”

MLA citation:

Duncan, John. “The Sphinx.” The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal, vol. 4, Winter 1896-7, p. 64. Evergreen Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, 2016-2018. The Yellow Nineties 2.0, Ryerson University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2018. https://1890s.ca/egv4_duncan_sphinx/

magazine_images The Evergreen: A Northern Seasonal 4 The Sphinx John Duncan Pen and ink Hare Sc

Egypt nighttime starry sky figure hunched over dark hair artists monogram engravers mark