A SONG OF THE PYRENEES.

Out of your smile I weave a silver web,
And as the day grows down to evensong
I fold it round my heart, this glistening veil,
And sit and dream there shrouded in your smile.

Out of a word from you I weave a song,
And a dim music that I only hear
Flows through the hours of sunshine and of storm,
The music of the stars out of one word.

Out of your silences I build my heaven,
A strange fair garden ’neath a slumbering moon ;
Amid the din and chatter of the world
I dwell there in my heaven of silences.

Alix Egerton.

This hand-coloured triptych consists of three images, side-by-side horizontally, framed with a thick black line. The image depicts a singular landscape, divided into thirds. The leftmost section is sunny, the centre is rainy, and the rightmost is in nightfall. The left section contains a hilly landscape. The sun is partially in frame in the top left corner and its beams extend along the background of the image, behind mountain crests and clouds. In the foreground, a blue river spans the image. Behind it, red and green land dotted with bushes and plants extends up to grey-coloured mountains. In the centre section, the hilly landscape continues, but this section is dominated by rainclouds along the top of the frame. Rain, represented by vertical lines, falls diagonally from the upper left to the bottom right corner. In the middle-ground of this section, a forest rendered in black ink outlines the landscape between the river and mountains. In the rightmost section, the third part of the landscape is depicted in moonlight. This section is coloured in shades of purple and blue. The river that spanned the first two image sections horizontally turns in this section, retreating between two mountains into the horizon. From between two mountains, a white moon is partially visible against a deep blue sky.

MLA citation:

Egerton, Alix. “A Song of the Pyrenees,” illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. The Green Sheaf, No. 1, 1903, p. [iv]. Green Sheaf Digital Edition, edited by Lorraine Janzen Kooistra, Yellow Nineties 2.0, Toronto Metropolitan University Centre for Digital Humanities, 2022. https://1890s.ca/GSV1-egerton-pyrenees/

magazine_texts The Green Sheaf 1 A Song of the Pyrenees Alix Egerton 1903 Poetry