I used this one from the movie Bull Durham (which I watched last month for about the 83rd time): "Full many a flower is born to blush unseen, And waste its sweetness on the desert air." It's from a poem written by Thomas Gray called "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard" (you can find the full text here).
In the movie, Kevin Costner's character hits a minor league batting record but no one knows about it except him and Susan Sarandon's character. When I heard these lines of the poem this last time, it made me think of the women in the vintage photographs I've been buying over the past year or two. Looking at those photos now, 100 years or so after they were taken, we don't know how they lived their lives or what they may have quietly accomplished in their own corner of the world. I also think of how differently their lives would have been led compared to how things are today, the restrictions they faced as women in society and how, like the lines of the poem, they may have had to bloom quietly and unnoticed, as wives, widows, spinsters, mothers, perhaps taken for granted by their loved ones, perhaps unable to fulfill their dreams. I think it's because the old photographs only show us the black and white images, we don't see the colour of their lives - the joy, the achievements, the bliss they may have found in their days.
Here's how my page turned out:
and here is a close-up of the text and the photo:
1 comment:
If I don't move to Seattle I'm moving to Toronto so I can go to Bizzy B with you.
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