Black Bull of Sorrow

Oh, white wall of Spain!

Richard Meier & Partners’ Barcelona Museum of Contemporary Art, Plaça dels Àngels, Barcelona, Spain

Oh, black bull of sorrow!

From Federico García Lorca’s Weeping for the Death of Ignacio Sánchez Mejías (1935)

A Season in Hell

A while back, if I remember right, my life was one long party where all hearts were open wide, where all wines kept flowing.

Marylebone Road, Westminster, NW1

One night, I sat Beauty down on my lap.—And I found her galling.—And I roughed her up.

Tontone Street, Folkestone, Kent, CT20

I armed myself against justice.

Queenstown Road, Wandsworth, SW8

I ran away. O witches, O misery, O hatred, my treasure’s been turned over to you!

Democracy Village, Parliament Square, Westminster, SW1P

I managed to make every trace of human hope vanish from my mind. I pounced on every joy like a ferocious animal eager to strangle it.

Gerry Judah's Auschwitz-Birkenau Model, The Holocaust Exhibition, Imperial War Museum, Lambeth, SE1

I called for executioners so that, while dying, I could bite the butts of their rifles. I called for plagues to choke me with sand, with blood. Bad luck was my god. I stretched out in the muck. I dried myself in the air of crime. And I played tricks on insanity.

From Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell (1873)

The Dream

Our life is twofold; Sleep hath its own world,
A boundary between the things misnamed

The Stade, Folkestone, Kent, CT19

Death and existence: Sleep hath its own world,
And a wide realm of wild reality,

Spring Gardens, Coding Street, Vauxhall, Lambeth, SE11

And dreams in their development have breath,
And tears, and tortures, and the touch of joy;

Church of St John-at-Hackney, Lower Clapton Road, Hackney, E5

They leave a weight upon our waking thoughts,
They take a weight from off waking toils,

Brentford, Middlesex, TW8

They do divide our being; they become
A portion of ourselves as of our time,

Dawlish, Devon, EX7

And look like heralds of eternity;
They pass like spirits of the past -they speak

Cleopatra's Needle, Embankment, Westminster, WC2N

Like sibyls of the future; they have power -
The tyranny of pleasure and of pain;

RAF War Memorial, Embankment, Westminster, WC2N

They make us what we were not -what they will,
And shake us with the vision that’s gone by,

George Blackall Simonds' Maiwand Lion, Forbury Gardens, Reading, Berkshire, RG1

The dread of vanished shadows -Are they so?
Is not the past all shadow? -What are they?

From Lord Byron’s The Dream (1816)