Rossetti’s “At Home” (1858) was initially titled “After the Picnic.” but when her brother Dante declared picnics frivolous and insisted on a change, Ms. Rossetti complied. It’s known Rossetti composed the poem after attending a real...
The phrase “No picnic in May” was already a cliché in July 1861 when Melville wrote in the aftermath of Bull Run, also known as the Battle of Manassas. It was an unexpected defeat for the Union army that deflated expectations of an easy victory against the Confederacy...
Carroll upends beach picnic expectations in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There (1871). Still, its tenor is darkly mocking, qualities evident in Tweedledee’s poem “The Walrus and the Carpenter” Of course, everyone laughs at the silly...
Hardy’s poems reveal an unhappy life with his wife, Emma Gifford. Perhaps the most definitive is “Where the Picnic Was,” in which he attempts to resolve their often “horrid shows” ends definitively: – But two have wandered far From...
Sandburg’s “Picnic Boat” is a snapshot of the aftermath of a Sunday picnic. It’s a visual and musical image picnicker returning at the end of a long leisurely day. Sunday night and the park policemen tell each other it is dark as a stack of...
Mansfield was in Bandol, a sea resort in the south of France, where she hoped to regain health and stability. However, her time there was unhappy, exemplified by “Pic-Nic,” a poem hinting that her state of mind was no picnic. Perhaps because it was too dark, she...
Nabokov’s “The University Poem” (1926) marks the decline of a love affair at a punting picnic on the River Cam in Cambridge. In what ought to be a happy scene of lovers on the Cam, a teem rivers full of punts bordered by tawny Gothic buildings and green lawns, and...
Betjeman’s picnics are filled with the nostalgia of his youth. The earliest appears in Cornwall (1934), a series of The Shell County Guides that he and John Beddington conceptualized. A photograph of boys at a picnic (perhaps Betjeman among them ) shows the group...
When Auden was twenty-four and just starting as a poet, he placed himself on the lower slope of Mount Parnassus, sacred to Apollo and the Muses of the arts, where he might find his place at a “picnic on the lower slopes” with minor poets. Thirty-plus years later,...
For his take on “Quatrain XI” of The Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám, Bearden transports Omar Khayyám Old World Persia to New World Tropics f. Though the poem suggests sensuality, Bearden presents the poet clothed but the woman naked, except for a body sash and a head...
