Illustration Friday: Wilderness

"Tim enters the enchanted glade.": (From: "How Tim was Lost in the Forest and Never Seen Again.") Please click for big.

Not that it's related to this illustration, but after seeing spindlemaker's and dthaase' work, I realised that I always think of this poem by Wallace Stevens when someone says "Wilderness".

Wallace Stevens was an insurance salesman..... never a more un-poetic vocation there was - and yet that didn't stop him at all. "Anecdote of the Jar" is a strange poem, indistinct, as if it is feeling its way around the subject matter, before slowly petering out. Yet I think his poem succinctly sums up how we (as humans) try to make order out of chaos. Cliched it might be, the concept of making unnatural order out of natural chaos, but it stops us going mad - assuming we aren't already... just a little bit mad..... even slightly cookoo.... there are no trolls under the bridge, are there....?

Anecdote of the Jar

I placed a jar in Tennessee,

And round it was, upon a hill.

It made the slovenly wilderness

Surround that hill.

The wilderness rose up to it,

And sprawled around, no longer wild.

The jar was round upon the ground

And tall and of a port in air.

It took dominion everywhere.

The jar was gray and bare.

It did not give of bird or bush,

Like nothing else in Tennessee.

Wallace Stevens