A Keats Treat: A Brief London Exposure

I was so wiped out yesterday that I only had time--or rather, the energy--to only update you on the Bath experience, but yesterday, I went to London for the first time! Our Spencer House gang thought we really needed to make the most of this week before our Regent's Park life began, so we took the day to go see a matinee of A Streetcar Named Desire...or at least that was our plan. See, what had happened was that I saw that Streetcar was playing in London's West End, and I was really interested in seeing an English adaptation of a very Southern play. Plus, Tennessee Williams is a playwright very close to my heart. Well, we got to the theatre, and there were no tickets left. Sold Out. So, there we were, standing in London's West End with not a thing to do after we had taken an hour train ride from Oxford. Our solution? We went to the British Museum!



Founded in 1753, the British Museum houses an impressive array of Egyptian, Grecian, and Roman art. Some notable pieces are the Rosetta Stone and the Parthenon sculptures brought over (aka possibly pillaged by) by Lord Elgin. Even though I'm not a big ancient Egypt fan, I still enjoyed the huge carvings, hieroglyphs, sarcophagi, and votive statues (although there's something about those big ole bulging eyes on ancient votive statues that give me the wiggins). The Grecian statues, however, were an absolute party for the eyes, and I could feel the emotions coming from the marble.


(Surprised Aphrodite--don't surprise goddesses, just as a general rule, ok?)


(Naiads--water nymphs, so the wet drapery effect is pretty and fitting.)

Finally, the most moving piece was the pediment sculptures of the Parthenon. These sculptures, along with many others from the Parthenon, were brought over to England by Lord Elgin, with a rather disregard for ethics. See, Elgin just kind of took these from the capital of Greece as British property, and then they wound up in the British Museum. But did he really have the right to pirate creations which should rightfully belong to Greece? The Romantic poet Lord Byron did not think so, and quite frankly, neither do I. However, all colonial ambiguity aside, the marble work was absolutely breath taking, and while viewing the triangularly arranged gods and goddesses that would have rested in the Parthenon's pediment, I kept thinking of Keat's sonnet, "On Seeing the Elgin Marbles for the First Time," which I will leave here, along with my photos. Read, look, and reflect...like, now:

My spirit is too weak; mortality
Weighs heavily on me like unwilling sleep,
And each imagined pinnacle and steep
Of godlike hardship tells me I must die
Like a sick eagle looking at the sky.
Yet 'tis a gentle luxury to weep,
That I have not the cloudy winds to keep
Fresh for the opening of the morning's eye.
Such dim-conceived glories of the brain
Bring round the heart an indescribable feud;
So do these wonders a most dizzy pain,
That mingles Grecian grandeur with the rude
Wasting of old Time -with a billowy main,
A sun, a shadow of a magnitude.