provides a treasure trove of practical techniques and ingenious approaches. In this captivating guide, noted artist
Jane Freeman shows readers, step by step, how to use modified kit components, and found and handmade objects to create intensely detailed miniature constructions.
« Murder, She Reads | Main | GRACE UNDER (water) PRESSURE »
October 31, 2006
Quoth the Poet Evermore
In Edgar Allan Poe’s day, Fordham was entirely rural. The “snug little cottage� that the author rented (1846-1849 @ $100 a year) is now a museum in the Bronx, which I visited a couple of days ago. Despite its quaint contours, a presence of sadness, deprivation, illness, death and loneliness hangs about the sere, aged rooms. Edgar and Virginia Poe, and Virginia’s mother Maria Clemm lived there together in destitution. They did without proper heat (well, I do too, but out of choice); their cat Catterina kept Virginia warm (along with E.A.’s overcoat) as she lay dying of TB. Mrs. Clemm foraged in the fields for their supper of dandelion greens.
A few small rooms comprise this 1812 frame cottage. The walls are painted white, with green-blue trim. Here Poe wrote “Annabelle Lee,� “The Bells,� and other important works. I went outside and walked all the way around the cottage. The scruffy lawn was suitably autumnal, sepulchral. I peeked in the windows at the rooms dimly lit by candles. In a tiny downstairs chamber, Virginia had died in that very bed. In the attic, up a set of steep and precarious stairs, are two more rooms, and a peculiar space with slitty windows, a severely pitched ceiling. The place was fairly bare, no rugs on the wide-plank floor; few pieces of furniture, much as when Poe lived there.
Darling Poe Cottage, in the middle of the overly urbanized Bronx, providentially preserved. As I left, I noticed some small tin wind chimes tied to a porch rafter. Anachronistic perhaps, yet they seemed to offer their own miniature tintinnabulation of welcome and farewell.
Posted by Jane on October 31, 2006 1:59 PM
