I.

 

Dadd was, by force of circumstance,
an artist who lived outside the art community.

 

      II.

 

He was a young man
when he killed his father.

 

      III.

 

He spent the rest of his life
in confinement in Bethlem hospital

 

where he produced a series of paintings
on the subject of fairies.

 

      IV.

 

The most elaborate of these is
The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke.

 

      V.

 

It is a painstakingly detailed work.

 

      VI.

 

It depicts a crowd of little people
standing among towering daisies

 

and watching a scene whose import must forever
remain locked in Dadd's imagination.

                                         A poem comprised of lines from The Symbolists by Michael Gibson. Harry N. Abrams, 1988. p. 70.

 

I've always been interested in found poetry—there's a lot of poetry around us just waiting to be discovered! Not everything works as a poem though, so I'm always on the lookout for words, phrases, and sentences that might be interesting in themselves or in combination with other words, phrases, and sentences. I was very taken by the sentence about Richard Dadd that I found in Michael Gibson's book The Symbolists, and I found that when I set it in a certain way, it worked independently as a poem.

 

 

                                                                                                         ~Bill Yarrow

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