A very random doodle today. Actually we’ve been having a very mild fall so far but the weather is supposed to change tomorrow so winter must have been on my mind!
She seems to be in the midst of saying something but I’m not sure what it is…
UPDATE: Just in – a lovely and bilingual approach to the illustration in the for of a Pushkin sonnet no less!
“I love this season’s consumation:
Je ne suis pas un hiver-phobe!
Mais oui, it’s still a small frustration
when the city dons her robe
of downy white; so soft, enchanting,
yet quite enough to set me ranting!
Le métro est en retard!
The slippery streets make driving hard!
But walking is for lower classes,
non pour une ingénue like me
caught adrift on snowy seas
until her handsome hero passes
who will my dreadful stress assuage
And be my knight, mon homme de neige!”
Copyright (C) 2011 TJ Radcliffe
image (cc) 2011 Hilary Farmer
Green Tea Doodles 
I love the frosty background!
Thanks Max! feelin’ frosty….
“I love this season’s consumation:
Je ne suis pas un hiver-phobe!
Mais oui, it’s still a small frustration
when the city dons her robe
of downy white; so soft, enchanting,
yet quite enough to set me ranting!
Le Métro est en retard!
The slippery streets make driving hard!
But walking is for lower classes,
non pour une ingénue like me
caught adrift on snowy seas
until her handsome hero passes
who will my dreadful stress assuage
And be my knight, mon homme de neige!”
🙂
Copyright (C) 2011 TJ Radcliffe
I had a lot of fun with this, and I’m pretty sure this is one instance where the poem took comparably long to the image! Although the French is probably not quite cricket I’m going to put down all the irregularities to poetic license.
I saw her as a sophisticated Type-A Montrealer who wants to be enchanted by the beauty of the snow but who can’t quite get past the inconvenience it’s causing her.
The form is a Pushkin sonnet, which I’ve been working on learning. It’s iambic tetrameter with a rhyme scheme of aBaBccDDeFFeGG where the lower case letters are “feminine rhymes”, with a trailing unstressed syllable. Because English doesn’t have much in the way of grammatical gender it’s a bit of an odd distinction, but it’s what Pushkin calls for and who am I to argue?
The first snow of the year is just falling in a few sparse flakes here, so a very timely image, too!
Great fun Tom! I must say that I had thought of her as rather younger and perhaps more up for a snow ball fight than worried about driving, but I love hearing your take on it!
I think she’s just driving, probably, making the snowfall extremely inconvenient for her, but she wants to see herself as much more mature than her chronological age!
…and such a nice homage to Montréal… 🙂
Very cute poem and your French is excellent. The only typo I notice is “Métro”. I would use a lowercase “m” to clearly make it the subway, as opposed to the grocery store’s brand name. Anyway, awesome bilingual mix!!
Thanks, Max!