Pure Pleasure: Peacocks

Villa of Poppaea, 1st C.

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It is time for pleasure, and few things are more pleasurable than peacocks.

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S.ta Costanza, Rome, 4th C.

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Dioscorides manuscript of Anicia Juliana, 6th C.

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Rotunda, Thessalonike, 4th C.

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I saw a peacock with a fiery tail

I saw a blazing comet drop down hail

I saw a cloud with ivy cirlced round

I saw a sturdy oak creep on the ground

I saw a pismire swallow up a whale

I saw a raging sea brim full of ale

I saw a Venice glass sixteen foot deep

I saw a well full of men's tears that weep

I saw their eyes all in a flame of fire

I saw a house as big as the moon and higher

I saw the sun even in the midst of night

I saw the Man that saw this wondrous sight.

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Rotunda, Thessalonike, 4th C.

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Identification  misplaced.

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Mark you how the peacock's eye
Winks away its ring of green,
Barter'd for an azure dye.
And the piece that's like a bean,
The pupil, plays its liquid jet
To win a look of violet.

Gerard Manley Hopkins

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Al Jazari's model for a drinking fountain, Topkapi Museum, ca. 1000?

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Benozzo Gozzolo, Medici Chapel, Florence, 1460

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Domination of Black

At night, by the fire,

The colors of the bushes

And of the fallen leaves,

Repeating themselves,

Turned in the room,

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

Yes: but the color of the heavy hemlocks

Came striding.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

The colors of their tails

Were like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

In the twilight wind.

They swept over the room,

Just as they flew from the boughs of the hemlocks

Down to the ground.

I heard them cry -- the peacocks.

Was it a cry against the twilight

Or against the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind,

Turning as the flames

Turned in the fire

Turning as the tails of the peacocks

Turned in the loud fire

Loud as the hemlocks

Full of the cry of the peacocks?

Or was is a cry against the hemlocks?

Out of the window,

I saw how the planets gathered

Like the leaves themselves

Turning in the wind.

I saw how the night came,

Came striding like the color of the heavy hemlocks

I felt afraid.

And I remembered the cry of the peacocks.

Wallace Stevens