1r:1
Afternoon in February

The day is ending
The night descending
The marsh is frozen
The river dead.

Through clouds like ashes
The red sun flashes
On village windows
That glimmer red.

And through the meadows
Like fearful shadows
Slowly passes
a funeral train.

Longfellow1

 1v:2
Three kingsdaughters fair
Fly away my heart away
Sweet appleblossoms bloom
So sweet so sweet.

Ah says the eldest one
Fly away my heart away.
The days began so sweet
So sweet.

Ah says the second one
Fly away my heart away
Far off I hear the drum
So sweet.

Ah says the youngest one
Fly away my heart away
’t Is my true love my own
So sweet.2

RM03

Br. 1990: 028 | CL:
From: Vincent van Gogh
To: Theo van Gogh
Date: London, probably between December 1874 and March 1876
more...
 
 
 
close
1. ‘Afternoon in February’ taken from Longfellow’s volume The belfry of Bruges and other poems. See Longfellow 1886-1891, vol. 1, pp. 223-224. Van Gogh copied five of the six stanzas of the poem in the margin of the lithograph Going to church for the last time (The funeral in the cornfield) [1912] by J.J. van der Maaten, a print which he gave in 1877 or 1878 to his teacher M.B. Mendes da Costa. See letter 128, n. 38.
[1912]
2. A rather free version after ‘My father’s close (Old French)’ by Dante Gabriel Rossetti; the complete text reads:

Inside my father’s close,
(Fly away O my heart away!)
Sweet apple-blossom blows
So sweet.

Three kings’ daughters fair,
(Fly away O my heart away!)
They lie below it there
So sweet.

‘Ah!’ says the eldest one,
(Fly away O my heart away!)
‘I think the day’s begun
So sweet.’

‘Ah!’ says the second one,
(Fly away O my heart away!)
‘Far off I hear the drum
So sweet.’

‘Ah!’ says the youngest one,
(Fly away O my heart away!)
‘It’s my true love, my own,
So sweet.’

‘Oh! if he fight and win,’
(Fly away O my heart away!)
‘I keep my love for him,
So sweet:
Oh! let him lose or win,
He hath it still complete.’

See Poems. London 1870, pp. 184-185.