Yesterday I got into Samuel Taylor Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, reading great swaths of it out loud (with no audience, which was maybe just as well). Then I went looking for illustrations and found a plethora of pen-and-ink drawings. Apparently the good Mariner didn't lend himself to colour pictures.
I was stunned to find one called Life-in-Death, drawn in the 1940s by illustrator Mervyn Peake. It looks as if it were done 200 years earlier, but even spookier than that is its resemblance to a certain macabre figure of the 21s century.
Does the word propofol mean anything to you?
Are those her ribs through which the sun
Did peer, as through a grate?
And is that Woman all her crew?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Is that a Death? and are there two?
Her lips were red, her looks were free,
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her locks were yellow as gold:
Her skin was as white as leprosy,
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
The Nightmare Life-in-Death was she,
Who thicks man's blood with cold.
http://margaretgunnng.blogspot.com/2012/01/synopsis-glass-character-novel-by.html
