Stars And Daisies: Andrew Young And Harald Sohlberg

"Flower Meadow in the North" was painted by Harald Sohlberg (1869-1935) in 1905, when he was staying at Gullikstad, Norway.  It is in the collection of the Nasjonalgalleriet in Oslo.  Sohlberg is one of many fine Scandinavian landscape painters of the 19th and early-20th centuries.  As an introduction to these artists, I recommend Torsten Gunnarsson's Nordic Landscape Painting in the Nineteenth Century (1998) and A Mirror of Nature: Nordic Landscape Painting, 1840-1910 (2006), by Gunnarsson and others.   

I featured "Flower Meadow in the North" in a previous post, and I thought of it again when reading the following poem by Andrew Young (1885-1971):

                         Daisies

The stars are everywhere to-night,
Above, beneath me and around;
They fill the sky with powdery light
And glimmer from the night-strewn ground;
For where the folded daisies are
In every one I see a star.

And so I know that when I pass
Where no sun's shadow counts the hours
And where the sky was there is grass
And where the stars were there are flowers,
Through the long night in which I lie
Stars will be shining in my sky.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1960).  "Daisies" in turn brings to mind two lines from Young's "The Ruined Chapel":

And headstones lie so deep in grass
They follow dead men to their graves.

Andrew Young, Collected Poems (1960).