A Study in Emerald

A quick conflation- emerald is May’s birthstone, and today is was the last episode of BBC’s Sherlock on PBS. Who knows how long until the next one. So I’m letting some fangirl out. (And going to go read The Adventure of the Empty House for meagre consolation.)

Neil Gaiman’s brilliant A Study in Emerald is a fun mix of Doyle‘s world and Lovecraft‘s mythos is available on his website. As a bonus this version looks like an old fashioned newspaper. Very fun!

A quirky collection of emerald Cthulhu and Sherlock themed crafts in honor of May’s birthstone and Gaiman’s story. (Yes, the comma was left out intentionally, they’re all emerald colored pieces!)

 

A Garden

Not really in the mood to write or research, but wanted to at least pop by. So a photo I took awhile back at a sort of local farm, Edmondson’s to illustrate one of my favorite poems. Edmondson’s also happens to be my favorite place to get pumpkins, has been since a family friend took me as a kid.

 

H.P. Lovecraft always brings to my mind eldritch creatures with too many tentacles, creepy seaside communities and a haunting violin. And then there’s this poem a friend introduced me to years ago. For something completely different and haunting in it’s own way.

 

 

by H. P. Lovecraft

 

There’s an ancient, ancient garden that I see sometimes in dreams,
Where the very Maytime sunlight plays and glows with spectral gleams;
Where the gaudy-tinted blossoms seem to wither into grey,
And the crumbling walls and pillars waken thoughts of yesterday.
There are vines in nooks and crannies, and there’s moss about the pool,
And the tangled weedy thicket chokes the arbour dark and cool:
In the silent sunken pathways springs a herbage sparse and spare,
Where the musty scent of dead things dulls the fragrance of the air.
There is not a living creature in the lonely space around,
And the hedge~encompass’d quiet never echoes to a sound.
As I walk, and wait, and listen, I will often seek to find
When it was I knew that garden in an age long left behind;
I will oft conjure a vision of a day that is no more,
As I gaze upon the grey, grey scenes I feel I knew before.
Then a sadness settles o’er me, and a tremor seems to start –

For I know the flow’rs are shrivell’d hopes – the garden is my heart.