Angels

摘要

When he was eight years old, William Blake saw a flock of angels in a tree. Their bright wings "bespangled every bough like stars". He also watched them in a field on the outskirts of London, threading through the oblivious haymakers. Cecil Collins, an English artist working in the second half of the 20th century, painted angels as he saw them: inhabiting trees, blessing rivers, walking by the sea. In 1949 Jacques Prevert, a French surrealist poet, imagined a boxing match with an angel under magnesium lights. He ended up winded and defeated, blinded with feathers. Pia Northrup, a Danish poet, spots angels in her modern Danish kitchen ("An angel came in;/we fled from him/as though we had got too near the fire").