It’s not the thing, anymore, to be one of a set of literary siblings. There’s no longer anything outré in converting to Roman Catholicism. There’s nobody these days quite like Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), to stand godfather if you do. There are simply no more of the kind of people who gathered for that famous 1948 Gotham Book Mart photograph, in which Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), looking like Yertle the Turtle in a turban, presides over what Bennet Cerf called “the darnedest assortment of celebrities”: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gore Vidal, among others, with W.H. Auden towering over the rest of them on a ladder. Whatever made it possible, that cosmic alignment of famous eccentricities, it’s gone. It’s gone and taken Sitwell with it. Artistic fashion, like every other kind of fashion, flashes upon us and vanishes away.

Today’s Poem of the Day, “Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe,” meditates on this central phenomenon of time: that however immovable any given moment might seem to the people caught in it, it never stands still. The poem’s title recalls not one painting, but possibly multiple ones, to which the poem responds. Most obviously there’s  the 1863 painting by Édouard Manet, scandalous in its day for presenting a nude woman in a picnic scene with two clothed men. We’ve all had nightmares like that painting.