It's great the wee meanders you take down the endless corridors of internet. I started with John Keats, then via La Belle Dame Sans Merci to the medieval French poet Alain Chartier, and from Alain Chartier via a historically impossible anecdote to Margaret D'Ecosse, Princess Margaret Stewart, the child bride of the future King Louis XI of France. A lost Scottish poet dead at 20.
Marguerite D'Écosse
Margaret Stewart
wrote poetry every evening.
She was loved for it by a few
but to most of the courtiers
she was the butt of jokes:
they laughed at her clothes,
her diet, her manners,
but most of all her desire
to write: as if a teenager
from the savage north could
have noble fancies and
the skill and wit to pen them.
Her husband hated her,
married her for her dowry
of Scottish troops,
tore her verses up when she
died. He was a successful King:
in other words a brutal thug
with libraries of books
written about him,
but she is remembered
in the vague and beautiful
ways that matter to some,
in scraps and stories
that might be dreams.
They say the master writer
Alain Chartier,
France’s finest, had a vision
where she graced him
with a poet’s kiss.
The painting, by Edmund Leighton is above.
Here's a link to Alain Chartier:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Chartier
https://www.hughmcmillanwriter.co.uk/
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