An Illustrated Courtship Poem
- Three approximately 8 x 10 inch pages
- Sing Sing (Ossining), New York , unknown year
Sing Sing (Ossining), New York, unknown year. Three approximately 8 x 10 inch pages. Excellent to near fine.. An illustrated poem from an unknown sender to Miss Cornelia Marshall in Sing Sing, New York. Sing Sing was the name of Ossining—which is home to the eponymous prison—until 1901. It was named for the Sint Sinck (Wappinger) people, whose traditional territory lay east of the Hudson River in what is now Westchester County.
The poem is chastely flirtatious, telling the story of a man at church services who is so distracted by the beauty of one of the women in the church choir that he cannot report on the subject of that day’s sermon. The author describes the woman, who wears a blue cloak: “Her beauty’s so great that it looked like the sun/ Or five handsome ladies all rolled into one”. The illustrations appear to be ink and watercolor. A sweet piece, of interest to folk art historians.
The poem is chastely flirtatious, telling the story of a man at church services who is so distracted by the beauty of one of the women in the church choir that he cannot report on the subject of that day’s sermon. The author describes the woman, who wears a blue cloak: “Her beauty’s so great that it looked like the sun/ Or five handsome ladies all rolled into one”. The illustrations appear to be ink and watercolor. A sweet piece, of interest to folk art historians.