"All in the Gay and Golden Weather"

Regarded as one of the great American Realists of the nineteenth century, Winslow Homer is known primarily for his large body of works in oil and watercolor. However, he also had an early career as a freelance illustrator, making drawings for wood engravings that were reproduced in mass-circulation periodicals such as Harper’s Weekly. In 1998, the Brooklyn Museum received a generous gift of more than 250 wood-engraved illustrations by Homer from Harvey Isbitts.

Much of the popular poetry of the late nineteenth century was not of the highest literary quality. Alice Cary’s “All in the Gay and Golden Weather” exemplifies the type of moralizing, pedestrian rhymes that told of the pitfalls of romance governed solely by the heat of passion. As the boat “sailed the way the river ran,” the couple, heedless of steering their own course, are carried by the current, unaware that they head for a nearby waterfall. Although the poem did not provide much in the way of inspiration, Homer chose to concentrate on the darker side of the theme, creating an emotional tension between the two figures that alerts the reader to the fact that the couple is destined to come to an unhappy end.