G.r.AY

what if I. . .. maud. maud gaunt? what a silly name

Tennyson’s The Charge of the Light Brigade can read like a tribute piece to the ‘noble six hundred’ soldiers who sacrificed their lives for king and country, giving themselves without a thought, but looking closer we can see Tennyson’s disdain for the Charge, the futility of it: ‘Theirs but to do and die’. Ellwood was ready to give himself like the soldiers of Balaklava, but after charging ‘so knowingly, so hopelessly, into the jaws of death’ like the very same soldiers he romanticised, his illusions of grandeur about war dissolve into a sickness for it. 

Gaunt read the works of, and about, Thucydides. Gaunt knew how he was exiled from his home of Athens during the Peloponnesian war, allowing him freedom to meet the Peloponnesians and see the war from their side, to write his accounts from both perspectives. Gaunt too is separated during his war, resulting in his experience of seeing how the men across no man’s land are not unlike the ones he fought with.

All in the valley of Death Rode the six hundred

THIS ONE’S FOR YOU ELLWOOD!! 🔥🔥🔥 I KNOW YOU’RE A KEATS FAN!!!! 🗣️🗣️🗣️

Please reblog this I had to draw historically accurate military uniforms and I’m still not sure if this is the correct Light Brigade one 🐎

(A study of La Belle Dame Sans Merci)

one year apart

these boys will simply never leave my mind will they. ack

but also that these traits are not important to the other person. Gaunt's love for Ellwood doesn't come from his handsome face - he loves his poetry, his passionate spirit.

likewise the moments Ellwood feels closest to Gaunt are those of emotional intimacy, where Gaunt shares his feelings in a way he wouldn't with anyone else - not his feats of strength or impenetrable toughness. he loves his vulnerability.

12 grimmauld place

I thought the earth remembered me, she took me back so tenderly, arranging her dark skirts, her pockets full of lichens and seeds. I slept as never before, a stone on the riverbed, nothing between me and the white fire of the stars but my thoughts, and they floated light as moths among the branches of the perfect trees. All night I heard the small kingdoms breathing around me, the insects, and the birds who do their work in the darkness. All night I rose and fell, as if in water, grappling with a luminous doom. By morning I had vanished at least a dozen times into something better.

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