Évariste Carpentier, Belgian
Becky Didn’t Understand Why This Kept Happening: One Minute She Was Taking a Head Count of Her Flock, and the Next She Was Out Like a Light, 1882
Oil on panel
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Info, or perhaps links that point to more info, about this artist can be found here (archived if necessary), here, here (Google translated if necessary), here, and here (can be read in full for free on Fridays), perhaps in addition to what’s in his Wikipedia page (Google translated French Wikipedia page has more).
The archive of a now non-existent webpage has the same info as the last here link, and can be read in full anytime the archive is available.
/// She gets drowsy around three o’clock.
Finds a grove, the bright sunlight, to block.
While the shepherdess sleeps
her alert sheepdog keeps
careful watch on the wandering flock.
/// Some sheep rest, others graze on the grass
as they wait for the soft-snoring lass.
One ewe digs a long rut
as she scoots on her butt,
driven wild by an itch in her ass.
/// As she slumbers she pictures a man—
strong and tall with a dark shepherd’s tan.
Though in dreams he’ll propose,
the sole shepherd she knows
is the Belgian dog she calls Kazan.
/// Belgian Shepherd, Kazan, looks and sees
a bulge tucked ‘tween her apron and knees.
The girl hides, (while she dozes),
her meal, but the beasts’ noses
are aware she’s got Limburger cheese.
/// That rank cheese was leftover from lunch,
but she used it for more than to munch.
It would keep, people say,
the mosquitos away.
(Men who roused her she’d deck with a punch.)
/// All the boys she’d grown up with were sleazy.
To find love she refused to be “easy.”
If a man “has his way”
he’s unlikely to stay.
She’d much rather be thought of as cheesy.
/// She awoke. By her side was a note.
“We have taken your flock,” someone wrote.
Looked around. Deep despair.
Sheep and dog weren’t there.
Even worse, they had gotten her goat.