Monet, by Bradbury

[browngirl]

med_cat posted this poem and I had to repost it. It touched me more than any of Monet's works did (my tastes in art run more towards Bouguereau than Impressionism).

Monet

Aug. 3rd, 2013 at 6:40 PM

He liked the way light went down the sky
And slid on church fronts, beckoning their shapes,
The more the shadows shaped the stone,
The more that Monet gaped and stood amazed
At every shadowed fret, each spire that blazed
The crazed incredible soft fracturings of light
When God said, Sun now set, now dark, now dark, now night.
Each measuring of air, each loss of sight
And then--reverse--erase the shade, sketch in the bright.
God's whisperings of sun, the merest drift
Drove Monet to his paints to catch and sift
Illuminations moulded like bright shrouds
In faceted cathedral face or dying clouds,
The blush of storms, the way wind looks in grass
Serenities of waterflower trapped in glass
And held forever till some day
Some wandering soul, fog-kept, stops, stares, to say:
Monet was camera to dawn, noon, dusk, and murmured night.
Monet told God: "Please, light!" And there was light.

(Ray Bradbury)

Comments

[med_cat]

Bouguereau's works look quite attractive, shall have to post some of them sometime ;) Thanks!

And very pleased you liked the poem ;)

[brighteyed-jill.livejournal.com]

This is beautiful. May I also recommend my favorite poem about Monet? It's Monet Refuses the Operation by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no haloes
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don’t see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don’t know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one great continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.

[theloriest.livejournal.com]

I love love love that poem so much, thank you for sharing it!!!

[shirebound]

Monet was camera to dawn, noon, dusk, and murmured night.
Monet told God: "Please, light!" And there was light.

Oh my goodness. Perfection.