Cloud Painter
Suggested by the life and art of John Constable
At first, as you know, the sky is incidental--
a drape, a backdrop for the trees and steeples.
Here an oak clutches a rock (already he works outdoors),
a wall buckles but does not break,
water pearls through a lock, a haywain trembles.
The pleasures of landscape are endless. What we see
around us should be enough.
Horizons are typically high and far away.
Still, clouds let us drift and remember. He is, after all,
a miller's son, used to trying
to read the future in the sky, seeing instead
ships, hornes, instruments of flight.
Is that his mother's wash flapping on the line?
His schoolbook, smudged, illegible?
In this period, the sky becomes significant.
Cloud forms are technically correct--mares' tails
sheep-in-the-meadow, thunderheads.
You can almost tell which scenes have been interrupted
by summer showers.
How his young wife dies.
His landscapes achieve belated success.
His is invited to join the Academy. I forget
whether he accepts or not.
In any case, the literal forms give way
to something spectral, nameless. His palette shrinks
ti gray, blue, white--the colors of charity.
Horizons sink and fade,
trees draw back till they are little more than frames,
then they too disappear.
Finally the canvas itself begins to vibrate
with waning light,
as if the wind could paint.
And we too, at last, stare into a space
which tells us nothing,
except that the world can vanish along with our need for it.
Jane Flanders has written numerous poems about art and painters. This poem takes up the life and career of the British painter John Constable, who was known for his landscapes, though, as the poem reports, he was not accepted into the Royal Academy of Art until later in his career.
Click here for images of Constable's landscape paintings.
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