Three Sonnets in Paint

Of course pigment and its forms cannot translate to word.  Paintings must be seen not heard.  Though we cannot speak paintings, we can, speak about paintings.  Thus, I share three sonnets where I try to speak about three paintings.  I picked these three paintings because they themselves seemed to try the reverse impossibility I note.  They try to be sonnets in paint.

1-Whistler’s Symphony In White

Embellished in the purity of fair

Folds, virtue’s marble blossom in her hands,

A white façade in right demeanor stands

On an eviscerated feral bear

Whose lifeless mouth lies in its pseudo roar

Of untamed, unconverted life.  A bloom

Dropped on that grizzly fur that rugs a room

Goes almost unobserved among a more

Impressive floral pattered rug.  What’s right

In fact?  The painted buds?  The creature that

Has spread a being as a surplus throw

Upon a floor already rugged?  Or might

It be the beast despite its mouth and eyes

Suggesting life where only carnage lies?

2- Turner’s Approach To Venice

What inference do we draw about a Sun

That never tries the night though weaker Moon

Swings both ways rising up before day’s done

As readily as at night?  One might soon

Conclude the frailer orb the braver or

The more inquisitive, industrious

Could such bold reasoning somehow ignore

The damage to the language.  It can’t.  Thus,

One says it’s not the Sun but is the night

That flees the Sun, that logic by some sleight

Has cleaved the two.  Where Sun is day is, too--

One’s words demand that Sun could never do

As moon.  Obedient, the Sun retires

So mind might have those shadows it requires.

3-Boudin’s Beach At Villerville

They prop their little world upon the sand

With axis uninclined.  Erect they stand

(Or sit unslouching) as their rules demand

For such an upright orb no forward hand

Dare spin.  From there they fix their glance beyond

That upright sphere in some astronomy

Of distant clouds in ethers that abscond

Some yellow planet and a galaxy

Of salt suspended in geometry

Their Newton might “decipher,” too, should he

Desire.   Where pretense meets the chaos sea

And clouds may wreak at will, unwillingly

The dog holds back.  When he must correspond

With separate spheres at once, how else respond?

© Harold Anthony Lloyd 2016