Friday, April 26, 2013

Epilogue | Robert Lowell


                     EPILOGUE

                      Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme -
                     why are they no help to me now
                     I want to make 
                     something imagined, not recalled? 
                     I hear the noise of my own voice: 
                     The painter's vision is not a lens, 
                     it trembles to caress the light. 
                     But sometimes everything I write 
                     with the threadbare art of my eye
                     seems a snapshot, 
                     lurid, rapid, garish, grouped, 
                     heightened from life, 
                     yet paralyzed by fact. 
                     All's misalliance. 
                     Yet why not say what happened? 
                     Pray for the grace of accuracy
                     Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
                     stealing like the tide across a map
                     to his girl solid with yearning.
                     We are poor passing facts, 
                     warned by that to give 
                     each figure in the photograph 
                     his living name. 

                     Robert Lowell 



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1 comment:

  1. Helen McKinlayApril 30, 2013 at 6:50 PM

    I like this. And the lines
    'Yet why not say what happened?
    Pray for the grace of accuracy' speak to me very much...but accuracy has so many meanings in the poetic context and for me is always a challenge. To be accurate with grace sounds like a wonderful idea.:-)

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