Monet

[MorpheusSandman]

Monet’s
Water lilies
In sky blue and sea green
Garden paths and the Argentueil
Snowed in

Haystacked
Impression, Sunrise, envisioned
Soft strokes of burnt orange
Parliament view
In fog

Rouen’s
Grand cathedral
The sun, fall, and wind blown
Poplars, radiant, standing streams,
Still life

Beauty
The hours pass through this painted view
Light, color, time, seasons
Nature’s canvass
Sublime

[deryk]

The shape and rhythm of this poem convey an incandescent vapor of images becoming energy on the page. It's like a bright, musical condensation of whispers. And still, I can't quite identify the way you've captured his strokes so effectively. I'll get there.

[Delta40]

Haystacked
Impression, Sunrise, envisioned
Soft strokes of burnt orange

some beautiful brushstrokes here. You didn't even use the word pastel....

[Hawkman]

The lightness of touch in this impressionistic word sketch is both evocative and sublime. great poem to read first thing in the morning, so thanks for that

Live and be well - H

[Jerrybaldy]

Your love of art shines bright and although a philistine by birth I got several of the reference points and I can see the order in this whether in sylables or stresses. It is probably a structure I am ignorant of (as with all poetic structures) but I am a bit in awe of your writing, if it is ok to say that, if not **** it
cheers
Jerry

[MorpheusSandman]

@deryk, Delta, and Hawk: Thanks sincerely! In secret, the moment I thought about writing a poem about Monet I thought of this form, as it's by far the most impressionistic form I've found in English poetry.

@Jerrybaldy: The form is simply two mirror cinquains (cinquain is a poem of 5 lines with 2, 4, 6, 8, 2 syllables, and a mirror cinquain is a cinquain and a reverse cinquain; 2, 8, 6, 4, 2). Although it's not "required", I also use the rule of 1, 2, 3, and 4 stresses for each respective line, and I also reverse the meter each line. I love the rhythm it creates. I only break it once here.

[Bar22do]

Your steady staccato blended the whole poem into so wonderful, neo-Impressionist a painting! Great read indeed! Love it a lot, MS!
Bar

[Alexander III]

Love this as a homage to the great Monet. I think your efforts to translate his paintings into poesy are amiable and very well done, I particularly love the second stanza.

The structure you use is also interesting, it gives the poem a nice visual aesthetic sense, which fits well with it's subject.

[blank|verse]

I think this is a well crafted ekphrastic poem, Morpheus, but wonder if you're relying too much on the reader's knowledge of these paintings. I think there's too much prosaic listing of things, like this:

Parliament view
In fog

Rouen’s
Grand cathedral

and felt there should have been more moments like this one:

The hours pass through this painted view

which seem to capture the spirit of paintings more.

Perhaps this is where the demands of the form make themselves felt, but wonder if concentrating on one painting would have given you opportunity to go into more depth.

[MorpheusSandman]

Thanks to Bar and Alex.

@B|V: I knew I ran the risk of this piece not working for people who hadn't seen these paintings, yet for those who have, I thought the form worked to give a literary sense to what made them so beautiful. The prosaic "listing" I thought echoed the superficial blandness of Monet's subjects themselves: Haystacks, Rouen, Parliament, Water Lillies, Poplars etc. I actually thought the final stanza is the weakest, because to me it moves from the realm of impressionism into criticism, yet I hoped the form was enough to make it seem like a move from the description of content to the description of feeling/reaction to that content. I guess that's what you liked, but I felt I was rather cheating.

I think it would be mighty difficult to devote a whole piece to any single Monet. He's a difficult painter to discuss, period, because you can't really say much about the content, there's nothing to interpret, it's all about the formal beauty, the simplistic perfection of nature in all its visual and sensuous moods. Of course you can evoke metaphors or delve into abstracts, but I felt that would violate the spirit of Monet's work.

[PrinceMyshkin]

As one or two others have remarked, your lines had the feeling of brush-strokes and I deeply appreciated the delicacy of the piece throughout - except for that last line, which appears to be intended (or to have the effect at any rate) to tell me how to feel about his art.

[deryk]

Thanks to Bar and Alex.

@B|V: I knew I ran the risk of this piece not working for people who hadn't seen these paintings, yet for those who have, I thought the form worked to give a literary sense to what made them so beautiful. The prosaic "listing" I thought echoed the superficial blandness of Monet's subjects themselves: Haystacks, Rouen, Parliament, Water Lillies, Poplars etc. I actually thought the final stanza is the weakest, because to me it moves from the realm of impressionism into criticism, yet I hoped the form was enough to make it seem like a move from the description of content to the description of feeling/reaction to that content. I guess that's what you liked, but I felt I was rather cheating.

I think it would be mighty difficult to devote a whole piece to any single Monet. He's a difficult painter to discuss, period, because you can't really say much about the content, there's nothing to interpret, it's all about the formal beauty, the simplistic perfection of nature in all its visual and sensuous moods. Of course you can evoke metaphors or delve into abstracts, but I felt that would violate the spirit of Monet's work.

Someone who isn't familiar with Monet isn't going to read a poem about him. I think it's a moot point.

[blank|verse]

I think you're being too reverential Morpheus!

Ok, the last stanza might be weak overall for the reason Prince outlines, but it does include the poem's strongest line - and it's the strongest because it changes the way I view Monet's paintings, in the same way his paintings change my perception of his subjects. Ekphrastic poems aren't easy, but that's how the poetry should be working I would say - by making the reader see another work of art differently (and metaphor and figurative language is a great way of doing that). Otherwise you're just writing a picture caption.

As for the 'superficially bland' subjects - there's nature, religion, commerce... there's loads you could write about one painting. Is Monet merely giving us photographic representations of his subjects? I think you're doing yourself a disservice to be honest; if you could come up with some similar lines to the 'hours pass' one, about one painting, you'd have a strong poem.

[MorpheusSandman]

@Prince: Thanks for commenting. Funny thing is that the last line was more of how I felt that Monet saw nature, more than how I felt seeing Monet... then again, maybe I meant both, in a way.

@B|V: We may have to agree to disagree here. The hours pass by, yes, but in feeling rather than thought. Monet isn't Picasso's Guernica where you can "interpret" every element and how it comes together. It's not that Monet merely gave us a photographic representation (not that photographic representations allow or disallow for any more/less commentary than painting; there's a lot to be said about Edward Steichen or Richard Avedon), it's simply that his "subject" was how nature's various elements affected our vision. Something like his haystack series draws our attention not the subject, but to everything around it. Yet all of this context is related to vision and ontological feeling rather than thought, symbolism, metaphor, etc. Monet is not trying to "say", he's trying to "see". You obviously can't replicate vision in text, but I think there's a form of pure description that gets close, where you can, like Monet, use form and style to manipulate feeling on a subtler, more unconscious level.

To me--and this is one reason I love cinquains in general--is that you can manipulate the simplicities of the form in so many ways to significantly alter how a subject is rendered. In this piece, I tried to use the alternating nature of the line stresses, as well as the mirroring structure, to formally render the delicacy of Monet's impressionistic style. I equally avoided verbs and complete sentences (until that one line) as I felt they'd bring too much of a solidity to the sentences that didn't fit with impressionism. So if the words themselves replicate the blandness of Monet's subjects, the form and rhythm replicates the craft that manipulates how we see it, feel it, and react to it. Perhaps you didn't feel that, and that's alright. But I'm simply saying I felt it would've been a violation of the spirit of what makes Monet work to have used metaphor, symbolism, or excessive description.