The Painter Dreaming In The Scholar-s House Poem Rhyme Scheme and Analysis
Rhyme Scheme: AB BCC DEFGBHIJBKALMNBOBPQR S TUBBUUCBUU VUBABUU BWSBX UBBUB BBBUB B BYB BUUBB ZRBUU A2AB2AUC2AUBA2 BUBRZUUUUBBBUD2A T AUE2BUU BF2G2UUA UH2I2J2UBUBUlt i gt in memory of the painters Paul Klee | A |
and Paul Terence Feeley lt i gt | B |
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I | - |
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The painter s eye follows relation out | B |
His work is not to paint the visible | C |
He says it is to render visible | C |
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Being a man and not a god he stands | D |
Already in a world of sense from which | E |
He borrows to begin with mental things | F |
Chiefly the abstract elements of language | G |
The point the line the plane the colors and | B |
The geometric shapes Of these he spins | H |
Relation out he weaves its fabric up | I |
So that it speaks darkly as music does | J |
Singing the secret history of the mind | B |
And when in this the visible world appears | K |
As it does do mountain flower cloud and tree | A |
All haunted here and there with the human face | L |
It happens as by accident although | M |
The accident is of design It is because | N |
Language first rises from the speechless world | B |
That the painterly intelligence | O |
Can say correctly that he makes his world | B |
Not imitates the one before his eyes | P |
Hence the delightsome gardens the dark shores | Q |
The terrifying forests where nightfall | R |
Enfolds a lost and tired traveler | S |
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And hence the careless crowd deludes itself | T |
By likening his hieroglyphic signs | U |
And secret alphabets to the drawing of a child | B |
That likeness is significant the other side | B |
Of what they see for his simplicities | U |
Are not the first ones but the furthest ones | U |
Final refinements of his thought made visible | C |
He is the painter of the human mind | B |
Finding and faithfully reflecting the mindfulness | U |
That is in things and not the things themselves | U |
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For such a man art is an act of faith | V |
Prayer the study of it as Blake says | U |
And praise the practice nor does he divide | B |
Making from teaching or from theory | A |
The three are one and in his hours of art | B |
There shines a happiness through darkest themes | U |
As though spirit and sense were not at odds | U |
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II | - |
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The painter as an allegory of the mind | B |
At genesis He takes a burlap bag | W |
Tears it open and tacks it on a stretcher | S |
He paints it black because as he has said | B |
Everything looks different on black | X |
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Suppose the burlap bag to be the universe | U |
And black because its volume is the void | B |
Before the stars were At the painter s hand | B |
Volume becomes one sidedly a surface | U |
And all his depths are on the face of it | B |
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Against this flat abyss this groundless ground | B |
Of zero thickness stretched against the cold | B |
Dark silence of the Absolutely Not | B |
Material worlds arise the colored earths | U |
And oil of plants that imitate the light | B |
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They imitate the light that is in thought | B |
For the mind relates to thinking as the eye | - |
Relates to light Only because the world | B |
Already is a language can the painter speak | Y |
According to his grammar of the ground | B |
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It is archaic speech that has not yet | B |
Divided out its cadences in words | U |
It is a language for the oldest spells | U |
About how some thoughts rose into the mind | B |
While others stranger still sleep in the world | B |
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So grows the garden green the sun vermilion | Z |
He sees the rose flame up and fade and fall | R |
And be the same rose still the radiant in red | B |
He paints his language and his language is | U |
The theory of what the painter thinks | U |
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III | - |
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The painter s eye attends to death and birth | A2 |
Together seeing a single energy | A |
Momently manifest in every form | B2 |
As in the tree the growing of the tree | A |
Exploding from the seed not more nor less | U |
Than from the void condensing down and in | C2 |
Summoning sun and rain He views the tree | A |
The great tree standing in the garden say | U |
As thrusting downward its vast spread and weight | B |
Growing its green height from the dark watered earth | A2 |
And as suspended weightless in the sky | - |
Haled forth and held up by the hair of its head | B |
He follows through the flowing of the forms | U |
From the divisions of the trunk out to | B |
The veinings of the leaf and the leaf s fall | R |
His pencil meditates the many in the one | Z |
After the method in the confluence of rivers | U |
The running of ravines on mountainsides | U |
And in the deltas of the nerves he sees | U |
How things must be continuous with themselves | U |
As with whole worlds that they themselves are not | B |
In order that they may be so transformed | B |
He stands where the eternity of thought | B |
Opens upon perspective time and space | U |
He watches mind become incarnate then | D2 |
He paints the tree | A |
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IV | T |
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These thoughts have chiefly been about the painter Klee | A |
About how he in our hard time might stand to us | U |
Especially whose lives concern themselves with learning | E2 |
As patron of the practical intelligence of art | B |
And thence as model modest and humorous in sufferings | U |
For all research that follows spirit where it goes | U |
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That there should be much goodness in the world | B |
Much kindness and intelligence candor and charm | F2 |
And that it all goes down in the dust after a while | G2 |
This is a subject for the steadiest meditations | U |
Of the heart and mind as for the tears | U |
That clarify the eye toward charity | A |
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So may it be to all of us that at some times | U |
In this bad time when faith in study seems to fail | H2 |
And when impatience in the street and still despair at home | I2 |
Divide the mind to rule it there shall be some comfort come | J2 |
From the remembrance of so deep and clear a life as his | U |
Whom I have thought of for the wholeness of his mind | B |
As the painter dreaming in the scholar s house | U |
His dream an emblem to us of the life of thought | B |
The same dream that then flared before intelligence | U |
When light first went forth looking for the eye | - |
Howard Nemerov
(1)
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