Short Poems

Can colour teach the Sermon on the Mount?
There be who think so, men of some account,
Who year by year with tawdry canvas try
To blaze with paint a pathway to the sky;
As tho' Christ's deathless Word were out of date,
And two dimensions could make meaning straight.

To make a school of Morals out of Art
Is to corrupt them both, in whole and part.

It is not " wisdom," " worth," or " moral" theme
That stamps the artist's vision as supreme;
It is that pow'r he has in age and youth
To see all things in terms of ideal truth —
To see in terms of beauty, and to say
All things in terms of music, fresh and gay.

All art pictorial is, in sober sooth,
Naught but illusion based upon the truth;
And thus the truth of art, for which men sigh,
Is, after all is said, truth of the lie.

Great art achieves the beauty of repose,
That clear content the Milo Venus knows;
That restfulness the Elgin Marbles share,
Serene and ample as the morning air.

The New translates the Old: forms fade and fail;
But Art abides to tell again the tale
In form as fair, and fitted to the need
That larger thought and broader methods breed.
For ever fashioning, for ever new,
Her moods are many, tho' her paths are few.

The pictures of the Past are dead and dim,
The chiselled marbles shattered, torn and grim;
The colour that the Grecians gave to men
Lives only in the record of the pen;
The golden word alone can mock at Time
In changeless beauty as the cycles chime.

The quenchless quest of all the troubled years
Is for the clean expression Fame inspheres.
Men seek life's painful secret to disclose
In forms that fit their fleeting joys and woes:
In Word, and Stone, in Colour, and in Song —
The paths of thought to object, that prolong
A little space the records of their part —
The paths that parallel, and men call art.

Édouard Manet, in his golden youth,
Led up the lightsome quest for plein-air truth.
Of fire-new technique, tender yet robust,
In his Impressions he was often just;
Fluidity of movement marked his strain,
And austere Beauty followed in its train.
Indeed 't was he, though few his cause defend,
Who gave to Gallic paint its present trend.

An expurgated Rousseau, light and gay,
Diaz could trace the sunshine's chequered play
With opalescent sou-bois tones and tints
That sparkle like the leaping flash of flints.