Herewith some musings on time and movement in paintings and poems. The ways in which artists suggest movement and the passing of time is paradoxical. The moment depicted is fixed eternally on a two-dimensional canvas, resisting change even while suggesting its inevitability. The viewer is bounded by his own temporal experience while still able to be drawn, through the art, into other times. Here are three examples of how I tried to respond to this in verse.
Giacomo Balla’s lovely work, Young Girl Running on a Balcony, is an example of a painter conveying the joy of movement, the freedom that transcends confinement. To try to express this I used short lines, unpunctuated, the rhymes released from expectation yet still echoing as the girl circles and expands her world:
“She is fire and air
Sun and sky
There she goes
Tip-toes…”
Monet’s famous painting, A Field of Poppies, depicts a golden afternoon, with the warm summer wind blowing the parasol, the ribbon, the leaves, grasses and poppies, as the two couples move through this idyllic landscape. I took up the phrase “the winds of time” to seek to express the transience of such a moment, given our knowledge of how a field in France with poppies would be changed for evermore by our knowledge of history and use of the poppy symbolism – could I ever view the scene innocent of the impending horror? Yet the girl and her mother remain intact in their delight for ever, through the power of the artist:
“The child is there still, gathering her flowers,
Absorbed as golden sunlight floods her mind,
And time is only present in these painted hours.
Here, there will be no war.”
I also loved the way “past and future are gathered” (Eliot) in Chardin’s The Governess where the present moment is charged with significance. The symbolism of the ominous open door, the pathos of the discarded toys on the floor, the long, soon to be disrupted intimacy of the governess and her pupil are poignantly conveyed. I used alternate rhymes and pentameter to try to convey the solemnity of the moment, the formality beneath which so much emotion lies unspoken as they must bid farewell to:
Next: Children in paintings and poems“All those years together, close confined
Within this humble, warm enclosing space,
Learning, exploring, travelling in the mind,
Finding immensity in little space…”