EPPH - Every Painter Paints Himself

As in Painting, so is Poetry

The image above, a detail of a painting by Balthus called The Painter and His Model, goes particularly well with the poem below by James Merrill. Balthus, his head wrapped in a cloth to keep paint off his hair, seemingly pulls the curtain aside but, on our level, he really has the extended arm of a painter drawing on the window-pane. Nor is the pane still blank: it contains a Cross, a symbolic reflection of the Universal Mind. The process of creation in  artist, poet, composer or even, I believe, great scientist is very similar and is beautifully expressed in Merrill's 1962 poem.

"A Vision of the Garden"¹

One winter morning as a child
Upon the windowpane's thin frost I drew
Forehead and eyes and mouth the clear and mild
Features of nobody I knew

And then abstracted looking through
This or that wet transparent line
Beyond beheld a winter garden so
Heavy with snow its hedge of pine

And sun so brilliant on the snow
I breathed my pleasure out onto the chill pane
Only to see its angel fade in mist.
I was a child, I did not know

That what I longed for would resist
Neither what cold lines should my finger trace
On colder grounds before I found anew
In yours the features of that face

Whose words whose looks alone undo
Such frosts I lay me down in love in fear
At how they melt become a blossoming pear
Joy outstretched in our bodies' place."

 

1. James Merrill, "Water Street" (1962) in From the First Nine: Poems 1946-1976 (New York: Atheneum) 1982, p. 85