It occurred to me that one way to rescue, celebrate, and appropriate that writing would be to turn it into poetry using the same method as we had for Kalamazoo. What follows is the result:
Preface: Being Bernard Berenson
Artistic existence did not dazzle us,
seeing an object in the air,
but he enjoys his feelings,
his powerlessness to cope,
while under the spell of this illusion.
Yet the success he attained was his ruin,
only one moment in the flux of his life.
He strayed: he never strayed
before he was swept away by the deluge.
Let us go one step further and
tear out a leaf from his own book.
Italian Painters of the Renaissance
You wanted to learn painting
to make allowance for the darkening
for the world itself was at fault.
As unconcerned as cobblers humming
Pisanello was casting,
Donatello was carving busts,
while Tintoretto stayed at home;
a wolf in sheep’s clothing
stirred with his enthusiasms
stilled in his effects of light.
Where St. Ursula leaves,
the Virgin soars heavenward,
utterly unable to hold that feeling for reality,
an acquaintance with things as they are
when it is stormy everywhere else.
In a genuine fragment of Giotto,
the thing of sovereign price,
is to render the roundness of a wrist.
If Leonardo has been left
successfully grappling with problems of form,
we are now able to understand our palms and fingers.
Opaline is almost everything
as clear and deep and satisfying
as impossible to keep untouched
as if begging for sympathy
A young girl happens to be asleep in the bed,
at once so brutal and so full of presage of change,
as to seem uncanny.
Michelangelo has faults of his own. I forgive them.
I have much better to do than to dwell.
But was this then, then, all Raphael’s
to please us through the channel of our eyes?
After the Decline of Art
For art is a garden cut off
as if you had turned the covers of a book
in the grey watered light of morning
and its garlanded triumphal arches opened
glowing like flames and ancient saints yearning.
It humanizes the void, making of it an enclosed Eden,
as we remain humanized beings
with the vanishing of that world.
The actual objects would have required
the existence of the object painted,
the line and light and shade,
the child’s joy in being alive,
to celebrate the triumph of the obvious.
For in art all shapes, all attitudes, all arrangements are:
the Madonna appearing against the sun in the midst
and Cupid’s leg clinging, holding the Queen of Heaven rising;
the grandeur of the saints in dark, soft, twilight greys,
in the eye of the stag lit up by the Byzantine glow.
Trap all the birds, hug all the trees, for the twinkling of an eye.
Wind at the touch of the lip.
Dewdrops upon the shining sea.