CLAUDE MONET (1840-1926)

 

 

 
 

 

A long way from Giverny,
On my park of the ruined abbey,
I cross the white stone bridge
As it glitters over the River Soar
And walk to the boating lake.
Through the oriental garden I go,
Crossing little wooden bridges
Painted red and green amidst trees,
Over lily ponds and nesting swans
And think of Monet afloat in his studio

Dreaming of ladies with parasols

Who gaze out to sea from cliff tops
In big hats and long white dresses.
He recalls maybe haystacks in a heat haze
And poppies cascading down slopes;
Sunshine blinding through a door
Opening on dappled paths in full bloom.
In his mind’s eye, the incandescent snow
On sunlit winter fields before it’s gone;
Glimpsing trains steaming into stations
And a peasouper London Parliament
Blazing in his fading memory’s store
Where Impression Sunrise awoke, perhaps,
From Turner’s Scarlet Sunrise at Rouen.

In the rising and the dying of the light,

The angles shifting this way, that way,
The scenes painted over and again.
Waiting for the weather to change
And the seasons to turn and turn again,
His eyes flicker like those of Turner,
Faltering with age, rubbed staring sore
As they strain at the blurring palette,
But still catching what they saw and more
In their half colour blind cataracts of light.

 

 

 The picture above the poem is Impression Sunrise - the painting often credited with starting the movement of Impressionism. Turner's Scarlet Sunset accompanies my Turner poem on this blog.

The one at the bottom here is, of course, part of the series of numerous studies of his later garden at Giverny by Monet himself. When taking photographs of the garden in Abbey Park mentioned in the poem, I've produced a few quite passable imitations - one of which can be viewed on the Photo Gallery of this blog.

 

(IGR 2015)