Whistler, by E.M. Schorb

Nocturne in Black and Gold (The Falling Rocket), by James McNeill Whistler (USA) 1875

Whistler
 
looked into his nocturne, 
then up and down and side to side.  
Which was the way?  The water flowed 
like a pale tongue from the horizon; 
it grew wide and thick three-quarters up
the canvas, then dropped down the sides 
three-quarters to a long thin tongue.  
He could not resist the patch of land 
in the close forewater two-thirds down, 
or whatever floated there, nor the bottoming twig
that seemed to say he was a camera still,
though one instinctively out of focus.  
But how not be a camera?  Was it 
unthinkable, the next natural step: to compose 
with no more than patches, splotches of color?
Hugo had done it, but Hugo was a poet; 
who would see his paintings?  Who would care?
A pure abstraction?  Whistler’s instinct 
may have urged him on but his life 
warned not, and even so John Ruskin 
called him coxcomb, said he flung 
paint in the public’s face—brush and pen 
at war.  Ruskin’s world would not admit
a purely graphic language of shape and color
related, the language the eye read on a wall, 
the babble of broken things together:
could only translate poems of paint to prose,   
could only illustrate the slow, linear language 
of speech. Nocturne in Black and Gold: 
The Falling Rocket: how close 
to spatter painting Pollock!  How very close 
to knowing how the essence is what counts!  
True, Art won its farthing against Ruskin, 
but the new vision remained unseen.
But had they asked how they could see, 
those blind, Whistler might have said,
as he did to Oscar Wilde that night in the salon,  
“You will, you will!”
 
E.M. Schorb
 
E.M. Schorb's poems have appeared in Agenda (UK), Antigonish Review (CA), The American Scholar, Dalhousie Review (CA), The Fiddlehead (CA), The Queen’s Quarterly(CA), Poetry Salzburg Review (AU), Wascana Review (CA), Prism (CA), The Yale Review, and Oxford Poetry (UK), among others.  His collection, Murderer’s Day, was awarded the Verna Emery Poetry Prize and published by Purdue University Press years ago, and a subsequent collection, Time and Fevers, was the recipient of the Writer’s Digest International Self-Published Award for Poetry and also an Eric Hoffer Award.  ​