Thanks, Julie. This post- WW2 poem by Louis MacNeice might be of interest to some potential competitors. Its 5-8-10 stress pattern of the triplets IMO aptly suggests the opening of a series of windows.

The National Gallery

The kings who slept in the caves are awake and out,
The pictures are back in the Gallery; Old Masters twirl their cadenzas, whisper and shout,
Hundreds of windows are open again on a vital but changeless world - a day-dream free from doubt.

Here are the angels playing their lutes at the Birth -
Clay become porcelain; the patter, the light, the ecstasy which make sense of the earth;
Here is Gethsemane scooped like a glacier, here is Calvary calmly assured of its own worth.

Here are the golden haloes, opaque as coins,
The pink temple of icing-sugar, the blandly scalloped rock which joins
Primitive heaven and earth; here is our Past wiping the smuts from his eyes, girding his loins.

Here saint may be gorgeous, hedonist austere,
The soul'd nativity drawn of the earth and earthy, our brother the Ass being near,
The petty compartments of life thrown wind-wide open, our lop-sided instincts and customs atoned for here.

Here only too have the senses unending joy;
Draperies slip but slip no further and expectations cannot cloy;
The great Venetial buttocks, the great Dutch bosoms, remain in their time - their prime - beyond alloy.

And the Painter's little daughter, far-off-eyed,
Still stretches for the cabbage white, her sister dawdling at her side;
That she grew up to be mad does not concern us, the idyl[l] and the innocent poise abide.

Aye; the kings are back from their caves in the Welsh hills,
Refreshed by darkness, armed with colour, sleight-of-hand and imponderables,
Armed with Uccello's lances, with beer-mugs, dragons' tongues, peacocks' eyes, bangles and spangles and flounces and frills;

Armed with the full mystique of the commonplace,
The lusts of the eye, the gullet, the loins, the memory - grace after living and grace
Before some plain-clothes death grabs at the artist's jemmy,
leaves us yet one half-solved case.

For the quickness of the heart deceives the eye,
Reshuffling the themes: a Still Life lives while portrayed flesh and feature die
Into fugues and subterfuges of being as enveloping and as aloof as a frosty midnight sky.

So fling wide the windows, this window and that, let the air
Blowing from times unconfined to Then, from places further and fuller than There,
Purge our particular time-bound unliving lives, rekindle a pentecost in Trafalgar Square.

L.MacNeice.

Thanks again for the thread, Alicia and co.
Margaret.