[Cally Conan-Davies]

John,

I would like to say a couple of things, briefly. I think the reader/viewer of your poem/painting can bring darkness with them to the scene. I want to tell you that two quotations rose in my mind after first reading your poem: first, I thought, "All flesh is grass"; then, I thought, "Golden lads and lasses must / like chimney sweepers come to dust". You have tapped an archetypal vein of prelapsarian awareness, a golden age, that is real and lives even when experience throws its shadow. And the place, Scotland, had the same effect on me, a place of soft, golden, heart-breaking light and beauty and grandeur and mistiness. There is something there, indeed, that Time has forgot.

Finally, I wish I'd had a father like you. And I will cherish this grand little poem of yours.

Cally

[Bruce McBirney]

John, thanks for posting the link to the painting and giving the background story. It certainly does add another layer to the poem. The rich, detailed description in the first part of the poem perfectly captures the painting, whch then steps out into your home with the ending. Alicia's suggestion of using a subtitle identifying the painting is worth considering.

Best regards.

[Kate Benedict]

I felt called somehow to learn more about this artist. A little googling was instructive. And I quote:

"Farquharson exhibited at least one painting of sheep virtually every year at the Royal Academy in London."

Because of his prodigious output of paintings featuring sheep in snow, he "was even nicknamed ‘Frozen Mutton Farquharson’."

A certain little museum in NYC called the Dahesh "was a shrine to what one observer called the . . .the technically ravishing but intellectually vacuous academic paintings that the Impressionists, the Nabis and the Fauves fought hard to consign to the dustbin of history." Farquharson was well represented there.

Which doth raise a question, John: if one is to write an ekphrastic poem, is it not meet to choose one's subject wisely? Vermeer, say, as opposed to Thomas Kinkade?

The sheep painting is pretty. The poem is pretty. And no, I don't mean pretty awful. It's perfect, actually, in its portrayal of a Farquharsonesque world. You report that your children actually lived in that world and were put to bed in an atmosphere of perfect security, where no nightmare could possibly infiltrate. It flabbergasts me. As a child, my lullabies were made up of traffic from the Cross Bronx Expressway, the laugh track of the Gary Moore show, and my parents having another one of their screamfests. Suddenly I wouldn't trade my childhood in for the world!

[Bruce McBirney]

Uh...I don't recall anyone saying their kids never had nightmares. The world has ample darkness to be sure (including in childhood, as shown in your excellent prize-winner, Kate). Truth be told, no doubt the sheep in the painting had parasites, the shepherd had no dental care and had lost his teeth, and his wife had left him for the butcher. Stuff happens. Too much information for story time, though.

And there are some of those "hot chocolate by the fire" spots of time that grown kids and proud parents remember, even in families more noted for screamfests. The painter may not have much wall space in the Vatican Museum; but he probably fits better in the family room than Laocoon and the serpents would.

Lovely work. If framed in a collection with darker poems before and after, I don't think anyone would comment adversely on the glow.

[Janet Kenny]

I thought that John's poem was about a better painting than the one he showed. I hoped for something more like Samuel Palmer.

John, I think your associations and your own imagination made something better than the painting which inspired the poem.
Janet

[John Beaton]

Well this reflects my take on Farquarson: http://www.ramshornstudio.com/joseph_farquharson.htm

He conjures the world I grew up in, and does so in enhanced light. He studied it, loved it, and connected it with poetry. He worked to perfect one theme. So? Yehudi Menuhin practised. For me, he captured light through trees. Vermeer did something similar. But I know more of sheep than baroque beauties. And the Samuel Palmer, perhaps beautiful to some, isn't my world.

Like Rick's Passenger, I'll walk through the first-class compartment of art any day and sit in coach where I'm more comfortable. I won't for one minute regret stopping in the Dahesh gallery whose purpose appears to be to denigrate art appreciated by those with tastes different from one's own.

We moved to Vancouver Island in part to insulate our children from the stress and materialistic values of city life. Kate, give kids traffic noise and screamfests if you must. That's your choice. Not mine.

Bruce and Cally, thanks.

Alicia, I thought of the epigram and stopped short because I changed the trees to birches. Maybe I should rethink. I see that the uncontexted shepherd was offputting to some. Thanks to you too.

John

[Janet Kenny]

John, I have seen the beauty of sheep in snow in Central Otago, New Zealand. I don't question the beauty of the real thing.

[Kate Benedict]

[quote=John Beaton;103331]
We moved to Vancouver Island in part to insulate our children from the stress and materialistic values of city life. Kate, give kids traffic noise and screamfests if you must. That's your choice. Not mine.

--------

For the record, it was hardly my choice, I was a trapped child, and for years I was ashamed of my background. Now I accept all that and make art of it.

My sister moved to rural Maine in order to do what you did, have a more wholesome family life in a natural setting; alcoholism and poverty took over and she learned that wife abuse can happen anywhere. There is nothing, repeat nothing, intrinsically nobler about country life than city life. But I understand the impulse to escape to a place where there is at least the possibility of calm and quiet.

And I've also been known to like art that the cognoscenti disparages, e.g. Andrew Wyeth's. I think Farquarson's paintings are perfect for Christmas cards; the poetry equivalent would be the Hallmark sentiment. I don't think your poem is that, though. It reads to me as the expression of a deep human wish to return to a womblike bliss. As an ekphrastic, I don't think it engages the painting. The shepherd is extremely small! The eye goes to the sheep in the foreground and then to the burst of sunlight behind the trees. The shepherd's being dwarfed by the nature around him is the one interesting thing about that painting! In your poem, the shepherd is all foreground. No law against it -- you used the painting as a "jumping off spot" for the poem -- but I would think a true ekphrastic poem would be more faithful to the painting itself.

[Janet Kenny]

Kate, I become annoyed by the use of the term "ekphrastic" sometimes. If the painting is a jumping off point for something personal that's fine.

I think John has infinitely improved on the painting which is associated for him with deeper personal things. It doesn't have to be a tone poem about the painting does it?

I have often said that Ostrovsky is the only writer who could have dealt with my own extended family.

How can any childhood be "happy"? We are learning so many things and so many of them are painful. No adult can protect us from that.

I sympathise with John's desire to remove his children from some city values. I am appalled at the brand snobbery little children acquire. There must be some sort of balance. A family close to my house has done what John and his wife did and the children are impressive.

[David Anthony]

I assumed at once that this poem was ekphrastic. I think it's the best kind, where you don't need to refer back to the picture to understand it. The quality or otherwise of the picture seems to me to be irrelevant, and I think John was quite right to let the poem stand on its own merits.
Best regards,
David