NaPoWriMo Day 4: "Kindred Spirits"

Vince Gotera should be proud: I followed his example and did a prompt mashup today. The NaPoWriMo prompt was to write a poem that achieves sadness through simplicity, possibly using the sonnet form; the Poem-A-Day Challenge prompt was to do a poem about a painter.

I have loved the Hudson River School artists since I was a teenager, spending weekends in the Hudson Valley. My personal favorite has been Asher B. Durand; I like his name (why aren't more boys named Asher?), I am awed by the meticulous realistic detail in his nature renderings, and once when I was still very young I spotted a landscape print engraved by him an an antique fair. It's hanging in my study now, about five feet from my computer.

My poem is about Durand a little indirectly, by way of a focus on his well-known painting "Kindred Spirits" (1849). It portrays the painter Thomas Cole, who was a mentor and friend to Durand and who died young in 1848, and the poet William Cullen Bryant. Durand and his patron gave it to Bryant as thanks for his eulogy for Cole. The phrase "illimitable air" is taken from Bryant's 1818 poem "To a Waterfowl." I had to assemble background about the painting pretty hastily so the poem feels far from resolved, but it is an unrhymed sonnet.

Kindred Spirits

Those were the days, the wilderness in your backyard.

Those were the days, viewing nature in a frock coat,

the days before men hid tenderness for one another.

Those were the days we spoke of the sublime.

Consider Asher B. Durand, finding nature after years

bent over the engraving plate, crafting art from art.

The cleft in the rock, the waterfall, the mountain range;

painting a new world leaf by leaf, each stone and curl of bark.

Now Thomas Cole, five years younger, is gone.

Asher poses them, the friends, his friends, at ease together,

as one gestures and one listens on a lip of cliff.

He adds a shattered tree trunk in the foreground, a bird

in the illimitable air, clouds towering in sun and mist.

Steady-handed, he makes over the world like God.

--Draft by Anne Myles. Do not quote or cite without permission.