I Would Not Paint a Picture
poem 505
I Would Not Paint a Picture - meaning Summary
Experience Over Representation
The speaker refuses representational roles—painter, musician, poet—and instead longs to be the thing that causes or embodies experience. Rather than depict brightness, sound, or song, she wants to inhabit the source: the celestial finger that stirs, the buoyant instrument, the living note. The poem contrasts creative distance with immersive, sensual yearning, treating awe and creative impotency as a delicious torment the speaker prefers to passive artifice.
Read Complete AnalysesI would not paint a picture I’d rather be the One Its bright impossibility To dwell delicious on And wonder how the fingers feel Whose rare celestial stir Evokes so sweet a Torment Such sumptuous Despair I would not talk, like Cornets I’d rather be the One Raised softly to the Ceilings And out, and easy on Through Villages of Ether Myself endued Balloon By but a lip of Metal The pier to my Pontoon Nor would I be a Poet It’s finer own the Ear Enamored impotent content The License to revere, A privilege so awful What would the Dower be, Had I the Art to stun myself With Bolts of Melody!
Feel free to be first to leave comment.