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Fabritius' Goldfinch -- by Zephirine
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Set in a heavy frame of carved black wood,
it’s not a very big picture.
A goldfinch on a perch, against a sunlit,
pale, somewhat weathered wall.
The perch curves round a grey wood box for food,
bird-sized, convenient.
And then you see
the fine chain holding the bird captive.
The genius who painted this died young,
in a famous disaster.
A gunpowder store exploded, wrecked the city;
a hundred people killed.
He died in the same year he painted this,
simple and unforgettable,
just the bird
and the fine chain holding it captive.
It would have been a pet, kept for its song
and its bright colours.
Nobody would have thought of that as cruel -
life was short and tough
for people and their creatures - they might feel
a small bird would appreciate
food and shelter
and not mind the chain holding it captive.
This bird seems living, solid, really feathered,
it’s painted so skilfully -
bright eyes looking out at you, and scarlet head,
perky beak and poised body
and folded gold wings that would spring to fly
if not for the obstacle,
always present,
the fine chain holding it captive.
But goldfinches carried meaning in those days:
birds of thorns and thistles,
recalling Jesus’ crown of thorns and even
splashed with his blood.
Fabritius would have been well aware his bird
signified the pure soul -
the dauntless spirit…
And the fine chain holding it captive?
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42 comments:
Yep, another idea nicked from GU poetry workshops - write a poem about a painting.
More to follow from other Pseuds...
Deserves the big paper treatment Zeph.
Nineteen years ago, I was required to write an essay on a painting - I chose Mark Gertler's Merry-go-Round in the Tate. I enjoyed that essay almost as much as the one I wrote a year later on Gustav Courbet's L'enterrement a Ornans (apologies for the bad French).
It's so pleasing to read and write about paintings.
I've always fancied writing a screenplay of either Courbet's or
Modigliani's life (perhaps through the eyes of Jeanne Herbeuterne - wrong spelling from me, wrong lover for her). Of course, I'll never get round to it.
I kept neither essay - in pre-PC days, they were handwritten on paper and just lost in the folly of youth. I'm sure I would groan at my naivety from this distance, but I bet the passion would be rawer.
Motm - have a go now, in verse form?
Bio-pics are difficult because people's lives don't have a dramatic shape usually, but there have been several good films about Van Gogh, so why not Modigliani?
Zeph - I'd love to, but I've done about 50 hours at work this week and I've a 9-5 tomorrow and my brain, to quote Woody Allen, has turned to guacamole.
Dear Guacamole Brain,
Whenever... This is a very relaxed site, it's here when wanted and the rest of the time it's happy to snooze quietly till someone feels creative again.
fine chain?
isn't it something of a memento mori?
while the bird lives it is chained, only in death will the chain be loosed
are any of us free in life
it's a lovely painting, as always the details are probably seen better in real life so to speak
an observation: the poem actually serves as a potted art history, touching stars of interest that define the whole night sky
and is there a zen aspect to the conundrum of a chained bird?
Yes, I think the painting's definitely intended as a memento mori, File, all Fabritius's paintings have a symbolic level to them though it's not always as clear to the modern audience as the Goldfinch.
I have seen the actual picture and it's stunningly good, doesn't really come over in reproductions.
it's one of the great illusions of print/net/tv isn't it?
nobody knows Van Gogh till they've felt those paint heavy brush strokes with their own eyes
I didn't know Fabritius but I'd imagine there's a real finesse to his and a convincing naturalism, an artful red herring as it's not about birds
the miners finch
wild canary
never a single flinch
nor note of song
believes in destiny as much
as those whose dynamite replaces
hammer and tap and stretches against the natural grain
for one more chance to signify
all clear
at the beginning and end of the mortal chain,
or waiting forever against the supervisor's wall,
or in an abandoned lunchroom
midst the gritty wrappers of last week's fare
for one more chance aqt least
to prove
the worth of her captivity
fo zeph....
That's beautiful, Doc.
I bind me, I'm bound.
Every dawn I am found
On a golden chain
Zeph,
I'd never seen it before but you could have dispensed with the painting. Your words would have painted a perfectly clear picture in my mind.
They're chirping everywhere here, unchained. Verdier, chardonneret, pinson, rouge-queue, and others unidentified... Not sure what their names are in English, but the music is lovely.
Thanks Offy. Nice garden in Toulouse huh?
It's not a garden, it's the whole countryside. I'm about 35km from the city of Toulouse, between Lavaur, Massac-Séran and Fiac. The landscape is all gentle curves, fields of golden light and grassy smells. The soundtrack I've covered already. Some days you wish would never end.
Lovely.
Un Verdier is a greenfinch, un chardonneret is a goldfinch, un pinson is a chaffinch, but I don't know what a rouge-queue is. A frenchfinch, perhaps.
Zeph
thank you for the Fabritius journey and attendant entryway into Vermeers halls (I believe australian painters call him 'harry verneer')....
my dear friend and painter par excellence geoff demain started his life as a miner in broken hill and had the goldfinch stuck in the back of one of his sketch books.
one day when I tore the cover off the Penguin Classic version of the idiot, to make a point, he in turn tore out the finch and left it on my table where it lay for a week and then was gone.
thank you for bringing it to life again with so many many songs...
Zeph's question:
and if I had such a painting left within me
could I could cast aside my indecision and
let it out into a goughian starry night
and conclude it with such dignified precision?; with Fabritian equanimity?;
such as this finch goldchained to mortal life and loss of flight...
Thanks Doc, beautiful comments as always.
I saw the real Goldfinch a few years ago and it is just as good as you hope it's going to be.
zeph
files golden chain of description...
and your crown of thorns...
maybe the Olympics of Captivity could be staged...
Aung San Suu Kyi would be favourite for the Nelson Mandela marathon,..
China would clean sweep the State Secret Border Sprints For Safety with retrospective judging in any events that they didn't win on first flush...
USA would naturally take the High Jump To Be Released event with new high bar settings daily and the winner dangling from a rope in Iraq...
and whilst here in australia we have a splendid history of detention cruelty with whipping, starvation etc; port arthur, moreton bay, the boab tree, etc, we would probably settle for gold in Germany's old favourite the Fencing; (even though a lot of our best work is done in other pacific islands undocumented and out of sight where endless rolls of razor wire imprison children and women for years until we can find an excuse to send them 'back home' we should still qualify)...
these Olympics would of course be free and unspoiled by performance enhancing substances such as culturally appropriate food and religious support for those chained to their unfortunate perches...
feeling a bit gritty and not unlike your goldfinch this morning (but without the plumage as mollifaction)....
keep your supply alive!!:
http://www.wwf.org.uk/support/adopt.asp?pc=ADF002001
Doc: out of context, but may I use "goughian starry night" on my cricket show review next week?
Sums up the Dazzler - though I know you didn't intend that at all.
Some great pictures in unexpected places here:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/arts/gallery/2007/jun/12/art.artnews?picture=330015552
mimi
why of course... the things I write are only the product of the things I have read and heard anyway... and you masy feel perfectly free to use, re-use, dispose of, and generally put to any purpose you choose anything I may have written... because I trust your integrity....
dazza is in a show called dancing with the tarts or something similar no?
Zeph
brilliant link absolutely brilliant... each work of art framed within a captured work of art... brilliant... oh I need to get back to London again just for the buzz of it...
brilliant stuff...
who took the photos? do you have a contact? I want to send them my compliments.
Doc: you just made me giggle at the wrong time and some Shiraz got spilled on the working desk! Goughie danced his way to the shimmering trophy a couple of years ago - Ramps won last year, so much dancing of cricketers with gorgeous gals, but Goughie's new endeavour is a little radio show. Please come and read my reviews at the usual cricket place.
I am doing a poster for my library for poetry spots, and so maybe you'll get comments on your gloriously reminiscent (sp) pieces from total strangers in scotland!
Doc, the photos seem to be mostly by David Levene of the Guardian, the rest are by another guy from Getty Images. There's a nice article by Maev Kennedy on the Art blog - you could leave a comment there.
It's a cool idea, isn't it? That's the sort of thing that makes me love London in spite of all the dirt and such.
zeph,
fantastic photo link, thanks for that
they become like living art, recontextualising with the urban landscape from one minute to the next depending on what's around them
objet retrouve et retrouve
if I were there I'd sit and just snap the changing environments around them, might make a good subject for a painting itself
oh this is an excellent end to the day.
thanks zeph will follow up.
file - the new image??
I did a poem for you on my mars and venus did you happen across it??
yes Shoot, looking at it now, just catching up with a nightful of postings
how did you manage to twist brad, venus and mars together so lyrically? and 'cherabin-piped explosion', I've heard it called many things but....!
wonderful, as is the Olympics of captivity above, tempted to join in but too late, dammit!
the street pics are great huh? but bit of a shame over V&M, perhaps the least best placed (and I think I'd have chosen La Primavera for an urbanscape and placed in front the Raymond Revue Bar [is that still there zeph?])
not sure what 'image??' means but for some reason it has come through in really low resolution and all those carefully placed clues are probably invisible, sigh
Shoot,
can I speak plainly to a plain speaking Ozzie?
I'm getting a big kick out of this site, tho I sometimes wonder when we can stop being so nice to each other!
I dig your arrangements of words a lot, I think you have an idiosynchratic voice that's really full of character (waxed lyrical about this before) but I do find you occasionally difficult to understand
phrases like 'smile away', 'flooded tapestry', 'drying paint of memory' are lovely but there are 5 people in the text and honestly I'm not sure how they fit together, someone got enfolded (I think V and M but it could be Brad and V or even Brad and M) and I take it Toulouse is a topical reference to faraway (ala offie) but then you seem to be placing Brad Botticelli, Venus and Mars in Toulouse and casually throw in your own voice too
very happy to accept that these are problems with me and not your verse and also very happy to accept sticks of criticism from anyone here, might even be a bit more useful than only fair praise all round
I don't have a problem, like most folk, with not understanding every nuance in poems, but sometimes when the narrative slips past you end up wishing there had been more, especially when the walls are painted in such dazzling word murals
I could have chosen to remain quiet on this and my aloofness might even have been mistaken for sagacity, tho I'd rather be honest as feel that more may come of it
my gauche works definately suffer from an over simplicity, so I'm sure the fault (if any there is) lies with me not the dandy doc
file
there is a quote high in the branches of my scrambled being and so far out of my reach that I cannot change it, and too late now anyhow.
it is the muse's window through which i fire out my miniscule patterings from this tiny spot on the planet, and by which I legitamise what I write.
I cannot for the life of me understand where it comes from....
I suspect perhpas,
perhaps it was the outrageously brilliant heinrich boll in that story about Leni the eye painter (Group Portrait With A Lady),
or
perhaps it was in a meditation class with the white raja yoga angels in suburban adelaide,
or even a casual aside from an old aboriginal woman juxtaposing leaves and twigs leaves to illustrate her possum woman story in the sandy riverbed of stephens creek...
anyhow the thrust was something like:
"aim your poetry at the feet of the gods; mortals who can see that far may enquire as to what it means, or read with their fingers and see the shape and mystery of it's body. but you cannot unravel anything or explain as to do so will contravene your very intent"
on the other hand you are perfectly correct re that little mars and venus popper inspired by your prompt.
the opening voice pretends to be objectively citing offieintolouse as brad quoting what happened in the painting, but this quote gives offieintolouse, as brad, omnipitent vision into my own (author's) heart and mind to know my motives and to be able to morph into me at the closure.
I stole (borrowed, recycled) the technique from a number of sources including those cited above and including virginia woolfe, john donne, and willie the bard etc etc...
I find my own writings to be so illusory and stuffed with inaccessible allusions, allegories, metaphors and voice changes as to be, in the end, nothing more than indecipherable offerings at the feet of the gods....
at times I prefer simple stuff, sometimes the meandering lyrical beauty of Ken Bolton's conversations with his kettle, sometimes I need the blood and gore of hamlet's grappling with plato.
nevertheless your poetry and mine, and AD Hope's Adam and Eve, all belong together because, as we agreed previously (with Satre, Freud, and Keppler) all is dreaming manifested briefly then gone, so do it anyway.
I, on the other hand, am lost without the support of a structure, even an informal one. Different strokes...
I must say, Doc, I like your small clear poems best - I thought of putting the lovely little canary poem up as a separate post?
Oops, just posted on the wrong thread.
zephyr breeze,
the little miner poem was only intended as a compliment to your inspired image selection and the poetic framing in which you placed it.
the image and your poem took me to places which I wanted to share back to you and to add into your discourse on life, death, and obligation.
you are nevertheless most welcome to post it anywhere you choose if you choose.
I have a longer poem ready, which may or may not be suitable for posting within these walls, to send to you, over the next few hours and days, once I am satisfied that the paint has dried sufficiently....
Looking forward to it :o)
shooter,
sorry late reply, been wrestling with Canada
thanks for talking doc, of course you are right re aiming at the feet of the gods, not deconstructing for wet mortals and pitching in to the collective dreaming
It's just that I hang on your every word and get frustrated when, after hours of classical and literal reference books, days of developing and testing decoding rubrics, weeks, months, years of phonic and philisophical fumblings and after modelling and clothing the characters in your stanzas, placing them in a recreation of your ode world and manipulating them to follow your poetic deux et machina...
after all that, when I can't get it I go into a black place of self-recrimination and loathing, railing at the gods for my limited capacity and eventually throwing myself on the sword of Sophia and collapsing onto a bed of common straw
I think I get it though, I know myself that when I write I can handle most of the street names (most of the time) but when I just have to transcribe the music of the dreaming as it passes through me my head tells me it's sacralige to touch tho my heart kno's that the fabric of the dreaming may be indeed by crafted by hands such as ours
or, together, we may rise to rub our noses against the very toeses of the godses themselves
as always, more, medicine man, more
file
you are flying tonight seer...
and close to the sun
but it is clear to me that your glue is made of stern stuff,
and sternly may the testing come in these taproom walls
and
I hope that my next piece is not too disappointing as
it took 41 years to complete.... and completion is like,
tomorrow, virtually,
and then it can stop driving me insane and I can pass it on...
if there is room inside the computer.....
(longish...oh dear) and only the first flush of the mushroom cloud
until you say enough,,,
glue may be strong doc, just have a bit of a bad feeling abou the wax plumes
frying tonight: cusp of fruition
I am the egg you never thought would hatch, the omnivorous baby finch with it's beak eternally open for the worms of your tequila; sqwaack
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