POEMS/ Elixir of Art
Elixir of Art
On Nadar’s Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, 1862
In this portrait she is only twenty-five.
But in his image of her, a moment held in time,
and yet not bound by it, we see into her soul
and feel the passion and the pain of a girl born
illegitimate and hidden until her mother’s lover
saw the young girl’s beauty, grace, and talent
and led her to a career of fame, the sobriquet “Divine.”
Here, in a work born in the infancy of a technology
that would transform our world, a photographer
creates a picture where art breaks down the confines
of life’s years. Posed against a shadowed wall,
she is clad in timeless drapery of ragged folds
that hide and yet suggest the fragile nakedness
and latent power that they conceal. She looks out
towards events we sense but cannot see,
gazing far beyond the camera, beyond her life’s great arc.
From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)
On Nadar’s Portrait of Sarah Bernhardt, 1862
In this portrait she is only twenty-five.
But in his image of her, a moment held in time,
and yet not bound by it, we see into her soul
and feel the passion and the pain of a girl born
illegitimate and hidden until her mother’s lover
saw the young girl’s beauty, grace, and talent
and led her to a career of fame, the sobriquet “Divine.”
Here, in a work born in the infancy of a technology
that would transform our world, a photographer
creates a picture where art breaks down the confines
of life’s years. Posed against a shadowed wall,
she is clad in timeless drapery of ragged folds
that hide and yet suggest the fragile nakedness
and latent power that they conceal. She looks out
towards events we sense but cannot see,
gazing far beyond the camera, beyond her life’s great arc.
From All Roads Go Where They Will (Antrim House, 2010)
