Painting Perfect Pictures
by cricketjeff on July 21, 2009. © Jeff Green, All rights reserved
A picture, it is offered, paints one thousand shining words;
Can pictures paint a love-song or a sigh?
And who would paint a nightingale, the drabbest of all birds,
Its beauty never enters through the eye.
Though pictures can be wonderful and exercise the soul
It’s only in great poetry that we can see the whole.
Vermeer portrayed each woman in a scene that showed her life,
While Botticelli showed a little more.
Picasso made an artwork of a most peculiar wife
And Playboy shows some ladies I adore.
But Shakespeare wrote his sonnets to his lady of the night
And every line he penned her showed that poetry is right.
When Constable saw haywains or a mill beside a brook,
He froze the moment till the end of time.
But Gray, when elergising, filled the pages of a book,
With countryside portrayed in flawless rhyme.
For Turner we have Wordsworth and for Hogarth there is Pope
But there’s no match for Shakespeare there’s no painter who could cope.
When Kipling wrote his treatise on the way to be a man
He showed what pictures only hope to show,
The U.S. founding fathers wrote the nation’s basic plan
In words that show a painting how to glow.
All the finest works of beauty that can illustrate your dreams
Aren’t paintbrushed onto canvas but are words in tumbled streams.
English