Your muse has sung in siren tongue
A beguiling incantation.
Your inspired mind no shackle can bind,
No qualm deter its vocation.
Artistry pent, pause you resent;
All scruple you christen defeat.
Your aim, I see: originality
Suffers no orthodox conceit.
Promptly then, your opus begin,
Unleash that rapacious vision.
With each stroke defy, make each shape deny
The tyranny of convention.
Prepare your page, your pen engage,
Your subject (let me now confirm)
Is that splendid beast, that atheistic feast,
The tusked and truckèd pachyderm.
Stylus grip, press its inky tip
To field of pale obscurity.
Why stand dismayed? Dare you invade
Its utopian purity?
No pretense is artistic sense
That reveres an unsullied space.
But reluctance to its neutrality hew
Conflates passivity with grace.
Yield not to fear, sketch first an ear
With a broad, elephantine curve.
Now neatly impose a prehensile nose
By a dexterous manual swerve.
How you protest! Do I suggest
So insipid a rendering?
Can I advise such a trite exercise
In artistic surrendering?
Drolly antique—hardly unique—
Is the hackneyed, serpentine snout.
I sense your distress, how can you express
Yourself by so public a route?
Art must be bold (or so I’m told),
So cowering custom displace.
Why not a square, or else nothing but air
To hang from his singular face?
Next his leg—your pardon I beg,
You find its girth too confining?
Then cinch it a bit, or freely submit
To less inspired designing.
Onward we tack to his broad back;
His bulk let us immortalise.
Never! Cry you, every feeling eschews
The banality of an elephant’s size.
Your pen strays near his unshaped rear
Tracing a concise, playful trail.
How dogmatic, how undemocratic—
But how sublimely like a tail.
Why do you cringe? Does it impinge
On your avant-garde proclivity
That a form so concrete should now complete
Your surge of creativity?
Bar then, rules of outmoded schools
From your audacious abstraction.
But if I may be plain, while they restrain,
They merit no blithe rejection.
Though indeed, your subject you’ve freed
From the rigid form that bound him,
In that cage he was free simply to be
An elephant, as you found him.
Corporally shrunk, loosed of his truck.
Can you him an elephant name?
The freedom you prize in willingness lies
To be restricted by a frame.
Pure license no insight attends,
But like that fool’s tale does it ring
With the full fury of blind anarchy:
A scene that signifies nothing.
Heed then, friend, lest your daring rend
Image from imagination.
Rejoice that each line from all else defines;
For true art is limitation.
© Elise Matich, 2012
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An elephant, drawn by Rembrandt van Rijn
Chalk on paper, 1637
from Wikimedia Commons |
