[485] Hunters in the Snow: Brueghel

Wrapping up the theme:

Quail and rabbit hunters with tawny hounds,
Shadowless, out of late afternoon
Trudge toward the neutral evening of indeterminate form
Done with their blood-annunciated day
Public dogs and all the passionless mongrels
Through deep snow
Trail their deliberate masters
Descending from the upper village home in lovering light.
Sooty lamps
Glow in the stone-carved kitchens.
This is the fabulous hour of shape and form
When Flemish children are gray-black-olive
And green-dark-brown
Scattered and skating informal figures
On the mill ice pond.
Moving in stillness
A hunched dame struggles with her bundled sticks,
Letting her evening's comfort cudgel her
While she, like jug or wheel, like a wagon cart
Walked by lazy oxen along the old snowlanes,
Creeps and crunches down the dusky street.
High in the fire-red dooryard
Half unhitched the sign of the Inn
Hangs in wind
Tipped to the pitch of the roof.
Near it anonymous parents and peasant girl,
Living like proverbs carved in the alehouse walls,
Gather the country evening into their arms
And lean to the glowing flames.
Now in the dimming distance fades
The other village; across the valley
Imperturbable Flemish cliffs and crags
Vaguely advance, close in, loom
Lost in nearness. Now
The night-black raven perched in branching boughs
Opens its early wing and slipping out
Above the gray-green valley
Weaves a net of slumber over the snow-capped homes.
And now the church, and then the walls and roofs
Of all the little houses are become
Close kin to shadow with small lantern eyes.
And now the bird of evening
With shadows streaming down from its gliding wings
Circles the neighboring hills
Of Hertogenbosch, Brabant.
Darkness stalks the hunters,
Slowly sliding down,
Falling in beating rings and soft diagonals.
Lodged in the vague vast valley the village sleeps.

	-- Joseph Langland

You don't often see this kind of descriptive poem attempted in completely free
verse; it's to Langland's credit that he achieves this task while remaining
remarkably 'poetic'. My favourite part of is this:
	"This is the fabulous hour of shape and form
	 When Flemish children are gray-black-olive
	 And green-dark-brown."
which seems to capture the feel of the orginal wonderfully well.

thomas.

[Thanks]

Dan Percival was the first of several people to write in with the name of the
painting I mentioned yesterday - it was 'The Human Condition', by Rene Magritte
[1]. Thanks, Dan (and all the others).

[1] Not Matisse, as I had written yesterday. I'm mortified that I confused the
two... they say the memory is the first thing to go... Magritte/Matisse,
Corot/Courbet, Monet/Manet... oh well.

[Moreover]

Dan also wrote:

"Magritte was deeply concerned with the distinction between a painting and its
subject, probably most famously expressed in "La trahison des images," ("The
treachery of images"), in which a realistic illustration of a pipe is captioned
with the phrase "Leci n'est pas une pipe." (This is not a pipe.)  There's a web
site with a searchable catalog of 300 of his paintings at www.magritte.com.
Several of his paintings treat the theme of a painting of a window placed in
front of the window.  Just go to that site, follow the "Museum" link, then pick
"window" from the theme menu of the search area on the left.  In the first two
pages of results, paintings like the one you describe are "The Human Condition"
(two versions) and "Where Euclide Walked."

Hmm, there's that old dichotomy between representation and represented again...

From: Amit Chakrabarti <chakra@>

Daniel Percival <danielp@> writes:
> There's a web site with a searchable catalog of 300 of his paintings
> at http://www.magritte.com.

Excellent! Thank you for this link.
-- Amit.