Day 951: Epilogue

This poem featured in the book 'All The Bright Places' which I've just finished reading (but have  not finished mulling over - utterly heartbreaking and thought-provoking.) And this poem has so much food for thought - what do we leave behind us when we die? How is art a measure of what was lived? If we are just 'facts' of existence, how can there be personalities, how do we matter? Do our stories count?

Epilogue - Robert Lowell

Those blessèd structures, plot and rhyme—

why are they no help to me now

I want to make

something imagined, not recalled?

I hear the noise of my own voice:

The painter’s vision is not a lens,

it trembles to caress the light.

But sometimes everything I write   

with the threadbare art of my eye

seems a snapshot,

lurid, rapid, garish, grouped,

heightened from life,

yet paralyzed by fact.

All’s misalliance.

Yet why not say what happened?

Pray for the grace of accuracy

Vermeer gave to the sun’s illumination

stealing like the tide across a map

to his girl solid with yearning.

We are poor passing facts,

warned by that to give

each figure in the photograph

his living name.