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ON MR. FREDERICK PORTER'S ROOM OF PICTURES, 1930, by                 Poet Analysis     Poet's Biography
First Line: The sun's your radiant painter, he
Last Line: Like these, and life's a pictured room.
Alternate Author Name(s): Blunden, Edmund
Subject(s): Paintings & Painters


THE Sun's your radiant painter, he
With sudden flush and verdancy
Will often at one stroke transform
Grey deathliness into a warm
Interior; then the void is filled,
The ghosts are driven, the goblin killed,
And in a picture-sphere we pass
Like pictures over mirrored grass;
The spirit in this sea of hues
Finds the refraction that renews,
Is given a sign, is given an eye
And swift possesses earth and sky.

Here of the sunbeam's fruitful art
I find a human counterpart,
And from the gleaming evidence
Feel beauty through a seventh sense;
Where this discernment lights the track,
The prison's rock-wall is a wrack
Dispelled by Prospero's wind or wand,
And happy islands sing beyond;
Let this kind energy but take
A thing of disproportioned make, --
A house of childish non-design, --
That thing becomes a friend of mine;
Upon the alien doors and walls
This natural and rare glory falls,
The local grows the transmarine,
And much grey work blooms into green;
Those flowers he chooses, though born fair,
Have found the same enchanted air,
And double-fragranced with his blessing
Seem for some white saint's possessing, --
Yet not out of common range,
The Sun's creation is not strange;
Fortune haunts us, moments bloom
Like these, and Life's a pictured room.





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