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.

Added: on September 24th, 2009 at 6:35 PM | Viewed: 5054 times | Comments (1)

Poet: Robert Lowell (Robert Lowell Art)
Poem: Epilogue
Volume: Day by Day
Year: Published/Written in 1975

Are you looking for more information on this poem? Perhaps you are trying to analyze it? The poem, Epilogue, has received one comment so far. Click here to read it, and perhaps post a comment of your own. Of course you can also always discuss poems by Robert Lowell with others on the American Poems poetry forum!