It’s not the thing, anymore, to be one of a set of literary siblings. There’s no longer anything outré in converting to Roman Catholicism. There’s nobody these days quite like Evelyn Waugh (1903–1966), to stand godfather if you do. There are simply no more of the kind of people who gathered for that famous 1948 Gotham Book Mart photograph, in which Edith Sitwell (1887–1964), looking like Yertle the Turtle in a turban, presides over what Bennet Cerf called “the darnedest assortment of celebrities”: Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, and Gore Vidal, among others, with W.H. Auden towering over the rest of them on a ladder. Whatever made it possible, that cosmic alignment of famous eccentricities, it’s gone. It’s gone and taken Sitwell with it. Artistic fashion, like every other kind of fashion, flashes upon us and vanishes away.

Today’s Poem of the Day, “Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe,” meditates on this central phenomenon of time: that however immovable any given moment might seem to the people caught in it, it never stands still. The poem’s title recalls not one painting, but possibly multiple ones, to which the poem responds. Most obviously there’s  the 1863 painting by Édouard Manet, scandalous in its day for presenting a nude woman in a picnic scene with two clothed men. We’ve all had nightmares like that painting.

Yet Sitwell’s poem, in rhymed couplets, its pentameter occasionally disturbed by lines in trimeter, seems instead to channel a painting with the same title by Claude Monet, finished in 1866. This second painting is more an exercise in light and shadow than in scandal. Green apples, touched by the sun, feature in this later picnic, and everyone is wearing clothes. All too quickly, the day, the scene, and the concerns of the first painting have shifted to something else.

While, as we have noted before in this space, the ekphrastic poem is apt to go wrong, Sitwell’s poem here avoids the worst of its particular pitfalls. The poem re-narrates the painting within a larger sensory frame, which takes in not only the drama of light but of sound, especially birdsong. It comprehends, too, what the art that triggers it does not: the idea that shadows conceal and protect some presence, an “I,” not quite realized as either bird or human, but conscious of the day, in its chiaroscuro of brightness and brevity. 

Déjeuner Sur L’Herbe 
by Edith Sitwell 
 
Green apples dancing in a wash of sun — 
Ripples of sense and fun — 
A net of light that wavers as it weaves 
The sunlight on the chattering leaves; 
The half-dazed sound of feet, 
And carriages that ripple in the heat. 
The parasols like shadows of the sun 
Cast wavering shades that run 
Across the laughing faces and across 
Hair with a bird-bright gloss. 
The swinging greenery casts shadows dark, 
Hides me that I may mark 
How, buzzing in this dazzling mesh, my soul 
Seems hardening it to flesh, and one bright whole. 
O sudden feathers have a flashing sheen! 
The sun’s swift javelin 
The bird-songs seem, that through the dark leaves pass; 
And life itself is but a flashing glass.

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With “Poem of the Day,” The New York Sun offers a daily portion of verse selected by Joseph Bottum with the help of the North Carolina poet Sally Thomas, the Sun’s associate poetry editor. Tied to the day, or the season, or just individual taste, the poems are drawn from the deep traditions of English verse: the great work of the past and the living poets who keep those traditions alive. The goal is always to show that poetry can still serve as a delight to the ear, an instruction to the mind, and a tonic for the soul.