I Eat Poetry

An Earlier Master
By Patrick Woodroffe

Don't trust a painting more than any memory;
And never blame an artist's brain and eyes
For twisting truth like some distorting camera,
Conspiring with his paints to offer lies.

Should he rebuke his erring hand and vision,
The subtle disobedience of his quill,
When beauty's got by half-restraining chaos,
By partly breaking happy hazard's will

When joy's the only force that lifts his pallette,
Where love alone directs his curious hands
To fix in paint a dream that lasts forever,
And set his painted foot in mythic lands?

The purest art were canvas left unblemished
The paper unpolluted by the word;
So if my heirs prefer an earlier Master,
May all my works to whiteness be restored!

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Patrick Woodroffe is a stunning visual artist as well as a poet. Here's his words on how this poem came about:

"No doubt hoping for possible sudden wealth, my son once suggested -- I hope he was joking! -- that we should strip the paint from one of my pictures in order to find out, as he put it, 'whether there's a real work of art underneath.' I suppose he had hopes of a priceless unknown Rembrandt! Anyway, I can assure him and anyone who may possess one of my paintings that the only images hidden my mine are of such conceptual minimalism as to merit only Whistlerian titles such as "Composition in White" or "Symphony in White."
And Oh! How perfect those pictures are!"