Classic Poem

Claude Monet uses, with essential ease,
The basic method of the Japanese
Who trace the feeling of the object shown
Thro' realism of the form and tone.
In handling masses they reject detail,
And triumph where atomic painters fail.
Like the old Greeks they better Nature's best,
And this is Classic Art's abiding test;
For ideal truth is Beauty's inner law
Freed from the trammel of material flaw.

Hundreds of years ere Monet saw the light,
Or Degas came, to charm with central sight,
Ere Whistler was, or Beardsley had his hour,
The Japanese Immortals rose to pow'r,
And wrought, with startling truth of type and place,
Supreme impressions of exquisite grace,
Steeped in the shining sorceries that attain
The singing splendour of the Grecian strain —
That old, undying charm that woos delight
In flawless beauty " winged for world-wide flight."

They drew the morning with its eager air:
The twilight pause that hushes toil and care:
Starshine and moonlight: and the flaming rays
Of flooding sunshine in meridian blaze:
Autumn's hoar-frost and Summer's silver dews
That mock the misty opal's magic hues:
The country's peace: the city's stir and strife
When moving masses crowd the streets with life:
Landscapes and figures: flying birds and bees:
Rainstorms and rainbows: and emblossomed trees:
The peach's bloom: the lily's saintly grace:
The single flower in the slender vase:
Water that runs: fishes that float and swim
In streams of liquid sapphire sweet and dim:

Snowscapes that shed the Winter's ghostly glow
Where wind-tossed flakes are driven to and fro:
Poetic mountain-tops that stretch away
Sun-kissed and solemn in the dying day:
The ocean's sparkle and reluctant surge
As laughing colour lyrics meet and merge:
Nocturnes and harmonies that take the breeze
And catch the glamour of the dreamy seas: —
All these they drew with beauty that endears
And Glory guerdons down the sordid years.

They met and mastered every phase of art
That Occidental painters may impart;
And still on fan and screen, on vase and urn,
Can teach us more than we shall ever learn.