See Through
Botanist on Alp (No. 1)
by Wallace Stevens
Panoramas are not what they used to be.
Claude has been dead a long time
And apostrophes are forbidden on the funicular.
Marx has ruined Nature,
For the moment.
For myself, I live by leaves,
So that corridors of clouds,
Corridors of cloudy thoughts,
Seem pretty much one:
I don't know what.
But in Claude how near one was
(In a world that was resting on pillars,
That was seen through arches)
To the central composition,
The essential theme.
What composition is there in all this:
Stockholm slender in a slender light,
An Adriatic riva rising,
Statues and stars,
Without a theme?
The pillars are prostrate, the arches are haggard,
The hotel is boarded and bare.
Yet the panorama of despair
Cannot be the specialty
Of this ecstatic air.
Claude is the French landscape painter Claude Lorrain, c.1604-1682.
