*Postcards from the volcano

I got a commission last week to make an illustration for the website The Morning News. I'd done an illustration for them last summer and both they and I enjoyed the experience a lot. The current article is on natural disasters. Kate Ortega, the editor I've worked with, suggested volcanoes as a theme. I latched onto the subject with glee and ended up submitting three images. This is the one Kate chose:

Here are the two others:

*And here is the poem I've filched my blog post title from:

A Postcard from the Volcano

by Wallace Stevens

 

Children picking up our bones

Will never know that these were once

As quick as foxes on the hill;

 

And that in autumn, when the grapes

Made sharp air sharper by their smell

These had a being, breathing frost;

 

And least will guess that with our bones

We left much more, left what still is

The look of things, left what we felt

 

At what we saw. The spring clouds blow

Above the shuttered mansion-house,

Beyond our gate and the windy sky

 

Cries out a literate despair.

We knew for long the mansion's look

And what we said of it became

 

A part of what it is . . . Children,

Still weaving budded aureoles,

Will speak our speech and never know,

 

Will say of the mansion that it seems

As if he that lived there left behind

A spirit storming in blank walls,

 

A dirty house in a gutted world,

A tatter of shadows peaked to white,

Smeared with the gold of the opulent sun.

 

This has been a favorite poem of mine since I first read it in my late teens, then still practically one of the children Stevens refers to in the first and sixteenth lines. Now, a lifetime later, I'm closer to the 'We' of the poem, hoping that I, too, will have left, when that time comes and in my own modest way, something of 'what I felt/at what I saw.'

Comments

[Megan]

I love this poem! Thanks for posting it!

[marly youmans]

Yes, I liked that Stevens poem as well--and I like energetic explosions and up-whirlings, though clearly I have looked at them all out of order.

[Cathy Johnson (Kate)]

Beautiful...your work AND the poem. Wallace Stevens will rip your heart out with his poignant, pointed words...

[Kris Wiltse]

So beautiful.... Many thanks.

[concetta flore]

Terrific, all three of them, but I prefer the third one.

[Beth]

This post is beautiful in so many ways, Laura. The paintings are gorgeous and free -- fun to see this different result related to your calligraphic experiments! I didn't know that poem by Stevens and it certainly expresses a lot of what I feel, too. I love that image of our once-alive selves being "as quick as foxes" "breathing frost."