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Best Famous Canvases Poems

Here is a collection of the all-time best famous Canvases poems. This is a select list of the best famous Canvases poetry. Reading, writing, and enjoying famous Canvases poetry (as well as classical and contemporary poems) is a great past time. These top poems are the best examples of canvases poems.

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Written by Christina Rossetti | Create an image from this poem

In an Artists Studio

One face looks out from all his canvases,
     One selfsame figure sits or walks or leans:
     We found her hidden just behind those screens,
That mirror gave back all her loveliness.
A queen in opal or in ruby dress, A nameless girl in freshest summer-greens, A saint, an angel—every canvas means The same one meaning, neither more nor less.
He feeds upon her face by day and night, And she with true kind eyes looks back on him, Fair as the moon and joyful as the light: Not wan with waiting, not with sorrow dim; No as she is, but was when hope shone bright; Not as she is, but as she fills his dream.


Written by Rita Dove | Create an image from this poem

The Bistro Styx

 She was thinner, with a mannered gauntness
as she paused just inside the double
glass doors to survey the room, silvery cape
billowing dramatically behind her.
What's this, I thought, lifting a hand until she nodded and started across the parquet; that's when I saw she was dressed all in gray, from a kittenish cashmere skirt and cowl down to the graphite signature of her shoes.
"Sorry I'm late," she panted, though she wasn't, sliding into the chair, her cape tossed off in a shudder of brushed steel.
We kissed.
Then I leaned back to peruse my blighted child, this wary aristocratic mole.
"How's business?" I asked, and hazarded a motherly smile to keep from crying out: Are you content to conduct your life as a cliché and, what's worse, an anachronism, the brooding artist's demimonde? Near the rue Princesse they had opened a gallery cum souvenir shop which featured fuzzy off-color Monets next to his acrylics, no doubt, plus beared African drums and the occasional miniature gargoyle from Notre Dame the Great Artist had carved at breakfast with a pocket knife.
"Tourists love us.
The Parisians, of course"-- she blushed--"are amused, though not without a certain admiration .
.
.
" The Chateaubriand arrived on a bone-white plate, smug and absolute in its fragrant crust, a black plug steaming like the heart plucked from the chest of a worthy enemy; one touch with her fork sent pink juices streaming.
"Admiration for what?"Wine, a bloody Pinot Noir, brought color to her cheeks.
"Why, the aplomb with which we've managed to support our Art"--meaning he'd convinced her to pose nude for his appalling canvases, faintly futuristic landscapes strewn with carwrecks and bodies being chewed by rabid cocker spaniels.
"I'd like to come by the studio," I ventured, "and see the new stuff.
" "Yes, if you wish .
.
.
"A delicate rebuff before the warning: "He dresses all in black now.
Me, he drapes in blues and carmine-- and even though I think it's kinda cute, in company I tend toward more muted shades.
" She paused and had the grace to drop her eyes.
She did look ravishing, spookily insubstantial, a lipstick ghost on tissue, or as if one stood on a fifth-floor terrace peering through a fringe of rain at Paris' dreaming chimney pots, each sooty issue wobbling skyward in an ecstatic oracular spiral.
"And he never thinks of food.
I wish I didn't have to plead with him to eat.
.
.
.
"Fruit and cheese appeared, arrayed on leaf-green dishes.
I stuck with café crème.
"This Camembert's so ripe," she joked, "it's practically grown hair," mucking a golden glob complete with parsley sprig onto a heel of bread.
Nothing seemed to fill her up: She swallowed, sliced into a pear, speared each tear-shaped lavaliere and popped the dripping mess into her pretty mouth.
Nowhere the bright tufted fields, weighted vines and sun poured down out of the south.
"But are you happy?"Fearing, I whispered it quickly.
"What?You know, Mother"-- she bit into the starry rose of a fig-- "one really should try the fruit here.
" I've lost her, I thought, and called for the bill.
Written by Robert Louis Stevenson | Create an image from this poem

For Richmonds Garden Wall

 WHEN Thomas set this tablet here,
Time laughed at the vain chanticleer;
And ere the moss had dimmed the stone,
Time had defaced that garrison.
Now I in turn keep watch and ward In my red house, in my walled yard Of sunflowers, sitting here at ease With friends and my bright canvases.
But hark, and you may hear quite plain Time's chuckled laughter in the lane.
Written by Czeslaw Milosz | Create an image from this poem

Artificer

 Burning, he walks in the stream of flickering letters, clarinets,
machines throbbing quicker than the heart, lopped-off heads, silk
canvases, and he stops under the sky

and raises toward it his joined clenched fists.
Believers fall on their bellies, they suppose it is a monstrance that shines, but those are knuckles, sharp knuckles shine that way, my friends.
He cuts the glowing, yellow buildings in two, breaks the walls into motley halves; pensive, he looks at the honey seeping from those huge honeycombs: throbs of pianos, children's cries, the thud of a head banging against the floor.
This is the only landscape able to make him feel.
He wonders at his brother's skull shaped like an egg, every day he shoves back his black hair from his brow, then one day he plants a big load of dynamite and is surprised that afterward everything spouts up in the explosion.
Agape, he observes the clouds and what is hanging in them: globes, penal codes, dead cats floating on their backs, locomotives.
They turn in the skeins of white clouds like trash in a puddle.
While below on the earth a banner, the color of a romantic rose, flutters, and a long row of military trains crawls on the weed-covered tracks.
Written by Barry Tebb | Create an image from this poem

THE PLAY HOUSE

 We had a new house

And split the decorating.
You took the piled rolls of paper, While I stacked the cans of gloss, One to each corner-white-what else? And when we began our slow labour We did not even sigh except in some relief In being there at last.
There were no spaces for our children’s visits Nor for the children they would never bring.
All rooms sat square and small, but with Every outside wall a window.
There was light Enough for a studio wherever you went, And for the tiny hall you chose A glazed blue bowl of your own making.
The house stood on a hill, just a little Inaccessible but, in view of our age, others Had to be near and there they were, paired like Dominoes in black and white, or chequer board Squares with a neat red pillar-box Anchored on the corner.
All the day of the moving I longed to be alone With you; for the men in their old-fashioned aprons To finish and be off and make space for you to squat And with your nimble fingers light the one real fire We had been allowed, so I could sit in my winged Windsor chair and decipher the text of the flames And savour the smoke before the up-draft caught; And for a few days there might seem little to say, The clay wet in the bin, the canvases heaped in the studio, And the faces in our children’s photographs stranger Than strangers.