Poetry Painting Project: Day 29

ABOUT THE POETRY PAINTING PROJECT

We selected 30 poems (from the public domain) and each day for the next 30 days I will write a poem inspired by it, and Addie will paint a painting.

So, without further ado, let’s get to today’s painting and poem, inspired by William Butler Yeats’ poem, The Lake Isle of Innisfree.

To read this poem, click here (or scroll down near the bottom of the page)


ADDIE’S PAINTING

I Shall Have Peace
By Addie Hirschten

MY POEM

WORD OF OLYMPUS

Child of Olympus,
you are a word that falls like rain.

Snows melt and rush headlong for the sea,
past rock and fallen tree,
tumbling from the mountaintop.

In nature we find our tidings.
Find your lesson in the river’s tide.

It spills you out to sea,
into a buoyant, breathless stillness—
under a wine-red sky,
you tread water and to turn to look
at all the world in miniature.

And the ocean swells like an enraged beast,
as if Amphitrite had loosed her husband’s cart.

You drink the briny deep
and sink into her slumbering, loving clutches,
having spent your patrimony on the broken crags
of this awful, delightful, bequeathed world.
How will you accounts be settled or will they be settled at all?
The market, too, is washed away with the tide.


OUR INSPIRATION

THE LAKE ISLE OF INNISFREE
by William Butler Yeats

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee;
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight’s all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet’s wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart’s core.


Notes:
William Butler Yeats, 1865-1939. Born in Sandymount, Ireland.
Link to Biography: https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/william-butler-yeats
Link to Poem: https://poets.org/poem/lake-isle-innisfree


ABOUT THE POETRY PAINTING PROJECT

For the past couple of months I have been working on a huge new secret project with my painter, Addie Hirshten, of Studio Alchemy

We selected 30 poems (from the public domain) and each day for the next 30 days I will write a poem inspired by it, and Addie will paint a painting.

Expect an outpouring of creative energy! This is the sort of big project that artists live for … where we can say what we yearn to say.  Big picture stuff. Heart wrenching stuff. I feel so inspired by the poetry we are working with AND seeing Addie’s process as well. Expect daily surprises with our posts. Expect passion. Expect love. Expect life.

Check Out Addie’s Instagram Account: www.instagram.com/alchemy.of.art.addie.hirschten/

Check out Addie’s art studio — Studio Alchemy:
studioalchemy.art/

The role of the artist is to ask questions, not answer them.

Anton Chekhov

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