Gas lamps as angels

Lisel Mueller's poem on Monet is part of her Pulitzer prize-winning collection, Alive Together. Years ago I saw a great presentation of Claude Monet's work at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in walking through the exhibit with the headphones and listening to the narration about the progression of his life's work, I was able to see how cataracts altered his vision and changed the images he painted. Monet's Impressionism was dedicated to capturing light and color as he saw it, and by looking at his early and late works you can see the startling and honest differences in his vision. His later paintings are not as pretty, with muddier, yellower color tones. And yet, they do continue to show what the eye sees -- his impaired vision still provided a valid study of sight, color and light.

From the link just above, a description of how Monet's vision impairment affected his art:

Monet was both troubled and intrigued by the effects of his declining vision, as he reacted to the the foggy, impressionistic personal world that he was famous for painting. In a letter to his friend G. or J. Bernheim-Jeune he wrote, “To think I was getting on so well, more absorbed than I’ve ever been and expecting to achieve something, but I was forced to change my tune and give up a lot of promising beginnings and abandon the rest; and on top of that, my poor eyesight makes me see everything in a complete fog. It’s very beautiful all the same and it’s this which I’d love to have been able to convey. All in all, I am very unhappy.” – August 11, 1922, Giverny.

From another analysis:

Many of these later paintings verge on the abstract, with colors bleeding into each other and a lack of rational shape and perspective. For example, "The House Seen from the Rose Garden, 1922-1924," is an explosion of orange, yellow and red hues, but leaves the reader barely able to discern the vague shape of the house in the background.Monet's diminished sight opened up a new vista for his art, one in which memory and the unseen play a more important role than the perceptions of direct experience.

In a certain sense, we must learn to see these last pictures of his garden at Giverny not as increasingly confused by his inability to see clearly, but as pictures in which Monet's memory traces of the site he had planted and tended and lived with so long - the paths, the plants and the waterways of his garden - came to replace the ever more fragile images of his failing eye.

In Mueller's poem, Monet is represented as resisting the idea that his vision must be treated medically. If not embracing vision impairment, he is at least exploring it for what it offers that is new and different.

Monet Refuses the Operation
by Lisel Mueller

Doctor, you say there are no halos
around the streetlights in Paris
and what I see is an aberration
caused by old age, an affliction.
I tell you it has taken me all my life
to arrive at the vision of gas lamps as angels,
to soften and blur and finally banish
the edges you regret I don't see,
to learn that the line I called the horizon
does not exist and sky and water,
so long apart, are the same state of being.
Fifty-four years before I could see
Rouen cathedral is built
of parallel shafts of sun,
and now you want to restore
my youthful errors: fixed
notions of top and bottom,
the illusion of three-dimensional space,
wisteria separate
from the bridge it covers.
What can I say to convince you
the Houses of Parliament dissolve
night after night to become
the fluid dream of the Thames?
I will not return to a universe
of objects that don't know each other,
as if islands were not the lost children
of one gray continent. The world
is flux, and light becomes what it touches,
becomes water, lilies on water,
above and below water,
becomes lilac and mauve and yellow
and white and cerulean lamps,
small fists passing sunlight
so quickly to one another
that it would take long, streaming hair
inside my brush to catch it.
To paint the speed of light!
Our weighted shapes, these verticals,
burn to mix with air
and change our bones, skin, clothes
to gases. Doctor,
if only you could see
how Heaven pulls earth into its arms
and how infinitely the heart expands
to claim this world, blue vapor without end.


Actually, my favorite poem from this collection of Mueller's is "What the dog perhaps hears," which muses about the keen canine ability to hear what we can only imagine. Both poems seem similar to me in the way they explore ability, inability, and what differences can reveal.