The Tate Gallery
Elizabeth Jennings
I
Preen no prejudice, but saunter into this proud building,
Remove your hat. Let your bags and baskets be examined
For bomb and gun.
Though within there will be blasts and explosions.
Important blows, battles and fisticuffs
With the history of art, for here are no concessions, no
unsuitable reticence,
Be ready
to be shaken, to toss out your inhibitions. Take off dark and pink glasses,
Unarmoured stand and reflect on improbable landscapes,
That easy scenery, coherent colours
Are out of court. Here is a kingdom of trial and error.
Experiment
Is Emperor and
everywhere a lively court is kept under soft control,
Allowed out on excursions, sent for on search-parties and
reconnaissance,
Ambassadors and
envoys are on the look-out for empirical makers,
Avoiding valleys, scaling stark mountains, hurrying, never
at rest.
And you walk here with
a ticket of freedom, a pass to dangerous escarpments,
The guards here are wary of withdrawals,
Will watch you watching canvas and metal, stone and clay,
A country then where Nature is often bypassed,
where rocks are hacked and broken, borders
footstepped and trampled,
But remember what is wanted from you is a good giving,
A generous benefaction – your open ideas,
your wide mind with its gates flung
back and windows open.
You will be received here by international personages,
Reclaimers, responders, builders, lavish spenders,
Rothko, Ernst, Magritte and Modigliani,
But Blake will restore your confidence,
Palmer hold out his hand.
Come, enter, accept this gilt-edged invitation,
You are important and needed. Your gaze is urgent,
Watch Turner bonfire the sky,
You are wanted for these lavish pyrotechnics.
II
Think of these at night when no-one
sees
The fearful summons and
unsparing brush.
Ernst is a
haunter with dark images.
Imagine ghosts of gazers seeing flesh
Hinted at. Rodin is there of course,
Yet in a night-time gallery, the wish
Of all past lookers and their live
discourse
Might haunt the air.
'Here,' one might say, 'My dread
Is captured. I've had dreams like that, a curse
On easy sleeping'. Do these painters
then
Darken our day to help us
through the night
Knowing that
we are scared and little men?
Perhaps, but we are ones who climb to bright
Precarious moments, love those abstract lines
Of Nicholson and Mondrian. Our sight
Is sharpened in this place of many
signs
Directing us within but
also out
To how the sky behaves
or moon reclines.
The Tate's pure purpose cannot be in doubt.
III
Place of mirror and mirage, hint,
retirement and then
Sudden
fierce arrivals, after shunting in sidings, of paintings which have unloaded
Influence, bias, and bring in their own views of now,
visions of time beyond us almost, also
Warhol, Pollock, Hockney, all, in a way, shockers, shapers
of work
Which affronts us, takes
us by the scruff, giddys us to come round and stand, shakily still
Before the risk and rise of intemperate choices, blatant
colours, bearers
Almost, of
ungrace. And yet, and yet… look closer,
Dare to stare at the tricks played by Magritte, be willing
to admit
That painters had to
leap down unconscious minds, and
Out-Freud Freud, healing not by talking trouble away, but
by being forced
To admit art
must go this way, find a difficult sturdy beauty in all unlikeliness,
And, as a touchstone, stare at Blake or Palmer,
Open your eyes to your own mind reflected
But improved, given form and purpose,
Painted out of the colour-box of the rainbow,
Shocking us only to save us for this moment
In an age at ease with violence and terror.
An almost impossible peace may here be gathered,
But has to be won by a courage of total looking.
Elizabeth
Jennings was born in Boston, Lincolnshire in 1926 and educated at Oxford High
School and St Anne's College, Oxford. Her many books of poems include
Collected Poems 1953 - 1985
(1986) and Tributes
(1989), both published by Carcanet. She has written a number of critical books,
including Robert Frost
and Every Changing Shape,
and has translated Michelangelo's Sonnets.
She has edited a number of anthologies and has given many poetry readings, in
Great Britain, Florence and New York.