A poem for the Rubenianum
January 14 2014
Picture: Rubenianum
The Rubenianum in Antwerp, world centre of Rubens scholarship, has been made the subject of a poem by Antwerp's official poet, Bernard Dewulf:
It might be better in Dutch.
Is this the first time an art historical establishment has been the subject of a poem? Does anyone know any more?
Update - a reader sends in this:
'At the Royal Academy', by Thomas Hardy
These summer landscapes--clump, and copse, and croft - Woodland and meadowland--here hung aloft, Gay with limp grass and leafery new and soft,
Seem caught from the immediate season's yield I saw last noonday shining over the field, By rapid snatch, while still are uncongealed
The saps that in their live originals climb; Yester's quick greenage here set forth in mime Just as it stands, now, at our breathing-time.
But these young foils so fresh upon each tree, Soft verdures spread in sprouting novelty, Are not this summer's, though they feign to be.
Last year their May to Michaelmas term was run, Last autumn browned and buried every one, And no more know they sight of any sun.
Update II - a reader alerts me to this poem by Jack Butley Yeats, about the Hugh Lane Gallery in Dublin.
Update III - a reader writes:
Regarding the post on your blog on the poem for the Rubenianum (which, by the way, is as bad in Dutch as in English): there is W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux-Arts, although it is more about a painting than about the institution mentioned in the title.
