Explore "A Painter's Holiday" by Bliss Carman on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
We painters sometimes strangely keep / These holidays. When life runs deep / And broad and strong, it comes to make / Its own bright-colored almanack. / Impulse and incident divine / Must find their way through tone and line; / The throb of color and the dream / Of beauty, giving art its theme / From dear life's daily miracle, / Illume the artist's life as well. / A bird-note, or a turning leaf, / The first white fall of snow, a brief / Wild song from the Anthology, / A smile, or a girl's kindling eye, -- / And there is worth enough for him / To make the page of history dim. / Who knows upon what day may come / The touch of that delirium / Which lifts plain life to the divine, / And teaches hand the magic line / No cunning rule could ever reach, / Where Soul's necessities find speech? / None knows how rapture may arrive / To be our helper, and survive / Through our essay to help in turn / All starving eager souls who yearn / Lightward discouraged and distraught. / Ah, once art's gleam of glory caught / And treasured in the heart, how then / We walk enchanted among men, / And with the elder gods confer! / So art is hope's interpreter, / And with devotion must conspire / To fan the eternal altar fire. / Wherefore you find me here to-day, / Not idling the good hours away, / But picturing a magic hour / With its replenishment of power.
Conceive a bleak December day, / The streets all mire, the sky all gray, / And a poor painter trudging home / Disconsolate, when what should come / Across his vision, but a line / On a bold-lettered play-house sign, / _A Persian Sun Dance_.