Gloria Moreno-Castillo
A Summer's Morning in 1797
Another landscape to paint,
Could be sold at a nice price
With a tidy label attached to it:
Norham Castle on the Tweed.
The rock, a firm platform placed right in the middle,
The ruins of the castle easily recognisable from a distance,
A few cows, carefully arranged in the foreground,
As true to life as possible;
And that would be it,
That would be definitely it.
Yes, indeed, a nice water-colour,
And a nice price fixed to it.
But now, dazzled by the rays of the rising sun,
The young man, Turner, can’t actually see the Castle.
So he lays aside his drawing and waits.
He can’t see what things are really like
So he leans back, stretches out his legs and waits.
Only the vague, dreamy clouds high above,
Only the flowing of the river, far below;
The rumbling of lazy cart-wheels from over the hills -
The hazy sunbeams - honey-coloured -
And the Castle, in the glare of dawn,
A glowing, ghostly shade -
The young artist starts and sits up.
Hang on a moment.
Why wait?
The blazing amber, the fading mist,
The wild uncertainty of it all,
The dramatic vagueness,
Hang on to it;
The glittering pearl, the lingering rays,
Hang on to them before they are gone.
The young Turner pulls himself together and stands up.
Yes.
There’ll be technical problems of course.
But he’ll think about those later.
Page(s) 46-47
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