A day of sunshine and showers and a rainbow late in the afternoon just as I was feeling  a little blue after our daughter had just left. It’s been such a lovely few days. Look carefully and you can just see the reflection of the rainbow. It was brighter in the sky than my camera managed to capture.

Our garden has really come alive over the last few days of sunshine. I love the yellows and whites at this time of year.

World Poetry Day is celebrated on 21 March, and was declared by UNESCO in 1999, “with the aim of supporting linguistic diversity through poetic expression and increasing the opportunity for endangered languages to be heard”.

I wanted to find a poem today to make readers smile and remembered this one by Billy Collins  which delighted me many years ago when we went to his poetry reading. On one of our holidays in France we went on an adventure to find the painting in the gallery only to be told it had gone away for cleaning. I was so disappointed. I really wanted to see Goya’s smile and his remarkable hat.

Candle Hat

In most self-portraits it is the face that dominates:
Cezanne is a pair of eyes swimming in brushstrokes,
Van Gogh stares out of a halo of swirling darkness,
Rembrant looks relieved as if he were taking a breather
from painting The Blinding of Sampson.

But in this one Goya stands well back from the mirror
and is seen posed in the clutter of his studio
addressing a canvas tilted back on a tall easel.

He appears to be smiling out at us as if he knew
we would be amused by the extraordinary hat on his head
which is fitted around the brim with candle holders,
a device that allowed him to work into the night.

You can only wonder what it would be like
to be wearing such a chandelier on your head
as if you were a walking into a dining room or concert hall.

But once you see this hat there is no need to read
any biography of Goya or to memorize his dates.

To understand Goya you only have to imagine him
lighting the candles one by one, then placing
the hat on his head, ready for a night of work.

Imagine him surprising his wife with his new invention,
then laughing like a birthday cake when she saw the glow.

Imagine him flickering through the rooms of his house
with all the shadows flying across the walls.

Imagine a lost traveler knocking on his door
one dark night in the hill country of Spain.
“Come in, ” he would say, “I was just painting myself,”
as he stood in the doorway holding up the wand of a brush,
illuminated in the blaze of his famous candle hat.

 

I just love the whole picture painted by the poet so that it all happens in your mind’s eye and you smile and feel the delight of himself and his wife ‘laughing like a birthday cake.’