Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Jane Hirshfield's "History as the Painter Bonnard" explores the interplay between history, memory, and the act of creation. Using the figure of the French painter Pierre Bonnard as a lens, the poem delves into the complexities of human experience and the desire for revision, both in art and life. In Bonnard's unique approach to his art-sneaking into galleries and even patrons' homes to make revisions-Hirshfield finds a metaphor for the human condition and the impossibility of finality in understanding the past.

The opening lines, "Because nothing is ever finished," set the tone for what follows, introducing a concept that holds true not only for Bonnard's ever-evolving artwork but also for the mutable nature of history and memory. The painter's impulse to "overscribble" his own work with new details like "milk jug or fattened pear" suggests that our understanding of past events, like a canvas, is continually repainted by the "ripening colors of second sight."

The term "pentimenti," referring to visible traces of earlier paintings beneath layers of paint on a canvas, serves as a metaphor for how remnants of the past inevitably resurface, "half-visible, half brine-swept fish." These lingering traces bear a haunting presence, "pocking the mind," reminding us of the imperfection and incompleteness of our revisions. For Bonnard, "toward the end, only revision mattered," mirroring how individuals often seek to reevaluate or alter their understanding of past events as a form of redemption.

The poem then shifts its gaze from the general to the specific, from the artistic to the intensely human. The line "While a woman in Prague asks softly, in good English for the camera, 'But who will give us back these twenty years?'" brings the abstract notion of history into a heart-wrenching realm of individual suffering. Here, history is not just a canvas to be revised; it has real and sometimes tragic consequences, and no amount of artistic or existential "revision" can fully amend them.

However, the poem does not end in despair. It concludes with a note of cautious optimism: "something nameless opens in the heart: to touch with soft-bent sable, ground-earth pigment, seed-clear oil, the rounding, bright-fleshed present, if not the past." This suggests a form of redemption in the present moment, in the act of creation or understanding that we can achieve now, even if we cannot change what has come before.

The closing lines offer a poignant vision of reconciliation: "The kissed child puts his hand at last back into his mother's, though it is not the same; her fine face neither right nor wrong, only thoroughly his." Here, history and memory are neither condemned nor exonerated; they simply exist as "neither right nor wrong," but as inextricable parts of our identity.

"History as the Painter Bonnard" serves as a profound meditation on the complexities of human experience. It grapples with the tension between our continual rewriting of the past and the lingering, often haunting, imprints it leaves upon us. In doing so, Hirshfield presents a compelling portrait not just of an artist but of the human condition itself.

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