Art has inspired poets for centuries. There is a kind of common creative bond that ties the two mediums together. Below we have shared some of our favourite poems about art.

1. Silver- Walter de la Mare

Slowly, silently, now the moon

Walks the night in her silver shoon;

This way, and that, she peers, and sees

Silver fruit upon silver trees…

A beautiful description of a nighttime scene where a moon glides over a serene landscape, shedding its silvery light. The focus on the colour silver lends itself to an artistic interpretation, as if it is a painting dappled in metallic moonlight droplets. It creates a harmony of colour, which works to bring out the magnificence of the moon’s rays, and its passive splendour, resting in the night’s sky. 

Read the poem here: https://www.poemtree.com/poems/Silver.htm

2. A painting- Sarah Howe

I watched the turquoise pastel

melt between your fingerpads…

A poem about how we can find beauty in artistic chaos. While the artist is careless, their paint flaking on their work surfaces and their ‘jamjar’ silty and chemically ridden, the narrator is the ‘verger’, tidying their studio. However, at the end of the poem, it seems the narrator changes their perspective. No longer do they look upon the ‘unscraped palette’ as ‘an ancient meal’s craquelured dish’; the leftover paint is, instead, ‘chewy rainbow, blistered jewels’. There is, in fact, a sort of art in the process of making it.

Read the poem here: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/a-painting-10/

3. Musee des beaux arts- WH Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position…

Nobody has captured Breughel’s ‘Icarus’ as accurately as Auden. The way that Icarus is positioned almost as an aside to the rest of the painting, hardly bigger than a thimble, is noted with a subtle ironic tenor. ‘Everything turns away quite leisurely from… disaster’, Auden writes, even for a ‘boy falling out of the sky’. 

Read the poem here: https://www.poetrybyheart.org.uk/poems/musee-des-beaux-arts/

4. Having a Coke with you- Frank O’Hara

 I look

at you and I would rather look at you than all the portraits in the world

except possibly for the Polish Rider…

O’Hara’s poem centres itself around artwork and how it can be used as a comparative form to the real world. He criticises the way that artists do not take the time to choose their subjects, and are more preoccupied with perfecting their technique, such as the ‘Impressionists’ who do not ‘get the right person to stand near the tree’ or ‘Marino Marini’ who ‘didn’t pick the rider as carefully as the horse’. This, he suggests, ‘[cheats them] of some marvellous experience’.

Read the poem here: https://poets.org/poem/having-coke-you

5. Sonnet 24- William Shakespeare

Mine eye hath played the painter and hath steeled,

Thy beauty’s form in table of my heart;

My body is the frame wherein ’tis held,

And perspective that is best painter’s art...

A charming little sonnet which describes a speaker’s lover. They paint the image of them and their frame hangs in their body. However in the middle of the poem (the volta), the speaker’s tone changes. They realise that while the paint captures their outer beauty, the true nature of a person is not found in the painting. It is in their heart.

Read the poem here: http://www.shakespeares-sonnets.com/sonnet/24

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