Poems to Model With (1)

When I model, I like to put as much of me as I can into the artist-model relationship – so I like to put talking and/or singing as part of the mix.

While this may not be appropriate in a studio situation, it can be
useful, with the instructor’s permission, in a classroom. I like to
use, especially, one or more of three short poems if I can find a way to
fit them. All three of these poems work especially well for models who
are opening themselves to artists, because all three are joyful
prayers.
First and shortest is a poem my grandfather, Joyce Kilmer it is called
“Easter”.

The air is like a butterfly
with pale, blue wings;
The happy earth looks at the sky,
and sings.

The second is a sonnet by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

God’s Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil,
It gather’s to a greatness like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not wreck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man’s smudge and shares man’s smell: The soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last light off the black west went,
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs –
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Gerard Manley Hopkins, 1877

Other Hopkins poems are wonderful for this too.

6/07/2010