Text of the Poem | The Painter By John Ashbery | Eureka Study Aids

1. Sitting between the sea and the buildings

2. He enjoyed painting the sea's portrait. 

3. But just as children imagine a prayer

4. Is merely silence, he expected his subject

5. To rush up the sand, and, seizing a brush, 

6. Plaster its own portrait on the canvas. 

7. So there was never any paint on this canvas

8. Until the people who lived in the buildings

9. Put him to work: "Try using the brush

10. As a means to an end. Select, for a portrait, 

11. Something less angry and large, and more subject

12. To a pinter's moods, or, perhaps, to a prayer." 

13. How could he explain to them his prayer

14. That nature, not art, might usurp the canvas? 

15. He chose his wife for a new subject, 

16. Making her vast, like ruined buildings, 

17. As if, forgetting isteslf, the portrait

18. Had expressed itself without a brush

19. Slightly encouraged, he dipped his brush

20. In the sea, murmuring a heartfelt prayer: 

21. "My sould, when I paint this next portrait

22. Let it be you who wrecks the canvas." 

23. The news spread like wildfire through the buildings: 

24. He had gone back to the sea for his subject. 

25. Imagine a painter crucified by his subject! 

26. To exhausted even to lift his brush, 

27. He provoked some artists leaning from the buildings

28. To malicious mirth: "We haven't a prayer

29. Now, of putting ourselves on the canvas, 

30. Or getting the sea to sit for a portrait!" 

31. Others declared it a self-portrait. 

32. Finally all indications of a subject

33. Began to fade, leaving the canvas

34. Perfectly white. He put down the brush. 

35. At once a howl, that was also a prayer, 

36. Arose from the overcrowded buildings. 

37. They tossed him, the portrait, from the tallest of the buildings; 

38. And the sea devoured the canvas and the brush

39. As though his subject had decided to remain a prayer.