The Painter

John AshberyFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1955

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Summary

Background

Poem Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Literary Devices

Symbols & Motifs

The Sea

While many of the recurring motifs or symbols in “The Painter” are tied to one or more of the repeated words of the sestina form, the sea stands as an important symbolic element of the poem despite its exclusion from these six words. From its first line, the poem contrasts “the sea and the buildings” (Line 1), with each gaining symbolic weight as the poem develops. The painter’s passion project is “painting the sea’s portrait” (Line 2), but he does so without initially even lifting his brush. The painter is drawn to the “angry and large” (Line 11) elements of the sea, whose existence far exceeds his or any person’s ability to truly depict. Ashbery develops the sea, then, as a symbolic stand-in for what he calls “nature, not art” (Line 14).

The painter, drawn in by the sea though still somewhat connected to the world of the buildings, loves trying to paint the truth of what is “vast” (Line 16) and unknowable. The sea sits at the border of the buildings, far exceeding their reach and size. Both the location of the sea and its largeness represent the infinite otherness of nature, with nature referring to all that exceeds the narrow limits of “the people who lived in the buildings” (Line 8). The sea is a particularly useful symbol for Ashbery in “The Painter” because it not only represents that which exceeds the human capacity for intellectual grasping, but it also simply is such a phenomenon. Like the painter in his poem, then, Ashbery uses poetic strategies that refuse to reduce any subject to “a means to an end” (Line 10), even in writing a poem about such processes.

The Buildings

If the sea represents one side of human experience and one way of approaching nature and reality in “The Painter,” the buildings are symbolic of the other. The buildings and their inhabitants are threatened by the painter’s private artistic passions, in part, because he is not a full resident of the buildings. Instead, the painter “[sits] between the sea and the buildings” (Line 1), a part of society but always reaching beyond its limits. The buildings are not simply a symbol of urban or developed living in the poem. Instead, they represent the established status quo of society, a society that must continually reassure itself of its control over experience. By refusing to reduce and capture what is ungraspable in his painting, the painter threatens the illusion of control the society has over itself and nature. If painting is not “a means to an end” (Line 10) of defining the knowability of experience, then the society of the buildings would have to acknowledge that reality lies beyond the careful boundaries it has set up and, thus, relinquish control. The poem confirms that there are plenty of “artists” who are “from the buildings” (Line 27), those who produce paintings that recognizably depict objects of experience and, in so doing, reassure the building dwellers of the safety and easily understandable nature of their reality. The buildings, then, are not symbolic of a non-artistic society, but of a society that keeps art under control as a means for control.