A poem by Emily Dickinson inspired this painting. Here it is:
Must be a Woe--
A loss or so--
To bend the eye
Best Beauty's way--
But--once aslant
It notes Delight
As difficult
As Stalactite
A Common Bliss
Were had for less--
The price--is
Even as the Grace--
Our lord--thought no
Extravagance
To pay--a Cross--
(1) Dickinson wrote this poem in the early 1860s. Its statement rejecting the Common Bliss for a deeper, more difficult Delight predates similar discussions that arose in Modernism by 50 or more years.
(2) The beauty of the poem is not only thematic. It comes to the palate in the tense rhyme between eye and way in first stanza. It comes in the different speeds needed to read the poem as controlled both by line and line breaks but also by the staccato effect interspersed and controlled by the dashes. It starts with a regular rhythm in the first two couplings in the first stanza. The reader is made aware that something different is going on by the stretched rhyme at the end of the second coupling. Then, the picks up a different rhythm. Faster. Dissonant. Difficult to the ear seeking a traditional poetic or even spoken melody. The music of this poem could have just as easily been written by a composer of the 2nd Viennese School.
(3) I love every bit of this poem. I have memorized it and thought about it and obsessed over it for some 25 years. It forms a cornerstone for my understanding of how Art works both in composition and in reception. But I think my favorite part is the word "Stalactite." The difficulty that Dickinson refers to is the very concrete sound quality of the word. The word as a concrete sound with no reference to the an image or the thing is designates makes this element a visionary one. Experimentation in poetry in Dada and in Paris in the early 20th century and the development of concrete poetry in the mid-20th century all live in the shadow of Dickinson's use of the word "Stalactite" in this poem. Absolutely brilliant...absolutely beautiful!