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Home  »  Poetry: A Magazine of Verse  »  Florence Kilpatrick Mixter

Harriet Monroe, ed. (1860–1936). The New Poetry: An Anthology. 1917.

The Death of an Artist

Florence Kilpatrick Mixter

“I TIRE of looking at the sea,” he said.

“The composition’s bad; it needs a tree

Within the line of vision where the red

Of sunset pales before immensity.

There’s too much water and there’s too much sky

Without a frame to hold them in their place,

And not enough of shore to rest the eye

Or any little thing to shatter space.

If I were painting it”—he suddenly smiled—

“You’d come upon it almost unaware;

Down avenues of green your soul, beguiled,

Would yield the sea a glance and find it fair.

How swiftly then the spirit would go free!….

I tire,” he said, “of looking at the sea.”