Life pours out images, the accidental
At once deleted when the purging mind
Detects their resonance as inessential:
Yet these may leave some fruitful trace behind.
Thus on this painted mirror is projected
The shield that rendered safe the Gorgon's head.
A travesty.--Yet even as reflected
The young face seems to strike us, if not dead,
At least into an instantaneous winter
Which life and reason can do nothing with,
Freezing the watcher and the painter into
A single immobility of myth.
But underneath the pigments' changeless weather
The artist only wanted to devise
A posture that could show him all together,
Face, shoulders, waist, delectable smooth thighs.
So with the faulty image as a start
We come at length to analyse and name
The luminous darkness in the depths of art:
The timelessness that holds us is the same
As that of the transcendent sexual glance
And art grows brilliant in the light it sheds,
Direct or not, on the inhabitants
Of our imagination and our beds.
Robert Conquest
