In The Rules of Forever, Cara brings her students to visit Lauren at the Metropolitan Museum of Art for a lesson in art and poetry analysis. After practicing with Hokusai’s The Great Wave, the students are let loose in the galleries to locate other artworks that have been memorialized with poetry. Here are the works and their attendant poems that the students were tasked with finding.

The Great Wave: Hokusai

But we will take the problem in its most obscure manifestation, and suppose that our spectator is an average Englishman. A trained observer, carefully hidden behind a screen, might notice a dilation in his eyes, even an intake of his breath, perhaps a grunt. (Herbert Read, The Meaning of Art)

It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky.

In the painter’s sea
All fishermen are safe. All anger bends under his unity.
But the innocent bystander, he merely
‘Walks round a corner, thinking of nothing’: hidden
Behind a screen we hear his cry.
He stands half in and half out of the world; he is the men,
But he cannot see below Fuji
The shore the color of sky; he is the wave, he stretches
His claws against strangers. He is
Not safe, not even from himself. His world is flat.
He fishes a sea full of serpents, he rides his boat
Blindly from wave to wave toward Ararat.

Donald Finkel

The Great Figure

Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
firetruck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city.

William Carlos Williams

Lepage’s Joan of Arc

Once, it may be, the soft gray skies were dear,
The clouds above in crowds, like sheep below,
The bending of each kindly wrinkled tree;
Or blossoms at the birth-time of the year,
Or lambs unweaned, or water in still flow,
In whose brown glass a girl her face might see.

Such days are gone, and strange things come instead;
For she has looked on other faces white,
Pale bloom of fear, before war’s whirlwind blown;
Has stooped, ah Heaven! in some low sheltering shed
To tend dark wounds, the leaping arrow’s bite,
While the cold death that hovered seemed her own.

And in her hurt heart, o’er some grizzled head,
The mother that shall never be has yearned;
And love’s fine voice, she else shall never hear,
Came to her as the call of saints long dead;
And straightway all the passion in her burned,
One altar-flame that hourly waxes clear.

Hence goes she ever in a glimmering dream,
And very oft will sudden stand at gaze,
With blue, dim eyes that still not seem to see:
For now the well-known ways with visions teem;
Unfelt is toil, and summer one green daze,
Till that the king be crowned, and France be free!

Helen Gray Cone

Cezanne’s Ports

In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.

But that meeting place
isn’t represented;
it doesn’t occur on the canvas.

For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.

And the immense water of L’Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats.

Allen Ginsberg

Venus and the Lute Player

Far in the background a blue mountain waits
To echo back the song
The note-necked swan, while it reverberates,
Paddles the tune along.

The player is a young man richly dressed.
His hand is never mute.
But quick in motion as if it caressed
Both lady and the lute.

Nude as the sunlit air the lady rests.
She does not listen with her dainty ear,
But trembles at the love song as her breasts
Turn pink to hear.

She does not rise up at his voice’s fall,
But takes that music in,
By pointed leg and searching hand, with all
Her naked skin.

Out of that scene, far off, her hot eyes fall,
Hoping they will take in
The nearing lover, whom she can give all
Her naked skin.

Paul Engle

Brueghel’s Harvesters

Though they stoop and sweat
outside a stingy circle
that the pear tree affords …

though the mustardy sheaves
of their morning’s labor
lie stiff in their ranks as battle-

tallied dead . . . and though
the tree itself, coiling
ungracefully heavenward, past

a blue steeple, splits
their world with its axis,
here is Eden after all

which the artist makes
us contemplate
by planting in the foreground

that husky, unkempt reaper
with his legs splayed wide,
forcing our gaze crotchward,

to the solid drowse
of his codpiece so casually
unlaced, while another,

nearby, holding summer-
ripe fruit firmly to his lips,
stares out at us, and eats.

Richard Foerster

And last but not least is the painting that kick-started Cara’s student’s study of poetry and art, The Starry Night, located in The Museum of Modern Art.

The Starry Night

That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion. Then I go out at night to paint the stars. —Vincent van Gogh in a letter to his brother

The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.

It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons   
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.   
Oh starry starry night! This is how   
I want to die:

into that rushing beast of the night,   
sucked up by that great dragon, to split   
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.

Anne Sexton