Searching For Order

"_{For me, poetry is always a search for order." – Elizabeth Jennings}

_{Born in England on this date in 1926, Jennings started her writing career with a bang winning the Arts Council of Great Britain Prize given for the best first book of poems.    She followed that with the prestigious Somerset Maugham Award for her book, A Way of Looking.  Regarded as traditionalist rather than an innovator, Jennings is best known for her lyric poetry and mastery of form.  For Saturday’s Poem, here is Jennings,}

                             _{Rembrandt’s Late Self Portraits}

<sub>You are confronted with yourself. Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care
Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.
There is no arrogance. Pride is apart
From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift
The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt
But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last
Experiment went on. You stared beyond
Your age, the times. You also plucked the past
And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,
And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,
The sadness and the joy. To paint's to breathe,
And all the darknesses are dared. You chose
What each must reckon with.</sub> 

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