Spencer Alley: Twentieth-Century Efforts to Catch the Eye

Thursday, December 6, 2018

Twentieth-Century Efforts to Catch the Eye

Raphael Tuck & Sons (publisher)
A Valentine Message
ca. 1910
lithographic postcard
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston

Edward McKnight Kauffer
Vigil - The Pure Silk
1919
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Edward McKnight Kauffer
Victoria & Albert Museum, South Kensington
(for London Underground)
1921
lithograph
Cooper Hewitt, Smithsonian Design Museum

Rockwell Kent
Bookplate for Chicago Latin School
1928
relief print
Philadelphia Museum of Art

Latin Lecturer
(The last class before summer)

Whatever his own eye troubles to make clear,
As the eagle plunges, ideal swimmer and angel,
He saw, and seizes.

If the falcon signal,
Flying as semaphore:
Life of an eye, a wing,
With the hush of a train. . . .

If the sparrow roister,
Stranded on backs of temples
like moving freights,
Are Roman, sometimes reclining,
His own invention. . . .

Remember how also amid the clang and report
of the yard –
Its auction disquiet,
Its surge of girls in the plaid –

He can make you think of the rain
And a landing in Britain:

The tremulous knees, the waiting,
The massing for stations,
The shield curt to the face,
As onward the cold cliff,
Then the leg is suddenly chalked
By the shore and the stiffness;

Till caught in an updraft and ready,
They found themselves sanded,
Too many and too strong
For that strip of shore.

And he takes to himself his watch
As the face of an elder –
Its shielded, impassioned wheel:
And feeling unsteady,
Senses the loss of his objects.

The lime and the envy burn
In trans-Alpine snow;
The birds like jacks
Have tracked the plain and crossed it
And flown like nail-prints.

And the evening comes over water –
Sets in a clutch of boughs
Like a hen or a vacancy;
And he knows, but loves, what he is.

Oh water, be under us like a shine.
The floor we played on,
The linoleum we paid for,
The life we led.

– Rosalie Moore (published in Poetry, 1957)