The Drying of the Paint

“I wonder why I write verses for nobody reads them.”

—Shelley (in 1820)

Learn to live with brute despair,

Since the slughorn reason’s there,

Full in view, embattled sight—

Allow yourself a luck that's bare!

Seeking merely, find the right.

Bid a fond farewell to hope,

Always such a slippery slope!

Like a little, the love you bear.

What to do, though, if you can’t,

My fellow stoic supplicant,

Puzzling how to forge some good

And yet be widely understood?

Scan the surface! Make it new!*

The paint? It's drying quickly, too!

*Make It New, the title of a 1934 collection of essays by the poet Ezra Pound, became the battle cry of the modernist movement in art and literature.

Epigraph: Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock, quoted in Ann Wroe, Being Shelley: The Poet’s Search for Himself (New York: Pantheon Books, 2007), 258.

Tuesday, March 10, 2026