“Fishmonger” Marsden Hartley I have taken scales from off The cheeks of the moon. I have made fins from bluejays’ wings, I have made eyes from damsons in the shadow. I have taken flushes from the peachlips in the sun. From all these I have made a fish of heaven for you, Set it swimming on a young October sky. I sit on the bank of the stream and watch The grasses in amazement As they turn to ashy gold. Are the fishes from the rainbow Still beautiful to you, For whom they are made, For whom I have set them, Swimming? | Some people are simply born with paint and ink running through their veins as naturally as blood, artists to whom inventive and visionary expression in just second nature: modernist poet, essayist and painter Marsden Hartley was one of those people. One of the most influential painters of the first half of the 20th century, Hartley born on the January 4, 1877 in Lewiston, Maine and become a member of a circle of American modernist painter including Georgia O’Keeffe, John Marin, Arthur Dove, and Charles Demuth. An avid traveler, Hartley’s many trips to Europe, Mexico, Bermuda, and Nova Scotia were an influence in his varying artistic styles and aims. A factor that never varied however was Harley’s fondness for the rough, rocky coastal landscape of his own home state, Maine. Raised by his aunt, Hartley moved at the age of 16 in 1893 to live with his father and stepmother, Martha Marsden in Cleveland, Hartley seems to have developed a deep respect for his stepmother as it was her maiden name that he adapted as a first name, as his own birth name was Edmund. In 1898, he received a scholarship to the Cleveland School of Art, he was so well received here that he was gifted a five-year stipend to study art in New York. During the years of 1899 to 1900 he took classes at William Merritt Chase's New York School of Art, and additionally attended the National Academy of Design from 1900 to 1904. During the summers however he returned to his beloved Maine to paint landscapes. Hartley’s early art was influenced by the likes of various emerging artists whom he had been introduced to in his studies and resulting contacts with rising circles in New York including Cezanne, Matisse and Picasso. Hartley’s first solo exhibition in Alfred Stieglitz’s 291 gallery in 1909 and following success in 1912 gave him the opportunity to travel to Europe. Paris, London, Munich, and Berlin, were all given special attention by Hartley because it was here that he met a myriad of the European modernist artists and began painting abstractions and was even given the opportunity to exhibit with Der Blaue Reiter group at the 1913 Herbstsalon( the First German Autumn Salon) in Berlin. Hartley’s German paintings were revealed to be an intriguing combination of his fascination with Germany’s military regalia and American Indian motifs, and resulted in audacious symbolic works. When he returned to New York in 1915, Hartley once again made a point to socialize with the rising numbers of progressive painters and continued to travel frequently but this time to more tropical and native countries such as Bermuda and Mexico allowing their colorful styles to bleed into his own work, he produced numerous Still Lifes and landscapes. It was during this period of his life when he began to write, including poetry and critical essays which were published in his own book: Adventures in the Arts in 1921. In order to return to Europe, Hartley returned to New York and auctioned off a total of 117 of his paintings as Anderson Galleries. While in europe he painted several Cezanne inspired landscapes in France, Austria, Italy and Germany traveling regularly until 1930 he returned to U.S.A. to utilize a Guggenheim Fellowship in Mexico from 1932-1933, and spent the following year back in Germany. The spiritual essence of nature became very clear and important to Hartley during his many travels, and he often explored this theme in his painting for the rest of his life. After this, Hartley’s life became much more low-key and following a short time in New York interrupted only by two trips to Nova Scotia(1935 and 1936) he returned to Maine after his last Stieglitz-organized exhibition in 1937. Maine was Hartley’s permanent home for the remainder of his life, and it was here that he embraced poetry and landscape and figure painting through the rugged environment and people of Maine. Though, he was rather sickly, weak and ill through the later years of his life, 1939 and 1943 he continued to be a man of individual and independent strength, with poised control and an impeccable sense of reason, during these years interrupted only by Duncan Phillips( an old customer from 1921) who bought six oils, Hartley endured to paint and seclude himself in his cherished homeland until his death in Ellsworth, Maine in 1943. |
The format of Marsden Hartley’s “Fishmonger” is as independent and individual as time itself, it flows with all the constant and ceaseless fluency of passing hours. Time does not stop for anything and neither does Hartley, he does not pause or divide his composition but lets it remain authentic and unadulterated. However, time can be divided into moments of varying lengths and significances in one’s mind and Hartley utilizes just this quality to give his poem the articulation of lines while never altering from his consistent theme of time.
Fifteen lines of varying syllabic and visual lengths comprise, “Fishmonger” and it’s meter seems to iambic that renews itself every line. Some lines appear longer to draw contemplation and slow the reader’s pace and some lines appear shorter to draw emphasis and enlightened attention. The pace of “Fishmonger,” is fairly rapid and engaging as apart from the separation of line, it has no pauses, and a good deal of action is condensed into the poem’s brief life, so most of the thought concerning more convoluted meaning follows the reading, staying with it’s audience for a while afterward. Although, the poem has no rhyme scheme or rhyme of any sort for that matter, repetition is utilized to a similar effect of adding a natural quality to the poem’s flow and creating connection between poetic thoughts, it is used through the first five lines in the form of “I have” to begin lines, “Are” is used in the same fashion in the eleventh and tenth lines, as is “For whom” in the thirteenth and fourteenth. The arrangement of “Fishmonger” is wild and free, with raw fluency and charisma it is a beautiful poem, that feel as beautiful and natural as any temporal length of event or entity's existence.
The originality of Hartley’s poem comes from the creativity behind his extended metaphor, rare in its striking individuality and eccentricity of choice for comparison through Hartley’s charming prose an aquatic animal on mindlessly gray and slippery, dull and slimy becomes beyond mundane description. To begin this analogous picture, Hartley first, verbally and through vibrant imagery, constructs from various objects of noted beauty a fish of iridescent scales,
“I have taken scales from off
The cheeks of the moon.”
In just two brief lines Hartley’s first person speaker personifies the moon in a fairly intimate way, giving it’s rotundity a facial quality, yet also establishes the fish as no mere being of the sea, but a creatures whose beauty is more than earthly, and indeed celestial. In the next line, he gives the fish, a creature once doomed forever to water, the freedom of air, while simultaneously providing vivid color and delicate finesse: “I have made fins from bluejays’ wings,”. He gives his fish eyes of the deep regal purple of a small, rich plum(the damson is an edible drupaceous fruit, and subspecies of the plum tree). Hartley continues his exploration of the rainbow with a questionable line regarding “flushes taken from peachlips in the sun.” what exactly Hartley means by “peachlips in the sun” is unclear the word has no formal definition and even informally is surely not something that has much exposure to sun. Perhaps, this is a fantasy? Or dreamlike image? Whatever the object in question, the intended shade of rosy pink comes instantly to mind. Composed of a myriad of colors, Hartley’s speakers has “From all these I have made a fish of heaven for you,” giving his imaginary creature a owner. This “fish” is then not released into water as with only ordinary wish but “Set it swimming on a young October sky”. The surrounding are described as warm and transitional, both welcoming and evolving simultaneously as the world around transforms, the consistency of beauty worries our protagonist. Will his work remain acceptable it to the one he has given it to( which must be a lover)?
The construction of the poem and its emphasis suggest an allegorical meaning behind the rainbow fish. Perhaps, it builds upon an extension of water’s symbolism: alluding to freedom from form or constraint, or the ever flow of time. But then again Hartley may mean the fish to be the embodiment of his love for a woman, beautiful and multicolored: ever so carefully and lovingly constructed with meticulously selected items of the rarest and most gentle grace. This amorous fish would then be released into the river of time, that seems to run forward from the horizon in her honor, here it shall be openly judged by the elements and evolution. Yet, as his work flows out of his control Hartley’s speaker does not mourn it’s freedom but instead relaxes upon the side of the river that seems to symbolize currents of time.
“I sit on the bank of the stream and watch
The grasses in amazement
As they turn to ashy gold.”
Hartley’s speaker pictures as unaffected(save for awe and slight spontaneity) by the changes that occur around him, his love will never alter he seems to believe he will remain loyal and patient: feeling of adoration unchanged forever. Here, upon “the bank of the stream” he remarks upon the raw appeal of his surroundings, regarding rather suddenly and with surprising shock and awe: the metamorphosis of river grasses into “ashy gold” not as pure and striking as his own fish but carry a singular beauty none the less. Although, this particular change is one of the innocent and annual changes that come once a year, not at that time beckons in will be so positive, especially at first glance. Sometimes, age can dull colors and fade the appeal of an aesthetic(may it be note though that Hartley choose to give his fish a quality that to the best of knowledge as never faded: the glow of the moon). This change nevertheless awakens in Hartley’s character, an immediate fear that his fish may be become lackluster in the eyes of his beloved.
“Are the fishes from the rainbow
Still beautiful to you,”
He fears she may no longer see the allure in his creation, because not all things can stand the test of time, and if this is indeed a love based solely on thing of visual beauty how can it be expected to hold up to the trials of age?
Marsden Hartley has written something of a near extinct quality of originality, he fearlessly pioneers in an area of tradition and repetition, creating an exclusive and unexpected metaphor of unparalleled creativity and charm. There is something deeply endearing about Hartley’s uncertainty in the face of time’s erosion, his fear that it will destroy his creation that has been nurtured with such adoration and loyalty;
“For whom they are made,
For whom I have set them,
Swimming?”
The speaker begs the eternal rhetorical question is beauty truly so fickle as to die with the seasons? His naive reverence of the continuing natural processes around him, and also his reference to October: the first true month of autumn, when the seasons is truly evident in the earnest shower of leaves. October is the catalyzer of the fiery colors, frigid, breeze and hibernation, as the chronology of the natural world leeches the warmth from the air, inciting the first frost. Hartley draws forth from nature both glory and inevitability. His prose is delightful and sensuous, full of light-hearted illusions and innocently childish emotions. For surely anyone who constructs their love from an impossible collection of material things cannot expect it to survive time, love must be deeper than this. The poem is one of innovation and artistry in-spite of the past, facilitating a romance that brims with honest naivety and a touch of candid ignorance. “Fishmonger” is a fluid and delightful composition, a fine catch which glows with all the energy of youth, fresh and eager in its embrace of emotion, new syntax and language, reflecting the natural patterns and vivacious colors of life.