Excerpts from
Through the Rainbow
By Thorkild Bjørnvig
Van Gogh in St. Rémy
1
The low morning sun sparkled in between the bars of his cell
at the hospital - and he painted that.
Out there the ploughman was walking,
out there the sower was walking,
out there the reaper was walking -
those, too, he drew and painted.
But the bars, never.
The intense awareness of birth and departure
imposes itself on the brink of life.
For him the reaper became a vision
of death out harvesting; the wheat, an image
of humanity dying. All in broad daylight,
in floods of sun, of acceptance, and nothing
to grieve for.
"How curious I should see that
through the iron bars of a cell," he wrote in a letter.
And he ardently painted what was not himself, not
his fits and anxieties. Things that were outside himself
and the cell: wheat
the brick wall enclosing the meadow, cypresses, mountains,
the sun and the moon. But never the bars
through which he saw them.
From Thorkild Bjørnvig: The World Tree
Mermaid Press/Gyldendal 1993
Translated by Paula Hostrup-Jessen
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