Paris Street, Rainy Day
Sonnet © 2020 Matthew de Lacey Davidson
About self-absorption, they were never wrong,
the petit-bourgeois Masters: how clearly every detail
presents itself — from the central line of the green streetlight
extending out towards the downcast throng,
all blissfully unaware that thousands of miles away
the lives of black people will become immeasurably worse
as concern is greater for the fashions of ballet
and how one’s wide ascot tie and square-toed shoes might get ruined by the rain and gale.
Anyhow, the damp begins to advance
down cobbled stones and silk umbrellas. To the right —
a husband and wife both throw a vacuous glance
towards an object which brings them passionless delight.
I wish my cares, as well, weren’t so diverse —
escaping, as I do for a time, into their luxuriant universe.
This is a pastiche of W. H. Auden’s (1907–1973) masterpiece, Musée des Beaux Arts (1938). Auden’s original poem has 21 lines, so I based my poem almost completely on the rhyming scheme of the first original 14 lines of Auden’s poem, thus making my poem a sonnet.
Paris Street, Rainy Day is a fabulous, enormous painting by Gustave Caillebotte (1848–1894), which is held in the Art Institute of Chicago, and I visited it almost once a week for a few years. It was painted in 1877, the year that Northern forces withdrew from the American South, thereby ending Reconstruction, and allowing civil rights abuses towards black Americans to continue until the civil rights era in the 1960s.
