One sign of a really good poem, I think, is that when you read about a place or moment in time that could very much exist in the natural world, you still end up thinking of another work of art. James Merrill’s “Cloud Country,” which I just read in his staggering Collected Poems, made me picture Inness’s haunted trees before I thought about actual sunsets.
The landscape where we lie is creased with light
As a painting one might have folded and put away
And never wished to study until now.*
George Inness, "Sunset Glow" (1883, Montclair Art Museum, oil on canvas, 16 in. x 24 in).
*James Merrill, “Cloud Country,” First Poems, Knopf, 1951
