Joan Eardley   ...   Flood Tide

  Joan Eardley   ...   Flood Tide


The Scottish poet Edwin Morgan wrote this poem ten years ago in honour of Eardley and in response to her painting Flood Tide.

JOAN EARDLEY: FLOOD-TIDE

Edwin Morgan

 

Lonely people are drawn to the sea.

Not for this artist the surge and glitter of salons,

Clutch of a sherry or making polite conversation.

See her when she is free: –

Striding into the salty bluster of a cliff-top

In her paint-splashed corduroys,

Humming as she recalls the wild shy boys

She sketched in the city, allowing nature’s nations

Of grasses and wild shy flowers to stick

To the canvas they were blown against

By the mighty Catterline wind –

All becomes art, and as if it was incensed

By the painter’s brush the sea growls up

In a white flood.

The artist’s cup

Is overflowing with what she dares

To think is joy, caught unawares

As if on the wing. A solitary clover,

Unable to read WET PAINT, rolls over

Once, twice, and then it’s fixed,

Part of a field more human than the one

That took the gale and is now

As she is, beyond the sun.