Poetry

One of Rob’s many passions is poetry. He is currently experimenting with traditional metres to explore personalities captured by portraits.

Below are a selection Rob’s most recent poems, accompanied by the images that inspired them

Portrait of Robert Stewart

Of what does this expression tell?
This pink-faced air of wariness
Which frozen by the artist’s spell
Will speak years hence of veiled distress

Viewing now with searching gaze
This statement of my vanity
I feel the need to reappraise
The person who looks back at me

I recognise the clothes with ease
The fineness of my jacket’s cut
The breeches flexing at my knees
The waistcoat tight around my gut

And there beyond my rustic chair
I see the backdrop that I chose
Dark clouds aflame with sunset’s glare
A rural idyll in repose

Yet still that visage draws me in
And holds me with imploring eyes
The rueful mouth and sagging chin
Subvert my elegant disguise

By favouring that siren voice
Which pandered to my fragile pride
I fear I made a fateful choice
And spurned the truth that lay inside

And rather than a man of note
For whom life’s clamour has been stilled
I see a lost soul cast afloat
With some deep yearning unfulfilled

Bolan ‘73

That elfin face once sprinkled with glitter
Radiates an aura born of magic
His bongo musings now turned electric
Have made a fashion of the mystic world
Fusing the eternal pulse of nature
With harsher rhythms of the current time

His dandy hat recalls a bygone time
When foppish costume stood in for glitter
Projecting a bright vivacious nature
With daring flair and as if by magic
Releasing sparks into the humdrum world
Making ordinariness electric

Even though his songs are now electric
Less reflective than in a former time
He still seems rooted in that other world
Where incantations could summon glitter
And bring forth transformational magic
Interweaving melody with nature

But that delicate fusion with nature
Is threatened when the lure of electric
Starts to overwhelm the charm of magic
And disenchanted forces of the time
Tend towards those baser forms of glitter
More suited to a material world

Nineteen seventy-three in Bolan’s world
Is the year in which diminished nature
Loses its faith in the power of glitter
To blunt the edge of thrashing electric
And his portrait captures this point in time
When banality first threatens magic

The point when gaudy charades of magic
Gain credence in a disenchanted world
And fearing a divergence from his time
He will shortly spurn his inner nature
Succumb to insistent brash electric
Relinquish enchanted gold for glitter

Snapshot in time pervaded with magic
Recalling glitter in a simpler world
Fleeting blend of nature and electric