Modern Age - Winter 2018 - 144

Modern Age

*

Winter 2018

scholar. She has traveled to Europe to see and study Van Gogh's
works and to consult Van Gogh experts. She provides a full scholarly apparatus for her poems: a preface on Van Gogh's beliefs
about religion, the Bible, and art; apt quotations (usually from Van
Gogh's letters) at the bottom of the page of each poem as well as
on pages whose numbers mark the book's eight titled sections;
and a comprehensive bibliography. In her preface, Mooney sums
up Van Gogh's beliefs: "To Van Gogh, nature was not the whole of
reality; nor was nature God; Nature was poetry and unadulterated
metaphor."
In landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and especially in scenes of rural
peasants, whose hard labor had long been fixed by the cycling
year and its agricultural seasons, Van Gogh saw the stories and
teachings of the Bible wholly embodied: birds as angels, a peasant shepherd as Christ the Good Shepherd, a girl rocking a cradle
as taking the place of one of the Magi, or the voices "of bidding
and of buying" at an auction of parts of an old torn-down church
as like the voices of the money changers in the temple ("Auction
of the Crosses").
In one such painting, "Old Man by the Fire," Mooney finds an
image of the uni- versal human condition. The man sits in a chair
by the hearth, his head in his hands, while "A kettle hanging there
/ Swings like a bell that tolls the final hours / Of day or life itself."
The poem concludes:
There's no one else in sight, no wife, no son
to listen, comfort, or to help him shoulder
heavy burdens that he bears alone.
Fire turns to ash; the room grows colder.
This study of a man, weary and worn,
Reminds us that from dust we all were born.
144

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Modern Age - Winter 2018

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Modern Age - Winter 2018

Contents
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