Welcome back to The Daily Poem, a podcast from Goldberry Studios.

I'm Sean Johnson, and today is Thursday, April 11th, 2024.

Today's poem is by Billy Collins, and it's called Candle Hat.

This is another ect frastic poem about an artist's self-portrait.

But it's a departure from yesterday's poem, and that it is much lighter in tone,

and the emphasis here is on the way in which the artist's self-portrait conveys the kind of characteristic eccentricities and even the comic elements of the artist's personality. Collins is writing about Francisco de Goya's

self-portrait in the workshop, or sometimes translated self-portrait in the studio,

in which he's wearing, in addition to some striking garb, he's a great red border on his jacket,

he's wearing a hat fitted with rackets or holders for candles. He's painting himself

painting at an easel during the day, but Goya was well known for a particular idiosyncrasy, he did not like to finish any of his paintings

under natural light. He preferred to put the finishing touches on all of his paintings

at night working by candlelight. So he devised this hat that would allow him to wear candles on his head. This is a feature in the

self-portrait, probably because Goya, working in the wake of the Enlightenment, wants to show off this

inventive development that he's come up with, and the idiosyncrasy itself is also a characteristic

coast enlightenment feature. There's a threat of autonomy there, this desire not to have

nature and the natural light of the sun

dictate to you how your image looks. You could imagine that the candles in his hat

providing the solitary light source by which he's working,

really coming from the same general vicinity

as the eyes of the artist themselves

would be an appealing situation for maybe any artist,

but especially an artist who's desirous of the kind of radical human autonomy from

...