Oh happy Degas!
I thought I’d won first prize in the Raphael:
she was the Bellini of the ball,
fresh and Fragonard,
melodious as a Jenny Renoir,
a newly-blooming Rossetti
in my paradise Chardin of love.
Veni, vidi, da Vinci – I came, I saw, I was conquered.
I let her spank my Botticelli:
“no pain, no Gainsborough,” she said.
I loved her every nook and Cranach,
I priced her virtue above Rubens.

But it was only a Vermeer,
she was taking the Michelangelo,
a real Pissarro artist
letting on she was intent on treading the Breughel path
while engaged in extra-Murillo activities with her Bosch,
lured by a Manet with Monet.
Though I went down on bended Veronese
by the light of the silvery Munch
she told me to Van Eyck it.
I raised my Boucher eyebrows,
it was wormwood and Rousseau,
a Turner for the worse;
my tears like a Van Dyck bursting
took many a Titian to dry.
It was the El Greco of all my hopes,
driven to the very Coreggio of despair.
I had been close but no cigar: only the Stubbs.
Though she’s treated me like a door Matisse
I just Canaletto her go,
I am a slave and never to be Friedrich
till I’m Poussin up daisies.
She will be my Constable nymph
until my Caravaggio has rested and the grim reaper
has driven his Holbein harvester
over the tattered Rembrandts of my heart,
all grist to the Millais.