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Romance at short notice was her specialty.

Saki (H.H. Munro), “The Open Window.”
Megan Gabrielle Harris, Kismet (2022).Acrylic on canvas, 122 cm x 91 cm (48 H x 36 W inches)

Welcome to Poetics Tuesday where once again we’ll endeavor to put pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and let our muses rise to the occasion, that is, sharing with each other our original poems. Dora here, coming to you from Dreams from a Pilgrimage, and I don’t know about you, but I’m ready to throw open every window in my modest abode, welcome in the spring air, and banish every lingering trace of the winter doldrums.

The quote above from Saki’s famous (very) short story, “The Open Window,” got me thinking about one of the most prevalent tropes in literature and art, that of the open window. In a painting it often functions variously as a source of light or an invitation to ponder the relationship between the interior view and the exterior, or perhaps something even more imaginative or prosaic. In Saki’s short story, the window is the focal point of a conversation between a young girl and her aunt’s ill-at-ease visitor, Mr. Nuttle, the end result of which has the latter bolting out the door for dear life. For the girl the window was a fount of imagination; for Mr. Nuttle, alas, it was something quite different.

Henri Matisse, Open Window, Collioure, 1905. Oil on canvas, 55.3 cm × 46 cm (21+3⁄4 in × 18+1⁄8 in). National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. View out of the window of Matisse’s apartment in Collioure, France.

Poet David Lehman writes of Matisse’s “The Open Window” in “Three Aesthetic Questions”: Matisse “looked and knew/the harbor is life, and blessed be the light/that results in such blossoms of color,/an exuberance that proves every seascape/is a lover’s state of heart.”

Here are a few poems to get us acclimatized to the trope of an open window:

(L-R) Waterhouse, I am Half-Sick of Shadows, said the Lady of Shalott, 1915; William Maw Egley, The Lady of Shalott, 1858; Waterhouse, The Lady of Shalott Looking at Lancelot, 1894

In Tennyson’s lyrical ballad, “The Lady of Shalott” (1832), the mysteriously cursed Lady of Shalott dwells within “four grey walls and four grey towers” on an island in a river leading down to Camelot. Day and night she weaves on her loom what she sees of the world through a mirror facing the open window, until the day she sees the lusty figure of Sir Lancelot, falls in love, and meets her doom.

In Jane Hirshfield’s “I Open the Window” (2023), the poet tells us just what it is she wants to accomplish by opening a window.

Tomas Transnomer in “The Open Window” (2011) stands shaving in front of an open window, the whirring of the razor directing his thoughts to a borderland between alternate realities.

For Anna Swir in “I’ll Open the Window” (1996), the act of opening the window is an act of cleansing oneself from a love that has ended.

Longfellow’s “The Open Window” (1850) finds the poet glancing up at an open window reminding him of his childhood.

Adolph von Menzel, The Balcony Room, 1845. Oil on canvas, 58 cm (22.8 in); width: 47 cm (18.5 in)

Sara Teasdale reflects on an invalid’s life and time’s passage in “Open Windows” (1920).

“Opening the Window” (1875) by Oliver Wendell Holmes makes use of the window as a metaphor for creativity.

A haiku by Kakio Tomizawa (1902-1962) “Opening a Window” is quirky and familiar.

Jim Holland, Summer Reading, 2005.

For this week’s Poetics, I’d like us to use the trope of the open window in our own poetry. We need not limit ourselves to an interior to exterior perspective. Baudelaire wrote of looking in through an open window in “Windows.” William Carlos Williams wrote of trying to open a window and realizing it was stuck in “The Window.” Maybe you’d like to write about trying to read by an open window. And I don’t know about you but driving with the car window rolled down (and the music turned up, she added guiltily) is a mandatory rite of spring as far as I’m concerned.

Wassily Kandinsky, Yellow-Red-Blue, 1925.

Imagination is what allows your mind to discover.

Wassily Kandinsky

What happens when we open a window? What vistas of the heart and mind, of our senses and perceptions lighten or preoccupy us? Do we hear bells or wind chimes from afar, sounds of a bygone time, catch the scent of wild wisteria, or the music of distant drums or a primeval surge of life?

MUSIC: “Dinaka” by Selaocoe, a South African cellist, vocalist, and composer, from his album, Hymns of Bantu (2025).

Give us your take on the romance of the open window through your poetry.

Bartolomé Esteban, Two Women at a Window (1665–1675). Oil on Canvas, 125 x 104 cm. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.

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