HUBERT ROBERT:PAINTER

Sharing your ravishment
as a painter of landscape,
canals and ruins
you shape an age
of rape, banishment
amid bacchanals and revolution
in a language of demolition
among Royalty and prison
your loyalty was to art
in a versatile definition
of a bravura style
as a water colorist
and garden designer
among prisoners
in a conflation
as your nation's pundit
amid the mystic grays
with the poets
Andre Chernier
Antoine Roucher
and the princess of Monaco
in your capriccio
at last fallen to apoplexy
with your last brush in hand
such was your past discipline
once called by Diderot
"Robert of the Ruins."