An art class has been set up to paint a view, and the poem watches the students rather than the view itself. D. L. Emblen's "Art School on La Jolla Boulevard" opens on hands, not faces: "Each young hand turns upon the pivot of a brush." The wrist becomes a hinge, and the hand a small machine of hesitation. Within a few lines we see three kinds of student: the one who "moves nervously," the one who "hangs back," and the one who "slashes deep into the oblong space of landscape." Almost no information is given about these people, yet we recognise all three at once, because anyone who has faced a blank page knows each of those moods.
The central idea sits in the poem's most ambitious phrase, "truth and splendor, / for truth and squalor." The repetition is the key. The students begin by searching for splendor, which is what a seaside view promises, but the line corrects itself on the spot and swaps in "squalor." The poem is quietly saying that honest seeing means accepting both. Then comes the sentence that holds everything together: each one is "seeking something in a scene that asks nothing from anyone." The landscape is not a judge or a teacher; it does not care whether it is painted well. All the pressure is on the human side, the longing and the nerves, while the thing being looked at stays serenely indifferent.
The second stanza shows what the students are actually facing, and the contrast with the first is the poem's cleverest move. The grand words ("truth," "splendor") give way to a list of plain, slightly shabby things: "faded red tile roofs, a scattered run of cars below, one by one." Even the palm trees, the usual postcard emblem of a Californian coast, are cut down to size: "a row of ragged palms, like turkey-necks against a dull green mass of sea." The simile is unflattering and a little comic, and it is exactly the kind of honest, unromantic observation the first stanza was reaching for. The sea is not sparkling or majestic but "dull green," a "mass." The poem seems to answer its own question about splendor and squalor by showing that the real view contains a fair amount of the second.
The ending is the quietest and perhaps the best part. After the sea and the cliff come "clouds, / and blurred horizons, / and telephone wires paralleling horizons." The list has been drifting upward and outward, toward something vast and soft, and then a telephone wire slips in and runs straight alongside the horizon line. It is a small, almost deflating detail, yet it is also a very good painter's observation: the human-made line and the natural one lie parallel, and a student would have to decide whether to include it. The poem ends on this unresolved, ordinary image instead of a grand conclusion, which suits its theme. The truth these students are chasing includes the wires.
The form supports all of this. There is no rhyme and no fixed meter; the lines vary in length, and the short ones ("hangs back," "clouds") feel like pauses where a painter steps away from the canvas. The first stanza is one long, searching sentence that "gropes" its way forward, while the second is a catalogue of nouns with almost no verbs, which gives it the stillness of a scene held in place. The movement from restless action to fixed observation mirrors the move from the students' anxiety to the landscape's calm.
The poem is significant for how much it makes of an everyday moment. It treats the act of looking as a kind of courage, and it refuses to prettify what is looked at. Without announcing a lesson, it suggests that honest art begins when we stop waiting for the view to be beautiful and start paying attention to what is actually there, turkey-necked palms and telephone wires included.