page_title: Thomas Smith (American painter)
section_title: Poem
hierarchical_section_title: Thomas Smith (American painter) / Self-Portrait / Poem
context_page_description: Thomas Smith was a seventeenth-century American artist and mariner. He is best known for the self-portrait that he painted c. 1680, which is 'the only seventeenth-century New England portrait by an identified artist and the earliest extant American self-portrait'.
context_section_description: Beneath the skull in the bottom-left corner is a piece of paper that contains an eight-line poem:
  Why why should I the World be minding
  
  therin a World of Evils Finding.
  Then Farwell World: Farwell thy Jarres
  thy Joies thy Toies thy Wiles thy Warrs
  
  Truth Sounds Retreat: I am not forye.
  The Eternal Drawes to him my heart
  By Faith (which can thy Force Subvert)
  
  To Crowne me (after Grace) with Glory.
  
                                                               T.S.
  The monogram T. S. led critics to assume that Smith composed the verses, which describe the speaker's resignation from the world's troubles in order to seek divine solace. In fact, the poem is Josuah Sylvester's translation of a French devotional poem by Simon Goulart. Roger B. Stein finds that 'the poem is the central organizing element, the key to the picture—to its design, to the relationship of its parts to one another, and to its meaning both as individual work and as an artefact within its larger culture'.
caption: Attributed to Thomas Smith, Mrs. Richard Patteshall (Martha Woody) and Child (1679). Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
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