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Industry, landscape and atmosphere collide in the sixth room's abstract environment. The stanza avoids the inclusion of any verbs and instead paints a chaotic scene with nouns, adjectives and relational prepositions that give the environment its depth and kinetic energy. Unlike previous stanzas in “The Palace of Art” that explicitly, if briefly, outline the action and narrative in the scene at hand, this stanza provides the descriptions of “a foreground black with stones and slag” and “All barr'd with long white cloud the scornful crags.”
This abstract method presents the raw materials but requires the reader to mentally assemble the pieces to create a unique and more highly personalized impression of the scene than a more explicit explanation would trigger. The form of the stanza remains consistent with the rhyming quatrain form of the poem's other stanzas, but the style and tone set it apart from the more-standard styles employed in the rest of the poem. Published several decades before the beginning of the Impressionist movement, “The Palace of Art” pushes back against the pressures of pre-established style and convention.
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