and never have I turned since then (or, some thoughts on Rufus Wainwright's 'The Art Teacher')

This is a song rooted in the wry pleasure of hindsight; from the very first "there I was", an image is created of the narrator considering their younger self as that self once considered the art, or the teacher. There's a sort of benevolence, the kind of affection you can only feel for yourself given the distance of years - oh, I was so young, so naive. I was just a girl then. Isn't it sweet? But the narrator is, at the same time, allowing their past self and that self's feelings legitimacy: "never have I loved since then." They are someone who loves, genuinely loves, their teenaged self in all their awestruck solipsistic glory, and it is deeply affecting to imagine that as a real conversation; to imagine the narrator's hand on their own shoulder, comforting, reassuring, to imagine them saying, you're right. You'll never feel quite like this ever again, not about anybody. You'll never forget it. I understand. I love you. I forgive you. I love you.

There's a moment there where the narrator slips, almost, and forgets that they're not really there at the Metropolitan Museum, considering the Rubens and Rembrandts with their long-ago classmates, when the teacher asks what their favourites are. It's almost tangible, how hard it is for the younger narrator to suppress their knee-jerk reaction, so cheesy and ridiculous it can only be the most painful kind of honesty: sir, but you are. Though the narrator muses that they "wish I could tell him", it's impossible not to remember the gulf of years, the fact that these events are immovably fixed. They never told him then, and the narrator, sadly, has to accept that there's no way now to make it so that they did. They correct themselves: oh I wish I could have told him.

The art teacher of whom the narrator thinks, in the final lines of the second verse, is not, you get the feeling, the very real man, "not that much older than I was", who is almost certainly somewhere out there, still alive and perhaps even still teaching. The narrator is thinking of the art teacher as they knew him then, at that exact moment in the museum. Young and vital and passionate, a half-silhouetted figure whose construction is only partly grounded in reality. No wonder we can believe them when they tell us they've never loved any other man; how can anything compare to the awful raw-edged earnest way we fall in love, at sixteen or seventeen, with the people we've mythologised?