Ekphrasis - the classics
 

While we wait for the event proposed over on GT by Philip Quinlan (and taken up enthusiastically by others) to find its final form, I thought this forum might be a suitable place to look at some classics of the art.

And we might as well start with one of the most famous. So here's Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts":


"The Shield of Achilles" is obviously another example of an ekphrastic poem, but it can also be seen as a kind of commentary on, or summation of, the entire genre.

Anyway, I'd be interested to see other people's favourite examples, together with any observations on the poems - and the genre itself.

By the way, does anyone know who it was that launched the cry "No more poems about paintings"? I remember reading it somewhere and now can only find it as the title of an essay by Edna Longley, but with a question mark, suggesting that she doesn't necessarily go along with the notion.

Gregory I love that Auden poem. I must confess that part of me is hostile to poems about paintings because so many poets really don't understand painting and use it for their own associations etc. I now accept that as part of life but something in me rebels when they reduce painting to mere illustration and write stories about the supposed illustration. It will be interesting to see what we can make of it.

Auden wrote a great deal about music too. His Magic Flute poem is amusing but is a very shallow take on a deep and deceptively decorative libretto and score.

Just a couple of irritating thoughts in the hope that they may produce a pearl or two.

I can't think of another example at the moment.

I think we've thoroughly hashed over the question of whether we may post on Mastery works by living poets, and I think we've decided that this is fair use, so I'll go ahead and post "The Charioteer" by A.E. Stallings.

I'm fairly sure that this statue is the one being described.

Can so new a poem be a classic of the art? Maybe not, but it's an example that moves me. Even the choice to put spaces between the couplets and to use initial caps is an important part of its effect: the push and pull of stasis and change.

The Charioteer

Delphi Museum


Lips apart, dry eyes steady,
He stands forever at the ready

Fingers open, sensitive
To the horses' take and give

(Although no single steed remains
At the end of tangled reins),

It is as if we are not here,
The way the patient charioteer

Looks beyond us into space,
For some sign to begin the race.

He has stared down centuries.
No wave from us, no sudden breeze,

Will trick him now to a false start.
He has learned the racer's art

To stand watchful at the gate,
Empty out the mind, and wait.

As long as it is in our power,
We gaze--for maybe half an hour--

Before we turn from him to go.
Outside, the hills begin to glow,

Burnished by a brazen sun
Whose course now is almost run.

We shiver, and around us feel
Vanished horses plunge and wheel.

Janet

I have to say four things, purely from a personal point of view:

1) First of all my conception of ekphrasis certainly extends beyond reference to the visual arts alone, although that seems to be the narrow, modern meaning. So I'm glad you introduced the idea of music. Martin Rocek had a thing up not long ago which referenced the music of Webern. Maryann Corbett also did a very effective job on a piece of music recently (Officium Defunctorum).
2) Personally I don't think an ekphrastic poem has to describe (in the strict sense) the (for instance) painting, or explain it, or interpret it (although it could do any combination of those things). For me the painting is a starting point and the poem is a sort of visceral reaction to it, rather than an intellectual one. I think that probably that's exactly the approach you aren't happy with. But I don't believe that diminishes the referenced work. So long, that is, as the poem celebrates the work in some way.
3) I will never be able to paint, because I can't get beyond that thing of "painting what I know is there" rather than what I actually see. Somehow poetry allows me to do that indirectly. OK, not well, mostly, but some.
4) Having had the privelege of working with an artist I have to say that she herself sometimes saw things in her work, having read the poem in response, that she hadn't either noticed or intended, but which nonetheless pleased her.
Philip

Amy Newman’s Guardian workshop on ekphrasis is illuminating. Neither “mastery” nor “classics” in evidence, of course, but the wonderful Jude Goodwin comes close, as always.

The two stages of the workshop can be found here and here.

Adam

I hadn't looked at the Grauniad poetry page in a bit, so I missed this. Thanks.

I thought Christine Klocek-Lim's poem was a far and away the best poem in its own right.

The Guardian workshop attracts some pretty good entries on many occasions. I have never forgiven them for my "found poem" sequence being rejected however (culled from a field guide to mushrooms of all things)!

Philip

Bishop on the ending of "Musée des Beaux Arts" in a letter to Lowell:

...even if it is describing a painting, I think it's just plain inacurate... --the ploughmen and the people on the boat will rush to see the falling boy any minute, they always do, though maybe not to help... Oh well--I want to see what you'll think of my 'Prodigal Son'

(quoting from a secondary source, not sure if ellipses are Bishop's or the quoter's)

The late Australian poet, the wonderful Gwen Harwood wrote many ekphrastic poems about music. The destructive forces of copyright have managed to remove nearly all of her work from the internet. If I manage to find time I will type something out.

Is this too remote from the music itself? More of a study of an artist in torment. Not really ekphrastic but it's short enough to type:
Afternoon

Kröte has spent some time devising
a kind of storage bin for tunes.
His cupboard's full of sheets comprising
the work of drunken afternoons.

Nothing today comes of his labours.
" 'Revenge, revenge' Timotheus cries,"
bellows a hopeful bass — the neighbour's
a singing coach. As Kröte tries

to catch the semiquavers, swearing
and whistling through his snow-white teeth,
Beethoven frowns in plaster, wearing
Kröte's hat on his laurel wreath.

A pupil comes. The noise is fearful.
From next door come contralto wails.
Kröte is forced to have an earful
of Gounod with his pupil's scales.

While she fights Bach he scribbles crudely
in ink across her virgin score.
She murmurs, and he asks her rudely,
"Stupid, what do you pay me for?"

Then he sits scowling at the scowling
features of the illustrious dead.
Between the wrong notes and the howling
he must endure, and earn his bread.

______

New Music

To Larry Sitsky

Who can grasp for the first time
these notes hurled into empty space?
Suddenly a tormenting nerve
affronts the fellowship of cells.
Who can tell for the first time
if it is love or pain he feels,
violence or tenderness that calls
plain objects by outrageous names

and strikes new sound from the old names?
At the service of a human vision,
not symbols, but strange presences
defining a transparent void,
these notes beckon the mind to move
out of the smiling context of
what's known; and what can guide it is
neither wisdom nor power, but love.

Who but a fool would enter these
regions of being with no name?
Secure among their towering junk
the wise and powerful congregate
fitting old shapes to old ideas,
rocked by their classic harmonies
in living sleep. The beggars' stumps
bang on the stones. Nothing will change.

Unless, wakeful with questioning,
some mind beats on necessity,
and being unanswered learns to bear
emptiness like a wound that no
word but its own can mend; and finds
a new imperative to summon
a world out of unmeasured darkness
pierced by a brilliant nerve of sound.

As Philip says, ekphrasis extends beyond paintings and sculpture.

"On first looking into Chapman's Homer" is not very historic, but very ekphrastic.

It's not originally in English, but it's about the most famous ekphrastic poem there is: Rilke's "Archaic Torso of Apollo." I didn't look all through the older thread, so I beg your pardon if it's already there.

We argued long and hard about it some time ago on translation, and I don't dare say that any translation is definitive. So here's a page that gives you four choices.

Stephen Dobyns has a fine book of ekphrastic Balthus poems (titled The Balthus Poems) and has a number of Cezanne poems in Cemetery Nights.

William Carlos Williams' Pictures from Breughel are fine examples from the Modernist era. Here's one:

The Parable of the Blind

This horrible but superb painting
the parable of the blind
without a red

in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading
each other diagonally downward

across the canvas
from one side
to stumble finally into a bog

where the picture
and the composition ends back
of which no seeing man

is represented the unshaven
features of the des-
titute with their few

pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
cottage is seen and a church spire

the faces are raised
as toward the light
there is no detail extraneous

to the composition one
follows the others stick in
hand triumphant to disaster


—William Carlos Williams


In her book The Philosopher's Club, Kim Addonizio has a strong poem about a photograph of victims of the Holocaust.

Then there is this famous one by Frank O'Hara based on Michael Goldber's "Sardines":

Why I Am Not a Painter

I am not a painter, I am a poet.
Why? I think I would rather be
a painter, but I am not. Well,

for instance, Mike Goldberg
is starting a painting. I drop in.
"Sit down and have a drink" he

says. I drink; we drink. I look
up. "You have SARDINES in it."
"Yes, it needed something there."
"Oh." I go and the days go by
and I drop in again. The painting
is going on, and I go, and the days
go by. I drop in. The painting is
finished. "Where's SARDINES?"
All that's left is just
letters, "It was too much," Mike says.

But me? One day I am thinking of
a color: orange. I write a line
about orange. Pretty soon it is a
whole page of words, not lines.
Then another page. There should be
so much more, not of orange, of
words, of how terrible orange is
and life. Days go by. It is even in
prose, I am a real poet. My poem
is finished and I haven't mentioned
orange yet. It's twelve poems, I call
it ORANGES. And one day in a gallery
I see Mike’s painting called SARDINES

―Frank O’Hara (1926-1966)


http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_KzfpIs7qjJ...g_sardines.jpg

There is Yusef Komunyakaa's "Facing It"

Facing It

My black face fades,
hiding inside the black granite.
I said I wouldn't
dammit: No tears.
I'm stone. I'm flesh.
My clouded reflection eyes me
like a bird of prey, the profile of night
slanted against morning. I turn
this way―the stone lets me go.
I turn that way―I'm inside
the Vietnam Veterans Memorial
again, depending on the light
to make a difference.
I go down the 58,022 names,
half-expecting to find
my own in letters like smoke.
I touch the name Andrew Johnson;
I see the booby trap's white flash.
Names shimmer on a woman's blouse
but when she walks away
the names stay on the wall.
Brushstrokes flash, a red bird's
wings cutting across my stare. The sky.
A plane in the sky.
A white vet's image floats
closer to me, then his pale eyes
look through mine. I'm a window.
He's lost his right arm
inside the stone. In the black mirror
a woman's trying to erase names:
No, she's brushing a boy's hair.

―Yusef Komunyakaa
[from Dien Cai Dau, Wesleyan UP]

Photo missing here. see below.
And there are so many more good ones!

Best, Tony

Edited in by Janice. Tony, I am very sorry to have removed your photo of the Vietnam Memorial that accompanied the Komunyakaa poem, also the Parable of the Blind by Breughel accompanying the William Carlos Williams poem. They stretched the thread and made it impossible to read without scrolling back and forth on each and every post.

May I suggest that you enter the photo as a link OR as an attachment. See how to add attachments under Additional Options below this thread. If you need help, contact me and tell me where to find the photo and I'll do my best to assist you.

I might suggest The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems After Pictures by Jean-François Millet by David Middleton. In and interview with William Baer in the current Measure pp. 26-27, Middleton briefly discusses this work.

Can so new a poem be a classic of the art?

Absolutely it can.

Great poetry isn't merely an historical reality - it happens all the time.

And "The Charioteer" is certainly up there with the Ekphrastic greats. Because not only do we get a graphic image of the work of art, but we also get the meaning BEHIND such works of art, which is the effect such things have on the human imagination that contemplates such works.

I think it is totally brilliant, and we are so very very lucky to have a poet like Alicia as a member of this board.

Thanks, everyone, for joining in. Chris, as the unofficial archivist of Eratosphere, kindly bumped up
an old thread on the same subject; Janice has locked it, purely to avoid confusion.
However, it is well worth reading through. There are some great contributions, including some
lengthy discussions of the subject by Rhina, among others. This website has a lot of buried treasures.

For those who haven't the time right now to read through the whole of the old thread I thought
it might be useful to post here a list of the poems that get mentioned, posted or discussed in it.
The list is not absolutely complete, but it does contain, I think, all the major examples:

Auden: “Musee des Beaux Arts”
Yeats: Leda and the Swan
Wilbur: “This Pleasing Anxious Being”
Christopher Bakken: “Terra Incognita”
Rhina Espaillat: “Rachmaninoff on the Mass Pike”
Rilke: “Archaic Torso of Apollo”
Lowell: “For the Union Dead”
Lisa Barnett: “Whistler Decorates the Peacock Room”
Sylvia Plath: “Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lilies”, A Sestina for the Douanier
Tim Murphy: “The Muromachi Cranes”
Leslie Monsour: “After Young Thomas and His Mother” (Mary Cassatt)
Wendy Cope: The Uncertainty of the Poet” (De Chirico”)
James Crenner: “The Rondanini Pietà” (Michelangelo)
Fleur Adcock: “The Ex-Queen among the Astronomers”
Frank O’Hara: “Digression on Number 1, 1948” (Pollock), “On Seeing Larry Rivers’ Washington Crossing the Delaware…”
Elizabeth Bishop “Large Bad Picture”
Adrienne Rich: “I Dream I’m the Death of Orpheus” (Cocteau film)
Sylvia Plath: “The Disquieting Muses” (De Chirico)
David Trinidad: “9 Cigarettes” (Bette Davis, All About Eve)
Williams: “Picture from Brueghel”
Hecht: “The Deodand”
Marianne Moore: “No Swan So Fine”
Thom Gunn: “Blackie, the Electric Rembrandt”
Louis MacNeice: “The National Gallery”
UA Fanthorpe: “Not My Best Side” (Uccello, St George and the Dragon)
Larkin: “The Card Players”
O’Hara: “Why I Am Not a Painter”
Ashbery: “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror”
Miroslav Holub: “Masterpiece”
M Cantor: “Japanese for Beginners”
Heaney: Poet’s Chair
X J Kennedy: “Nude Descending a Staircase”
Kazimir Malevich: “To Malevich’s Woodcutter”
Winfield Townley Scott: “Winslow Homer”
Edwin Muir: “The Annunciation”
Hans Magnus Enzensberger: “The Sinking of the Titanic”
Henri Coulette: “Intaglio”
Donald Justice: “Anonymous Drawing”
Robert Mezey: “Tea Dance at the Nautilus Hotel” (painting by Donald Justice)
Terese Coe: “Film noir: Out of the Past”

As you will see, some of the poems are by members of the Sphere, because Alicia encouraged
a mixture of "classics" and new works by members. However, since there is now a bumped-up
thread on D&A on the subject, and there is soon going to be an Ekphrastic Event here on the Sphere,
I suggest that we refrain from posting our own works on this thread. Of course, feel free to post other
members' poems, if you consider them classics (like the one by Alicia, already posted here). (
Editing in here, just to express total agreement with Mark's remarks above, with which I cross-posted.)

Here's a link to the third section of Anthony Hecht's poem "Meditation". The section gives a wonderful
description of a Renaissance "sacra conversazione" painting; I don't think any specific work has been
identified here; you can spot details from various painters like Bellini and Cima da Conegliano.

By the way, if anyone does post an image, can they please be careful about keeping it down to manageable size?

R.S. Thomas wrote several good ones and a few less good ones, though I don't have the book to hand and I'm too tired to run a search.

Rory

Somewhere on one of these old threads there's a post by Alicia Stallings about her poem "Amateur Iconography: Resurrection," which appears in Hapax. Although there's an icon of the Harrowing of Hell on the front of the book, Alicia says she had no specific icon in mind for the poem--I've forgotten her words exactly but she talks about the icons as being derived from standard iconographic elements and models. In a case like that, where many icons might be similar, I think a poem could be ekphrastic even without being derived from a unique work. Can Larkin's poem be thought of that way?

Maryann,

Quite. Seconds after posting I thought about what I'd written and tried to excise this little paragraph, but never mind: you'd already seen it and started commenting. This is a manifestation of the phenomenon known as Rory's Law, and an argument in favour of more sleep.

Best,
Rory

I agree with Rory. The Larkin poem is not an example of ekphrasis. At first glance it might seem to be, but in fact it is using a supposed painting as a vehicle in order to cleverly paint with words.

An ekphrasis has to be based on some other work of art and in someway enlarge it. That is the usual definition. The word means "to speak out of" and the Larkin poem is its own reference.

Actually, Janice, 'ekphrasis' is a noun meaning "description" which comes from the verb ekphrazein, to show thoroughly, describe. Had you actually gotten around to reading the thread which I bumped up and you locked, you might have noted my old posts there, to the effect that in ancient practice the genre of ekphrasis involved not the description of some pre-existing work but the invention of an entirely new one, like, for example, the shield of Achilles in the Iliad. Most Latin & Greek examples of the genre happen to fit your definition pretty precisely of what an ekphrasis is not, in that they use "a supposed [artwork] as a vehicle in order to cleverly paint with words." Personally, I see no reason to be dogmatic about the definition of the term.

By the way, for anyone who might not know, American classicists pronounce this word EKphrasis, because the Greek accent falls on the first syllable. The British tend to pronounce it ekPHRAsis, to rhyme with molasses. I advocate the first way, but then, I'm an American classicist.

Chris

Well, I ain't no classicist, but I agree. To me an ekphrasis is something which:

1) Is occasioned by another work, or form, of art in some way.
2) References it in some way.
3) Celebrates it in some way.
4) Doesn't necessarily restrict itself to description (which seems pointless unless you are trying to describe a painting to a blind man - actually, pointless even then). A work of art describes itself, non?

Philip

Actually Chris, I do not speak Greek and I cannot dispute what you claim. I made it easy for myself and quoted from

I daresay there are other interpretations that are close variations on the above definition and the one you contributed.

It is true that I did not read the entire thread before I locked it, but I assure you that it was not the content that caused me to lock it. I locked the thread, Chris, because of past praxis. On occasions when new members have dug up old threads and given their thoughts on discussions that started and ended six or seven years ago, there has been a hullabaloo. So to protect the nearly-asleeps and half-awakes, I locked it. I don't see anything wrong with that action.

Certainly there was no hinder for you to start a new thread for fresh scholarly comments from members who are currently active.

As regards the Achilles' shield, I don't know if there was a real one or not, and neither do you. It is possible that an actual shield fitting that description once existed, the description of which entered oral tradition and finally the written poem.

I do know that the description of the other shields in the Illiad fit the description of shields I have seen in museums in Greece. I can't quote you the exact section and line, but I remember that there is a passage stating that the shields were made strong by several layers of ox hide. These shields most certainly existed. In fact I have often reflected that regarding certain shields of thin gold which are said to be ritual shields rather than battle shields, it might be that the gold was an overlay of these many layers of ox skins. They would of course have rotted away leaving only the frame and the gold covering. I can't prove it of course, and I don't claim to. My point is though, that a shield similar to that described as Achilles' might have had a prototype.

Personally, I feel that "dogmatic" is quite an awful thing to be ("Characterized by an authoritative, arrogant assertion of unproved or unprovable principles.") and I truly hope I am not guilty of it.

Thank you for sharing your pronounciation erudition and preference.

The Hecht poem I posted above is, like the Larkin one and Alicia's "Resurrection", based on "standard iconographic elements". However, in the same volume that contains the poem, The Transparent Man, is his long-ish narrative poem, "See Naples and Die", which contains a wonderful passage giving a very detailed and brilliant description of Bellini's "Transfiguration" in the Capodimonte Museum in Naples. I don't have my books to hand but I'll come back later and edit the section in to this post.

Let me just repeat that the old thread excavated by Chris is a fascinating read. But as it obviously isn't the last word on the subject there's no reason for us not to have fun in this one as well. And Janice's action had the simple aim of making it clear that this was the new active thread on the subject.

The description of the bas-reliefs in Purgatorio canto X (the bas-reliefs are by God the Artist!) are a good example of ekphrastic writing.

Luca Signorelli’s monochromes in the Orvieto cathedral depict scenes from Dante, including images of the bas-reliefs--visual art based on ekphrastic poetry that is based on imaginary works of art (no doubt a composite of ones Dante actually saw).

How's that for complicated?

If you say so. I still don't really understand the locking of the other thread, but I don't care that much, and the subject is tedious.

Why don't we get back to posting examples of the genre? How about "An Arundel Tomb," has anybody mentioned that one yet? A quick scan of Gregory's list does not reveal it. Here's a link with Larkin's reading.

May I suggest this poem by Kit Wright which seems to tick many of the aforementioned boxes:

Lead Like Leather

(to the direct metal sculpture, 'Harness', by Peter Greenslade

That lead should wear the muted sheen
Of working country leather, laid
At rest upon a barn floor, mean
The same slow-motion cavalcade
Of strap and buckle, seems to me
Triumphant in a simile.

I rub the leather's molten grain
And smell the linseed in the lead.
The soft Convergence of the Twain
Sinks pleasure deep inside my head:
I like it that the world should be
So veined with similarity.

All men, all things, be family.

Pretty Ann. Very pretty.

I've been meaning to come back to this thread. In particular, thanks, Ann, for that wonderful poem by Kit Wright. I love "veined with similarity".

Here's the Hecht passage on the Bellini painting, which I mentioned earlier:

From "See Naples and Die":

See, what a perfect day. It’s perhaps three
In the afternoon, if one may judge by the light.
Windless and tranquil, with enough small clouds
To seem like innocent, grazing flocks of heaven.
The air is bright with a thickness of its own,
Enveloping the cool and perfect land,
Where earthly flocks wander and graze at peace
And men converse at ease beside a road
Leading to towers, to battlements and hills,
As a farmer guides his cattle through a maze
Of the chipped and broken headstones of the dead.
All this, serene and lovely as it is,
Serves as mere background to Bellini’s painting,
Of The Transfiguration. Five dazzled apostles,
Three as if just awakening from sleep,
Surround a Christ whose eyes seem to be fixed
On something just behind and above our heads,
Invisible unless we turned, and then
The mystery would indeed still be behind us.
A rear-view mirror might perhaps reveal
Something we cannot see, outside the picture
But yet implied by Bellini’s art.
Whatever it is seems to be understood
By the two erect apostles, one being Peter,
The other possibly John, both of them holding
Fragments of scroll with Hebrew lettering,
Which they appear just to have been consulting.
Their lowered eyes indicate that, unseeing,
They have seen everything, have understood
The entire course of human history,
The meaning and the burden of the lives
Of Samson, Jonah and Melchizedek,
Isaiah’s and Zechariah’s prophecies,
The ordinance of destiny, the flow
And tide of providential purposes.
All hope, all life, all effort has assembled
And taken human shape in the one figure
There in the midst of them this afternoon.
And what event could be more luminous?
His birth had been at night, and at his death
The skies would darken, graves give up their dead.
But here, between, was a day so glorious
As to explain and even justify
All human misery and suffering.
Or so, at least, perhaps, the artist felt,
And so we feel, gazing upon a world
From which all pain has cleanly been expunged
By a pastoral hand, moving in synchronous
Obedience to a clear and pastoral eye.


(And here's a link to the painting.)

A beautiful poem, but I do so wish he'd bothered to check the New Testament account! The insufferable know-it-all in me wants to correct the "five dazzled apostles" error--the identity of two who weren't apostles is of major importance to the story, and the painting is OBVIOUSLY treating those two differently from the "Three as if just awakening from sleep".

Although I must say that narrator makes rather a point of parading his ignorance of the story ("the two erect apostles, one being Peter,/ The other possibly John"). Almost surely that's intentional, and Hecht is intentionally tweaking the noses of us insufferable know-it-alls.

Grumble. I still think it would be a more effective poem if Moses and Elijah were given their proper billing:
"...both of them holding
Fragments of scroll with Hebrew lettering,
Which they appear just to have been consulting.
Their lowered eyes indicate that, unseeing,
They have seen everything, have understood
The entire course of human history,
The meaning and the burden of the lives
Of Samson, Jonah and Melchizedek,"
etc. This is great stuff, and it would be an even more plausible description if the narrator were aware that he's describing a couple of dudes born centuries before the scene in question, no?

Again, I can't quite believe this misidentification isn't intentional at some level, but it still bugs me. Probably just as Hecht intended it to.

Thanks for the poem and the link, Gregory! Enjoyed.

Yes, Julie, I'm sure it must be intentional. As I said in an earlier post this passage comes from a long-ish narrative poem which contains many puzzling elements. Most of the puzzles in the poem are related to the narrator himself and in particular to the tone of his narrative. He is at times almost endearingly comic and at others repellingly insensitive. This misreading of the painting is another puzzle. I'm not sure I can explain it.