[Gregory Dowling]

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":

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters; how well, they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

"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.