Sorry to have been scarce around these parts of late. Only just returned from the island conference.
An issue I've been pondering. It seems to me that we must have discussed this at some point... but looking back, I haven't found it. How to write about art? (Or should one? Housman, for instance, considered poems on paintings an illegitimate genre.)
I'm interested in what favorite ekphrastic poems folks here may have. Or any ekphrastic poems of your own? Any thoughts on this topic?
I'll start things rolling with the obvious:
Musee 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 plowman 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.
-- W. H. Auden
Also a wonderful piece of het-met. And so gracefully rhymed--it was years before I even noticed.
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