EKPHRASTIC
POETRY
Poems on Paintings
Ekphrasis
Ekphrasis is the graphic and rhetorical
description of a visual work of art.
Ekphrastic poetry is poetry that focuses on
works of art to “to interpret, inhabit,
confront, and speak to their subjects.”
(“Ekphrasis,” Poets.Org)
“Ekphrasis: Poetry Confronting Art” from Poets.Org:
http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/5918
Wikipedia article on Ekphrasis:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ekphrasis
The Lady and the Unicorn tapestry, c.1500, Flanders,, the Musée de Cluny, Paris
Jorie Graham, "The Lady and the Unicorn
and Other Tapestries"
If I have a faith it is something like this: this ordering of images
within an atmosphere that will receive them, hold them in solution, unsolved.
It is this: that the quail
over the snow
on our back field run free and clocklike, briefly safe.
That they rise up in gusts, stiff and atemporal, the moment a game they enter,
held in place, as prey,
by goodness,
by their role in the design. And when they rise, straight up,
to this or that limb in the snowfat fir, they seem -- because the body drops
so far below its wings -to also fall,
like our best lies that make what's absolutely volatile
look like it's weighted down -- our whitest lie, the beautiful . . . . They rise up in
the falling snow
and yet to see them is to see
their fallenness . . . . And when, each to their limb they go,
their faces taupe and indigo and peeking gently out from under hats like thread
and needle starting to
pull in the simple
fear, it is an ancient tree their eager eyes map out -playful and vengeful and symmetry-bound: where out of love the quail are woven
into tapestries, and , stuffed
with cardamon and pine-nuts
and a sprig of thyme.
Leonardo da Vinci, Mona Lisa
(c.1503)
Oil on panel,
approximately 30 inches x 21 inches.
Louvre, Paris.
John Stone, “Three for Mona Lisa”
1
It is not what she did
at 10 o'clock
last evening
accounts for the smile.
It is
that she plans
to do it again
tonight.
2
Only the mouth
all those years
ever
letting on.
3
It's not the mouth
exactly
it's not the eyes
exactly either
it's not even
exactly a smile
But, whatever,
I second the motion.
Pieter
Brueghel
the Elder,
Two
Monkeys
(1562)
Oil on
canvas,
approximate
ly 8 inches x
9 inches.
Dahlem
Museum,
Berlin.
Wislawa Szymborska
“Two Monkeys by Brueghel”
(trans. from the Polish by Magnus Kryski)
I keep dreaming of my graduation exam:
in a window sit two chained monkeys,
beyond the window floats the sky,
and the sea splashes.
I am taking an exam on the history of mankind:
I stammer and flounder.
One monkey, eyes fixed upon me, listens ironically,
the other seems to be dozing-and when silence follows a question,
he prompts me
with a soft jingling of the chain.
Pieter Brueghel, Kermesse (1567-8)
Oil on canvas, approximately 45”x64.5”.
Kunsthistorisches Museum, Vienna.
William Carlos Williams, “The Dance”
In Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess,
the dancers go round, they go round and
around, the squeal and the blare and the
tweedle of bagpipes, a bugle and fiddles
tipping their bellies (round as the thicksided glasses whose wash they impound)
their hips and their bellies off balance
to turn them. Kicking and rolling
about the Fair Grounds, swinging their butts, those
shanks must be sound to bear up under such
rollicking measures, prance as they dance
in Brueghel's great picture, The Kermess.
Pieter Brueghel, The Fall of Icarus
Oil-tempera, 29 inches x 44 inches. Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels.
W.H. Auden, “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 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.
Titian, Venus and the Lute-Player
(1560-65)
Oil on canvas, 65 “ x 82.5 “
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City.
Far in the background a blue mountain waits
To echo back the song
The note-necked swan, while it reverberates,
Paddles the tune along.
The player is a young man richly dressed.
His hand is never mute.
But quick in motion as if it caressed
Both lady and the lute.
Nude as the sunlit air the lady rests.
She does not listen with her dainty ear,
But trembles at the love song as her breasts
Turn pink to hear.
She does not rise up at his voice's fall,
But takes that music in,
By pointed leg and searching hand, with all
Her naked skin.
Out of that scene, far off, her hot eyes fall,
Hoping they will take in
The nearing lover, whom she can give all
Her naked skin.
Paul Engle,
“Venus and the
Lute Player”
Charles I, with his second son,
James, Duke of York, in 1647
Painted by Peter Lely [Lilly]
(1618–1680).
SEE ! what a clouded Majesty ! and eyes
Whose glory through their mist doth brighter rise !
See ! what an humble bravery doth shine,
And griefe triumphant breaking through each line
How it commands the face ! so sweet a scorne
Never did happy misery adorne !
So sacred a contempt, that others show
To this, (oth' height of all the wheele) below ;
That mightiest Monarchs by this shaded booke
May coppy out their proudest, richest looke.
Whilst the true Eaglet this quick luster spies,
And by his Sun's enlightens his owne eyes ;
He cares his cares, his burthen feeles, then streight
Joyes that so lightly he can beare such weight ;
Whilst either eithers passion doth borrow,
And both doe grieve the same victorious sorrow.
Richard
Lovelace, “To
my Worthy
Friend Mr.
Peter Lilly :
on that
excellent
Picture of his
Majesty, and
the Duke Of
Yorke, drawne
by him at
HamptonCourt.”
These, my best Lilly with so bold a spirit
And soft a grace, as if thou didst inherit
For that time all their greatnesse, and didst draw
With those brave eyes your Royal Sitters saw.
Not as of old, when a rough hand did speake
A strong Aspect, and a faire face, a weake ;
When only a black beard cried Villaine, and
By Hieroglyphicks we could understand ;
When Chrystall typified in a white spot,
And the bright Ruby was but one red blot ;
Thou dost the things Orientally the same
Not only paintst its colour, but its Flame :
Thou sorrow canst designe without a teare,
And with the Man his very Hope or Feare ;
So that th' amazed world shall henceforth finde
None but my Lilly ever drew a Minde.
William Blake,
“The Clod and the Pebble”
"Love seeketh not Itself to please,
"Nor for itself hath any care,
"But for another gives its ease,
"And builds a Heaven in Hell's despair."
So sang little Clod of Clay
Trodden with the cattle's feet
But a Pebble of the brook
Warbled out these metres meet:
"Love seeketh only Self to please,
"To bind another to Its delight,
"Joys in another's loss of ease,
"And builds a Hell in Heaven's despite."
William Blake (1757-1827),
Songs of Experience
Blake illustrated and engraved
his own works
J. M. W. Turner, British, 1775-1851 Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead
and Dying, Typhon Coming On). Oil on canvas (35 3/4 x 48 1/4 in.)
David Wright“Before You Read the Plaque About Turner's Slave Ship"
See the bare canvas.
A pure white
bone that
splits the sky's
weak, warm
skin of colors.
What will be left
on the ocean floor,
What will be left
under the swells,
What will be left
is unspeakable
and vivid
and not the vicious beauty
of cracking masts
against the atmosphere
writing lines of blood.
Not the blended light,
or the curious gulls.
Not the market's
fanacious hope.
Not the gods' desperation to include us in
this disaster,
without our will. But the bare,
bright,
smoothed bones of
many, many hands,
so cold, down where the master
could not imagine,
could not light
the darkest depths.
Kitagawa Utamaro,
Girl Powdering Her Neck
Musee Guimet, Paris.
The light is the inside
sheen of an oyster shell,
Cathy Song,
sponged with talc and vapor,
“Girl Powdering
moisture from a bath.
A pair of slippers
Her Neck”
are placed outside
from a ukiyo-e
the rice-paper doors.
She kneels at a low table
print by Utamaro
in the room,
her legs folded beneath her
as she sits on a buckwheat pillow.
Her hair is black
with hints of red,
the color of seaweed
spread over rocks.
Morning begins the ritual
wheel of the body,
the application of translucent skins.
She practices pleasure:
the pressure of three fingertips
applying powder.
Fingerprints of pollen
some other hand will trace.
The peach-dyed kimono
patterned with maple leaves
drifting across the silk,
falls from right to left
in a diagonal, revealing
the nape of her neck
and the curve of a shoulder
like the slope of a hill
set deep in snow in a country
of huge white solemn birds.
Her face appears in the mirror,
a reflection in a winter pond,
rising to meet itself.
She dips a corner of her sleeve
like a brush into water
to wipe the mirror;
she is about to paint herself.
The eyes narrow
in a moment of self-scrutiny.
The mouth parts
as if desiring to disturb
the placid plum face;
break the symmetry of silence.
But the berry-stained lips,
stenciled into the mask of beauty,
do not speak.
Two chrysanthemums
touch in the middle of the lake
and drift apart.
Claude Monet,
Water Lilies
1906 (190 Kb);
Oil on canvas,
87.6 x 92.7 cm
(34 1/2 x 36
1/2 in); The Art
Institute of
Chicago
Robert Hayden, "Monet's Waterlilies"
Today as the news from Selma and Saigon
poisons the air like fallout,
I come again to see
the serene, great picture that I love.
Here space and time exist in light
the eye like the eye of faith believes.
The seen, the known
dissolve in iridescence, become
illusive flesh of light
that was not, was, forever is.
O light beheld as through refracting tears.
Here is the aura of that world
each of us has lost.
Here is the shadow of its joy.
Paul Gauguin, The Loss of Virginity. 1890-91, Oil on canvas
90 x 130 cm (35 x 50 3/4 in), The Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, Virginia
Linda Pastan,
“In the Realm of Pure
Color"
after Gauguin's The
Loss of Virginity
It is our eyes that lose
their innocence, ravished by
these purples and greens as we gaze
at the woman lying there,
her ankles pressed together,
like Holbein's christ.
She is perfectly immobile,
as if the fox signifying lust
were hardly there, nor the bird
settled on her open hand.
Even the procession that winds
its slow way towards her
is simply a curve of darkness
in the distance. In this realm
of pure color it is the intense blues
of the water that matter,
the soft shapes of the rocks,
more voluptuous than any woman.
And she becomes a flat plane of white
in the foreground, the tropical color
of sand after the sea has receded.
Edvard Munch, Girls on
the Jetty (c. 1899)
Oil on canvas,
approximately 53.5
inches x 49.5 inches.
Nasjonalgalleriat, Oslo.
Derek Mahon, “Girls on the Bridge”
Audible trout,
Notional midges. Beds,
Lamplight and crisp linen wait
In the house there for the sedate
Limbs and averted heads
Of the girls out
Grave daughters
Of time, you lightly toss
Your hair as the long shadows grow
And night begins to fall. Although
Your laughter calls across
The dark waters,
Late on the bridge.
The dusty road that slopes
Past is perhaps the high road south,
A symbol of world-wondering youth,
Of adolescent hopes
And privileges;
A ghastly sun
Watches in pale dismay.
Oh, you may laugh, being as you are
Fair sisters of the evening star,
But wait-if not today
A day will dawn
But stops to find
The girls content to gaze
At the unplumbed, reflective lake,
Their plangent conversational quack
Expressive of calm days
And peace of mind.
When the bad dreams
You scarcely know will scatter
The punctual increment of your lives.
The road resumes, and where it curves,
A mile from where you chatter,
Somebody screams.
The girls are dead,
The house and pond have gone.
Steel bridge and concrete highway gleam
And sing in the arctic dark; the scream
We started at is grown
The serenade
Of an insane
And monstrous age. We live
These days as on a different planet,
One without trout or midges on it,
Under the arc-lights of
A mineral heaven;
And we have come,
Despite ourselves, to no
True notion of our proper work,
But wander in the dazzling dark
Amid the drifting snow
Dreaming of some
Lost evening when
Our grandmothers, if grand
Mothers we had, stood at the edge
Of womanhood on a country bridge
And gazed at a still pond
And knew no pain.
Paul Cezanne, L'Estaque (1883-85)
Oil on canvas. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Allen Ginsberg
“Cezanne’s Ports”
In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn't represented;
it doesn't occur on the canvas.
For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its
mountains.
And the immense water of L'Estaque
is a go-between
for minute rowboats.
Henri Matisse,
The Red Studio (1911)
Oil on canvas, 71“ x 86” The
Museum of Modern Art, NYC
There is no one here.
But the objects: they are real. It is not
As if he had stepped out or moved away;
There is no other room and no
Returning. Your foot or finger would pass
Through, as into unreflecting water
Red with clay, or into fire.
Still, the objects: they are real. It is
As if he had stood
Still in the bare center of this floor,
W.D.
Snodgrass,
His mind turned in in concentrated fury,
“Matisse: The Red
Till he sank
Like a great beast sinking into sands
Studio”
Slowly, and did not look up.
His own room drank him.
What else could generate this
Terra cotta raging through the floor and walls,
Through chests, chairs, the table and the clock,
Till all environments of living are
Transformed to energy-Crude, definitive and gay.
And so gave birth to objects that are real.
How slowly they took shape, his children, here, Grew solid and remain:
The crayons; these statues; the clear brandybowl;
The ashtray where a girl sleeps, curling among flowers;
This flask of tall glass, green, where a vine begins
Whose bines circle the other girl brown as a cypress knee.
Then, pictures, emerging on the walls:
Bathers; a landscape; a still life with a vase;
To the left, a golden blonde, lain in magentas with flowers scattering like stars;
Opposite, top right, these terra cotta women, living, in their world of living's colors;
Between, but yearning toward them, the sailor on his red cafe chair, dark blue, selfabsorbed.
These stay, exact,
Within the belly of these walls that burn,
That must hum like the domed electric web
Within which, at the carnival, small cars bump and turn,
Toward which, for strength, they reach their iron hands:
Like the heavens' walls of flame that the old magi could see;
Or those ethereal clouds of energy
From which all constellations form,
Within whose love they turn.
They stand here real and ultimate.
But there is no one here.
X.J. Kennedy
“Nude Descending a
Staircase”
Toe upon toe, a snowing flesh,
A gold of lemon, root and rind,
She sifts in sunlight down the stairs
With nothing on. Nor on her mind.
We spy beneath the banister
A constant thresh of thigh on thigh-Her lips imprint the swinging air
That parts to let her parts go by.
One-woman waterfall, she wears
Her slow descent like a long cape
And pausing, on the final stair
Collects her motions into shape.
Marcel Duchamp, Nude Descending a
Staircase, No. 2 (1912)
Oil on canvas, 58”x 35”.
Philadelphia Museum of Art.
Edward Hopper, House by the Railroad (1925)
Oil on canvas, 24 inches x 29 inches. Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
Edward Hirsch,
“Edward Hopper and the House
by the Railroad (1925)”
Out here in the exact middle of the day,
This strange, gawky house has the expression
Of someone being stared at, someone holding
His breath underwater, hushed and expectant;
This house is ashamed of itself, ashamed
Of its fantastic mansard rooftop
And its pseudo-Gothic porch, ashamed
of its shoulders and large, awkward hands.
But the man behind the easel is relentless.
He is as brutal as sunlight, and believes
The house must have done something horrible
To the people who once lived here
Because now it is so desperately empty,
It must have done something to the sky
Because the sky, too, is utterly vacant
And devoid of meaning. There are no
Trees or shrubs anywhere--the house
Must have done something against the earth.
All that is present is a single pair of tracks
Straightening into the distance. No trains pass.
Now the stranger returns to this place daily
Until the house begins to suspect
That the man, too, is desolate, desolate
And even ashamed. Soon the house starts
To stare frankly at the man. And somehow
The empty white canvas slowly takes on
The expression of someone who is unnerved,
Someone holding his breath underwater.
And then one day the man simply disappears.
He is a last afternoon shadow moving
Across the tracks, making its way
Through the vast, darkening fields.
This man will paint other abandoned mansions,
And faded cafeteria windows, and poorly
lettered
Storefronts on the edges of small towns.
Always they will have this same expression,
The utterly naked look of someone
Being stared at, someone American and gawky.
Someone who is about to be left alone
Again, and can no longer stand it.
Kate Fagan, “Circa
1927: Realising Belief”
This world of geometry and truth
outruns my hand
in sprawling colour.
Awake in constancy
and a vaulted sky
where sun gives shape to limbs
I saw you
standing with the jacarandas,
siren of a new present
as though feeling
could not be pacified by numbers
and shone replete in things.
We are here — only here.
Hill, bucket, river that fills
and empties in a pool at my feet.
Grace Cossington Smith's Trees, 1927, Newcastle Region Art Gallery
Charles Henry Demuth (18831935), I Saw the Figure Five
in Gold
Oil on board, approximately 30
inches x 36 inches.
Metropolitan Museum of Art,
New York City.
This is actually a painting on a
poem.
Demuth’s painting is based on
W.C. Williiams’ poem
William Carlos Williams, “The Great Figure”
Among the rain
and lights
I saw the figure 5
in gold
on a red
fire truck
moving
tense
unheeded
to gong clangs
siren howls
and wheels rumbling
through the dark city
Paul Delvaux, The Village
of the Mermaids (1942)
Oil on panel, 41”x 49”
The Art Institute of Chicago.
Who is that man in black, walking
away from us into the distance?
The painter, they say, took a long time
finding his vision of the world.
The mermaids, if that is what they are
under their full-length skirts,
sit facing each other
all down the street, more of an alley,
in front of their gray row houses.
They all look the same, like a fair-haired
order of nuns, or like prostitutes
with chaste, identical faces.
How calm they are, with their vacant eyes,
their hands in laps that betray nothing.
Only one has scales on her dusky dress.
It is 1942; it is Europe,
and nothing fits. The one familiar figure
is the man in black approaching the sea,
and he is small and walking away from us.
Lisel Mueller,
“Paul Delvaux:
The Village of
the Mermaids
Oil on canvas,
1942”
Jackson Pollack, Number 1 (1948)
Oil on canvas, 68 inches x 104 inches. The Museum of Modern Art, New York City.
No name but a number.
Trickles and valleys of paint
Devise this maze
Into a game of Monopoly
Without any bank. Into
A linoleum on the floor
In a dream. Into
Murals inside of the mind.
No similes here. Nothing
But paint. Such purity
Taxes the poem that speaks
Still of something in a place
Or at a time.
How to realize his question
Let alone his answer?
Nancy Sullivan
“Number 1 by
Jackson Pollock
(1948)”
Larry Rivers,
Washington
Crossing the
Delaware (1953)
Oil on canvas,
7’x 9’. The
Museum of
Modern Art,
NYC
Now that our hero has come back to us
in his white pants and we know his nose
trembling like a flag under fire,
we see the calm cold river is supporting
our forces, the beautiful history.
To be more revolutionary than a nun
is our desire, to be secular and intimate
as, when sighting a redcoat, you smile
and pull the trigger. Anxieties
and animosities, flaming and feeding
on theoretical considerations and
the jealous spiritualities of the abstract
the robot? they're smoke, billows above
the physical event. They have burned up.
See how free we are! as a nation of persons.
Dear father of our country, so alive
you must have lied incessantly to be
immediate, here are your bones crossed
on my breast like a rusty flintlock,
a pirate's flag, bravely specific
and ever so light in the misty glare
of a crossing by water in winter to a shore
other than that the bridge reaches for.
Don't shoot until, the white of freedom glinting
on your gun barrel, you see the general fear.
Frank O'Hara, “On Seeing
Larry Rivers' Washington
Crossing the Delaware at
the Museum of Modern Art”