EKPHRASTIC POEMS
EKPHRASIS
“Description” in Greek. An ekphrastic poem is a vivid description of a scene or, more commonly, a work of art. Through the imaginative act of narrating and reflecting on the “action” of a painting or sculpture, the poet may amplify and expand its meaning.
THE POETRY FOUNDATION
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RAINER MARIA RILKE
ARCHAIC TORSO OF APOLLO 1918
translated by Stephen Mitchell
We cannot know his legendary head
with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso
is still suffused with brilliance from inside,
like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low,
gleams in all its power. Otherwise
the curved breast could not dazzle you so, nor could
a smile run through the placid hips and thighs
to that dark center where procreation flared.
Otherwise this stone would seem defaced
beneath the translucent cascade of the shoulders
and would not glisten like a wild beast's fur:
would not, from all the borders of itself,
burst like a star: for here there is no place
that does not see you. You must change your life.
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Belvedere Torso, 1st century BCE
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JOHN KEATS
ODE ON A GRECIAN URN 1819
Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,
Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?
What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
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Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed
Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
And, happy melodist, unwearied,
For ever piping songs for ever new;
More happy love! more happy, happy love!
For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,
For ever panting, and for ever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.
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Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?
What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
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O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all
Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."
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Sosibios Vase, ca. 50 BCE
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w.H. auden
musée des beaux arts 1940
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.
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Pieter Brueghel the Elder, The Fall of Icarus, ca. 1558
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percy byssche shelley
on the medusa of leonardo da vinci in the florentine gallery 1824
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It lieth, gazing on the midnight sky,
Upon the cloudy mountain-peak supine;
Below, far lands are seen tremblingly;
Its horror and its beauty are divine.
Upon its lips and eyelids seems to lie
Loveliness like a shadow, from which shine,
Fiery and lurid, struggling underneath,
The agonies of anguish and of death.
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Yet it is less the horror than the grace
Which turns the gazer's spirit into stone,
Whereon the lineaments of that dead face
Are graven, till the characters be grown
Into itself, and thought no more can trace;
’Tis the melodious hue of beauty thrown
Athwart the darkness and the glare of pain,
Which humanize and harmonize the strain.
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And from its head as from one body grow,
As grass out of a watery rock,
Hairs which are vipers, and they curl and flow
And their long tangles in each other lock,
And with unending involutions show
Their mailed radiance, as it were to mock
The torture and the death within, and saw
The solid air with many a ragged jaw.
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And, from a stone beside, a poisonous eft
Peeps idly into those Gorgonian eyes;
Whilst in the air a ghastly bat, bereft
Of sense, has flitted with a mad surprise
Out of the cave this hideous light had cleft,
And he comes hastening like a moth that hies
After a taper; and the midnight sky
Flares, a light more dread than obscurity.
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'Tis the tempestuous loveliness of terror;
For from the serpents gleams a brazen glare
Kindled by that inextricable error,
Which makes a thrilling vapour of the air
Become a and ever-shifting mirror
Of all the beauty and the terror there--
A woman’s countenance, with serpent-locks,
Gazing in death on Heaven from those wet rocks.
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Medusa, ca. 16th or 17th century, Flemish (formerly attributed to Leonardo da Vinci)
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paisley rekdal
when it is over it will be over 1824
Hurricane of what must be
only feeling, this painting's
sentence circling to black
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on blank, ever-
tightening spiral
of words collapsing
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to their true gesture: meaning
what we read
when not reading,
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as the canvas buckles
in the damp: freckled
like the someone
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I once left sleeping
in a hotel room to swim
the coast's cold shoals, fine veils
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of sand kicked up by waves where
I found myself enclosed
in light: sudden: bright
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tunnel of minnows
like scatterings of
diamond, seed pearl whorled
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in the same
thoughtless thought
around me: one column of scale
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turning at a moment's decision,
a gesture I
was inside or out
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of, not touching but
moving in
accord with them: they
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would not wait for me, thickening
then breaking apart as I slid
inside, reading me
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for threat or flight by the lift
of my arm, as all
they needed to know
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of me was in the movement:
as all this sentence
breaks down to Os and Is,
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the remnants of someone's
desires or mine so that
no matter if I return
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to that cold coast, they will
never be there: the minnows
in their bright spiraling
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first through sight, then
through memory,
the barest
shudderings of sense:
O and I
parting the mouth with a cry
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that contains—
but doesn't need—
any meaning.
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Troy Passey, detail from When It Is Over It Will Be Over
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ELENA KARINA BYRNE
PANIC AT JOHN BALDESSARI'S KISS 2019
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The aftermath always happening like an airplane falling, or a man
midair falling from a horse, and an arrow, a gun, many guns
pointing away, at us, our all bull’s-eye-on-the-mark. This is what he
sees when he sees. Maybe Wrong or not, the appropriation, the film
clip, chase, pressed lips over lips, photo moment on the minute-drawn
breath in, the over, the under, bodies in black and white cut to pose,
the way a kiss can pose, dispose of everything around it for another,
dispose of thinking. It’s like waving good-bye. Mouth to mouth seeing
as saying. Inside. Resuscitation back to the brain saying yes as the mouth
makes an O. Circles for the digital age, colored dots for faces already
made for erasing. Hurry, come, he, 6’7”, sees fifteen minutes from the
Mexican border, cremates his old paintings up close. But the ashes were
kept in a book urn, not so afloat in the ocean with my parents, Above,
On, and Under (with Mermaid) to kiss and kiss, riot in the dark depth
of it. The collision, the kiss, the capture, once in the for-all-we-know
of haunting who comes first. Kiss into kiss and so into kiss. All laws
of gravity leave us. Gender begins in violence and space. Space begins
in gender and violence as all laws of gravity leave us. So, kiss, kiss, kiss!
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John Baldessari, Green Kiss, Red Embrace (Disjunctive), 1988
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Pascale petit
what the water gave me (VI)
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This is how it is at the end –
me lying in my bath
while the waters break,
my skin glistening with amnion,
streaks of starlight.
And the waters keep on breaking
as I reverse out of my body.
My life dances on the silver surface
where cacti flower.
The ceiling opens
and I float up on fire.
Rain pierces me like thorns. I have a steam veil.
I sit bolt upright as the sun's rays embrace me.
Water, you are a lace wedding-gown
I slip over my head, giving birth to my death.
I wear you tightly as I burn –
don't make me come back.
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Frida Kahlo, Lo que el agua me dio (What the Water Gave Me), 1938
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ANNE SEXTON
THE STARRY NIGHT
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That does not keep me from having a terrible need of—shall I say the word—religion.
Then I go out at night to paint the stars. Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
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The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.
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