Nelson-Denny Practice Test 14

Poems About Pictures

¹Ekphrasis, a term from ancient Greek rhetoric, originally meant any vivid description that seemed to bring its subject before the listener's eyes. Today it usually refers to a narrower kind of writing: a poem or passage that describes, or speaks to, a work of visual art. The tradition is old. In Homer's Iliad, the poet devotes more than a hundred lines to the scenes worked onto the shield that the god Hephaestus makes for Achilles: cities at peace and at war, plowed fields, a harvest, a dance.

²Such writing faces an obvious problem. A painting or sculpture presents everything at once and holds a single moment still, while language unfolds one word after another, through time. A poet cannot simply copy an image into words. Instead, ekphrastic poets tend to do what pictures cannot: they imagine what happened just before or after the frozen scene, give voices to silent figures, or reflect on what it means that the moment will never change.

³John Keats's "Ode on a Grecian Urn" is a classic case. Looking at lovers pictured on an ancient vase, the speaker notes that the young man will never kiss the woman he pursues, but also that she will never fade and his love will never cool. The stillness that first seems a loss becomes, in the poem, a kind of permanence. More than a century later, W. H. Auden's "Musée des Beaux Arts" took a different approach. Studying a painting attributed to Pieter Bruegel, in which the mythical Icarus falls into the sea while a plowman and a passing ship go on with their business, Auden used the picture to observe how ordinary life continues, unconcerned, beside suffering.

⁴In both poems, the artwork is less a subject to be recorded than an occasion for thought. That may be why ekphrasis has lasted: it lets writers test what words can do by setting them beside an art that works by different means.