Past and Present (triptych)
by Augustus Leopold Egg, 1858
Tate Modern, London

Part 1 of Marriage à-la-mode (six parts)
by William Hogarth, 1743–5
National Gallery, London

Joseph Stalin
by Samuel Johnson Woolf, 1937
National Portrait Gallery, Washington

Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
attrib. Pieter Bruegel, c.1590-5
Royal Museum of Fine Arts, Brussels

Vanitas
by Jacob de Gheyn II, 1603
Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York

Painter when painting
a portrait of a lute player
by Marguerite Gérard, a.1803
The Hermitage, Saint Petersburg

When Finzi takes De La Mare's "The Birthnight" he does not assert that he has replaced the poem, defined it, improved it, appropriated it or represented it by a discourse. In effect he has done in music what every reader does in his or her mind when reading a text, that is follow his own hunches and inclinations to respond, and in his case to produce a sumptuous piece of music for which the world is richer, in much the same way as it is richer for Keats's Ode on a Grecian Urn, whose meaning, however complex, is pace Professor Mitchell, not banal, but if one were less keen in driving a point home, might include an understanding that Keats, who had nursed his brother Tom through consumption and death, and had just learned that he himself was suffering from consumption, might have supposed his own time to be too short to attain what he desired — in which supposition Keats was right.

Nor do I think that Keats is writing a precisely ekphrastic poem because while he describes some elements of the urn, it is hard to see the whole. We get a list of the figures, some musical instruments, the priest, the heifer, some forest branches and trodden weed but I don't think we could reconstruct the vase from the poem except in a rather general way. My contention is that nor are we ever supposed to. The point is a balancing of various possibilities: pursuit combined with stillness, unfulfilled desire with fulfilment, mortality with immortality and the complexity of the idea of beauty and truth, which does not simply mean a rudimentarily politicised, rather extreme form of prettiness and a documentary or indeed moral certainty but is also to be read the other way around, as it is in the forgotten second half of Keats's tag where truth is beauty, meaning whatever truth, including the truth of tuberculosis. It's not either/or, it's both. To be doing both, to be in fact doing several things at the same time, is the entire point of Keats's poem, of any poem, indeed of any work of art.

Ekphrasis, in so far as it is "an extended and detailed literary description of any object, real or imaginary," or labours at "giving voice to a mute art object," or offers "a rhetorical description of a work of art," or is indeed "[a] set description intended to bring person, place, picture, etc. before the mind's eye," seems to me beside the point as far as art goes, No-one actually thinks that is what happens. If that did happen in poetry, Mitchell — and Bloom — might be right. But good poems do both much more and much less. Poems that do work along lines that seem to be vaguely ekphrastic — in other words they concern themselves with trying to sum the appearance of a picture by bringing it before our mind's eye seem rather dull to me. Good poems are usually busy doing something else.

At one stage, while constructing a Masters course about Writing the Visual, I came up with a list of the kinds of picture that seemed to have offered possibilities for creative commentary. There were:

a) Poems about portraits, in which the poem is less about the portrait than about the person depicted. If the portrait is mentioned at all as a work of art it is for its effect on the writer as a memento of the sitter. This is all about presence. A good example might be Cowper's poem on the receipt of the portrait of his mother, 'O that those lips had language!'

b) 'Picture as detective fiction.' Here again the writer disregards the painting as an object and reads a narrative into the subjects depicted. Victorian narrative painting gladly offered many such hostages to fortune. In this kind of picture the objects depicted serve as clues in the solving of the narrative.

c) Not quite same as (b) is 'picture as speculative fiction.' I am thinking here particularly of Lichtenberg's gorgeous Commentaries on Hogarth in which the philosopher takes each and every one of Hogarth's engravings series and playfully concocts a gossipy commentary filling in narrative details that Hogarth does not show but that might have taken place to bring the actually depicted scenes about. This is so consciously mischievous as to be positively delightful.

d) Related to (b) above, is the official didactic icon. Here one could include all pictures that are intended to teach, instil, stress or correct notions of hierarchy. The iconography of any religion falls into this category, so, in a painting of the life of Christ, we may recognize the various events and figures referred to in the sacred text. There are fascinating comparisons of the art of Stalinist Russia with that of Nazi Germany: which political figure is shown in which position? Which way is the Leader facing? Everything is significant. Ideally, everything that is visual should be easily translated into text of the most unambiguous kind. Dogma, as we have said before, must be clear and firm.

e) Paysage moralisé. Here a landscape with figures is presented in a number of possible frameworks that relate to existing narrative texts but take certain liberties with them. Greek or other myth, or Shakespeare or Dante or Goethe, or indeed history: all offer well-known stories that are recognized but not treated as dogmatic statements or as problems to be solved. They are primarily invitations to consider the human condition. No wonder most poems are based on this kind of work — the text, being incomplete, invites completion or at least extension. Keats speculates on a Grecian urn. Auden considers Breughel's 'Fall of Icarus'.

f) Vanitas is rather like (d) the didactic icon. Here too everything is known or at least knowable. Here be skulls, bubbles, peachy complexions, mirrors, pipes, flowers, short-lived insects. You name it: we've got it. And let's not forget the Darkness. Darkness is befitting to vanitas because its chief message is: You are going to snuff it. Not much to be said about it because, like the didactic icon, it is already saying it, is already text. Usually. You could still turn an elegant poem on it, or even a decent piece of music pure.

g) There is a class of speculation about the artist rather than the art, the poetic products of which we could term, after Browning, dramatis personae. As we recall, Browning wrote long poems voiced for Fra Filippo Lippi and Andrea del Sarto. The Lives of the Artists (to take another title, this time from Vasari) can make a good human document. Most fiction works down this line for obvious reasons: artists, being people, tend to change. Pictures don't.

One might suggest a similar set of classifications for the other arts, for music as poetry or art, for poetry as either art or music, for art as music or poetry.

Continue to Page 10 of 10 >>