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 One
of the important poetry prizes is that of the Boston
Review, which is awarded for a single long poem. The winner
of the sixth annual contest was recently announced in the October/November
issue (Volume 28, number 5). It is The Debtor in the Convex
Mirror by Susan Wheeler, who teaches at Princeton and at the
New School in New York City. She has published three collections,
the most recent of which is Source Codes, which appeared
in 2001. The poem is long and complex (you can read
it here); but it begins with a description of a painting,
The Banker and His Wife, painted by the Flemish painter
Quentin Metsys (also spelled Massys) (1465/6 – 1530) in 1514.
On the banker’s table there is a small convex mirror in which
can be seen an image of a window and the head of someone apparently
in front of the table behind the viewer. The opening is:
He counts
it out. By now from abroad there are shillings and real—
Bohemian silver fills the new coins—but his haul is gold, écu
au soleil,
excelente, mostly: wafers thin and impressed with their marks,
milled
new world’s gold the Spanish pluck or West African ore Portugal’s
slaves
sling. The gold wafers gleam in their spill by the scale.
A year earlier,
by the way, Metsys had painted The
Ugly Old Woman, which John Tenniel used for his drawing
of the ugly old duchess in Alice in Wonderland – the owner
of the Cheshire Cat. (But I digress – yet again!)
This all
reminded me of a poetry writing class I took about twenty five
years ago taught by Frances Mayes, who, amongst other good things,
introduced me to the excellent book Western
Wind: An Introduction to Poetry by John Frederick Nims,
which I have used as a primary source for my articles for The
Mediadrome on the general topic So
You Want to be a Poet. During this class she gave all
the students an arbitrarily selected postcard of a painting, and
suggested we write a poem about it, based on it, or inspired by
it. I thought then, and think now, that that was an excellent
exercise, and really it is directly aligned to one of the overall
purposes of these weekly columns, which is to give some idea on
how the great poets selected topics for their works.
Unfortunately,
she took back the postcards, so I have my homework piece, but
I don’t have a copy of the picture. It was by René Magritte
(1898 – 1967), the Belgian surrealist, and it was one a number
that he painted with somewhat random objects in a compartmented
box. I have tried a number of times to find it again, but he painted
about 1300 paintings, and so far I have failed. When I received
this post card, I was somewhat taken aback – everybody else seemed
to have rather more representational pictures, which I thought
presented less of a challenge. This is what I ended up with:
In my wooden
box, at last released
from the clockwork of my life.
My shallow history arranged below
in so few stylized symbols.
When I
was alive, in my rococo day,
I would put on my bourgeois hat,
arrange my face before the empty glass,
and walk out into my gray existence.
In my private
way, I would imagine
that my long straight nose
gave me (perhaps) a patrician air.
I was rather glad when I lost my hair.
My days
were well-ordered. For my love
a gift of only constancy, while
my brief life burnt away in peace.
Emblems of an empty man.
In my wooden
box, relaxed
after life. I will pull my cloak
to my lips, and dream forever of Helen
in her storm-tossed Aegean.
 Frances
practiced what she preached, by the way: in her collection After
Such Pleasures (1979) she has a poem The Dream of Saint
Ursula (after Carpaccio’s painting). Apparently, the story
of Saint Ursula was based on what my source says was “a cryptic
inscription on a basilica at Cologne”. The story was amplified
in The
Golden Legend – historians interested in the "real
lives" of individual saints value the earliest texts above
all others, of course; but for assessing the later cult of saints
in Western Europe the Golden Legend (Aurea Legenda) compiled
by Jacobus de Voragine (1230 – 1298) in about 1260, achieved dominance
in later western hagiographical literature - about 900 manuscripts
of his book survive. From 1470 to 1530 it was also the most often
printed book in Europe. It was translated into English (‘Englished’
as the cover page has it) by William Caxton (1422 – 1491) in 1483.
The story
of St. Ursula is more than I want to recount here, but in essence
she assembled a group of 11,000 virgins in England at a date,
which is either 258 or 452 C.E., and took them to Rome to see
the Pope, who is named as Pope Ciriacus, and said to be the nineteenth
Pope after Peter. In fact, the 19th Pope was St. Anterus, who
held the office from 235 to 236 C.E.; the name Ciriacus does not
appear in the list of Popes according to the Catholic
Encyclopedia. According to The Golden Legend, this
is because Ursula revealed to him that she had been told in a
dream that she and her charges would be martyred during their
return journey. Pope Ciriacus decided to accompany them, and he
too learnt in a dream that he would be martyred also. He announced
to the people that he was going to do this, and renounced his
papacy. The Golden Legend describes the reaction of his
colleagues thus:
“But all
men gainsaid it, and especially the cardinals, which supposed
that he trespassed, leaving the glory of the papacy and would
go after these foolish virgins, but he would not agree to abide,
but ordained an holy man to occupy in his place, which was named
Ametus. And because he left the see apostolic against the will
of the clergy, the clerks put out his name of the catalogue
of popes. And all the grace that he had gotten in his time,
this holy company of women made him for to leave it.”
On their
return journey they were going to visit the bishops in Cologne,
but the city was besieged by the Huns, who beheaded them all,
except for Ursula, who, because of her beauty, was taken to the
leader of the Huns, who wished to marry her. She refused him,
and he killed her with an arrow.
The painting,
The Dream of Saint Ursula, is in the Gallerie dell'Accademia,
in Venice; and it is the fifth of a set of nine large paintings
called “Stories from the Life of St. Ursula”. The painting shows
Ursula in bed asleep, and at the food of the bed is the figure
of the angel, who appears as a winged red-headed woman in a long
blue dress, with a very sharp thin shadow: she appears to be holding
a long thin dark object. The first stanza of the poem describes
the picture well:
In early
light the angel comes, bringing
the palm of my martyrdom. Ursula,
the sound of my name in her mouth is close
to rain I heard in the spouts I heard as a child
of my father’s house. My dog does not stir.
I lie still, still a citizen of this
room. Light soaking into the scarlet cloth
of my bed. My slippers, quill, candle. Deep
green walls of this world! Greener than
the seas we’ve travelled over these three years.
Saint Ursula
is the Patron Saint of orphans, schoolgirls, tailors, teachers,
and universities.
The complete poem
will be our third poem of this week.
 Pieter
Brueghel (called ‘The Elder’ to distinguish him from his son,
also a painter) (approx.1525 – 1569) is generally regarded as
the greatest Flemish painter of the sixteenth century. In 1559
he dropped the ‘h’ from his name, but his son continued to use
it. One of his works is called Landscape With the Fall of Icarus.
The painting is dated 1555, but there is some argument about the
artist; some critics think it may have been painted or completed
by his son. The painting is in the Museum van Schone Kunsten (Musée
des Beaux-Arts, in French) in Brussels, Belgium. I am sure you
all know this, but the story is as follows. Icarus was the son
of Daedalus, whose name means “skillfully wrought” in Greek. He
is generally regarded as a mythical figure, but the Greeks of
the historic age attributed to him buildings and statues the origins
of which were lost in the past. Later critics ascribed to him
such innovations as representing humans in statues with their
feet apart and their eyes open. A phase of early Greek art, Daedalic
sculpture, is named for him. In addition to architecture and sculpture,
he was what we would now call an engineer. He was employed by
King Minos of Crete to solve a rather important domestic problem:
his wife had given birth to a monster called the Minotaur as a
result of an alliance with a snow-white bull. (Details in a later
edition to be written by The Mediadrome History staff). Daedalus
designed a maze, with the Minotaur confined at its center: this
was called the Labyrinth. However, Daedalus had an argument with
King Minos, and was imprisoned, together with his son, Icarus.
He designed a novel way of escaping: he collected feathers from
the gulls around his prison, and made wings, using wax to stick
the feathers together. He and his son then flew out of the prison;
but Daedalus had warned his son not to fly too high, or the heat
of the sun would melt the wax and the wings would disintegrate.
As a general proof that nothing changes, the boy totally ignored
his father, flew high, and the wings melted and he fell in the
sea. There’s a moral there!
Anyway, the
story has always fascinated people, and one of the results was
Brueghel’s painting. The painting is very interesting, because
it is essentially what it says, a landscape: in the foreground,
a farmer is plowing a field on the top of a headland. Below, ships
are sailing in a sea, and to the left is a town. In the bottom
left corner, a man points downwards to the sea, not far from the
stern of one of the ships, and there is a leg sticking out of
the water and the image of another just beneath the surface. Another
man with a small herd of sheep, and a sheepdog by his side is
looking into the sky with a vaguely puzzled expression. The major
feeling that one gets is how anticlimactic the whole thing was
– nobody really noticed!
I knew of
two excellent poems inspired by this picture. The older one is
by W.H. Auden (1907 – 1973); the title is Musée
des Beaux Arts, and it is dated December, 1938. The second
is by William Carlos Williams (1911 – 1983); the title is Landscape
with the Fall of Icarus, and it is from his collection
Pictures from Brueghel and other poems, which contains
poems written over the period 1950 – 1962. I have used these poems
before; the Williams poem was one of our Poems of the Week back
in September, 2001; and I quoted from the Auden poem in July this
year. I think therefore that Auden’s poem will be our first poem
of this week. However, I can’t let the Williams poem go, because
it summarizes exactly the way a poet should approach the transfer
of the pictorial message of an artist to the verbal message of
a poet:
According
to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer
was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the
year was
awake tingling
near
the edge
of the sea
concerned
with itself
sweating
in the sun
that melted
the wings’ wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash
quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
However,
as I was preparing this week’s piece, I came across an interesting
item on the web. Bert-Jaap Koops has completed a graduate thesis
that contains a list of poems on Brueghel’s painting, and he has
found no less than 47! These are in many languages, but there
are a number in English – eleven in addition to the two I have
quoted here. The earliest is by W. F. M. Stewart, Icarus,
published in Poems from New Writing 1936-1946, edited by
John Lehman.
 I
have decided to include as my second poem of the week Lines
on Brueghel’s Icarus by Michael Hamburger. He was born
on 22nd March, 1924, in Berlin. The family emigrated to England
in 1933 and eventually settled in London. Hamburger was educated
at Westminster School and then won an Exhibition at Christ Church,
Oxford, where he read Modern Languages. His studies were interrupted
by WWII, and he served in the army from 1943 to 1947. After his
return to civilian life, Hamburger set out as a freelance writer,
but after marriage in 1951, and the arrival of children, he was
obliged to take up an Assistant Lectureship in German at University
College, London. In 1955, he moved to the University of Reading,
where he began as a Lecturer and then became Reader. Later, he
spent a considerable amount of time in the U.S., but he returned
to England in 1978. He is regarded as an excellent translator,
but he regards himself as primarily a poet. This poem was published
in his collection
Ownerless Earth, published in 1973. I have included
the poem because it illustrates a different way of approaching
the transfer process I mentioned above: it chooses to ignore the
background of the accepted myth, and introduces thoughts and aspects
of the other participants in the picture beyond those in the other
two better-known examples.
I know a
painter very well, and when I described the subject of this week’s
piece to her, she pointed out the issue of translating from one
art form to another, and who benefits from this. I think this
is a valuable point. In the case of Saint Ursula, for example,
the sequence appears to have been that an incident in religious
history resulted in a somewhat cryptic written account. This was
then developed into a much more detailed written account, required
because the Church needed a case to warrant the elevation of the
people who had been killed as a result of their faith to the status
of martyrs. In the case of Ursula herself, the elevation to sainthood
has to go through further stages, and the case for this is made
by the development of a document to show that the individual has
satisfied the criteria to be so recognized. The written case itself
is the product of a hagiographer: the word itself derives from
the Greek hagios meaning holy or saintly. The Golden Legend
is a collection of hagiographs for the saints who had been canonized
up to the point of its writing. Next, religious painters would
often paint pictures representing the incidents in the saint’s
life that merited the canonization, for the benefit of those parts
of congregations who found the visual presentation easier to relate
to than the written texts. Finally, the poets might find the inspiration
from the paintings to write poems to make the same point. As a
parallel stage, it sometimes happens that hymns are written to
allow the poems to be sung.
As we entered
the renaissance, there was an increasing desire to ‘humanize’
these events, and Brueghel’s paintings embedding the sacred (or
mythological) events into everyday life became more and more important.
It is important to recognize that Brueghel would assume that everyone
who saw his painting of Icarus would be familiar with the legend,
and the effect of embedding it would be to increase its believability,
because the viewer would be able to imagine it happening in their
presence.
Now, if one
is going to write a poem about Brueghel’s painting, one needs
to think what is the objective. Remember that it is very easy
to see the painting oneself, nowadays – I downloaded an excellent
image myself from the web while I was writing this. That was not
the case for Williams, and in some of his Brueghel poems there
is perhaps too much straightforward description of the pictures
for someone who has not seen them. Even if you have access to
them in this form, it does not convey the impact of seeing the
full set of the large Ursula paintings in the original; and in
this case the poet has the objective of making the reader share
in the religious experience that results from seeing the pictures.
However, it is still worth remembering that the paintings themselves
were made from a ‘word’ source, and it is necessary to think why
one is using the painter’s vision as being superior to what one
might derive from the source that they themselves used.
I find Auden’s
poem addresses these issues as clearly as I can imagine. There
is, nevertheless, another way of thinking about it. One can imagine
the Icarus legend from the point of view of striving to achieve
a superior goal: that man could fly. In this case, it is a case
not of presumptive irresponsibility being punished by predictable
failure, but rather a reaching for the stars – the ‘glorious failure’
concept, that simply sets the stage for the next attempt in the
confident belief that eventually someone will succeed. In this
case, one is not simply recording and translating the artist’s
vision, but using that same vision to transcend it. Perhaps in
Hamburger’s poem one sees something of this concept.
Although
it is not a painting, in an earlier piece I used a poem in which
the inspiration was a statue, Hiran
Power’s Greek Slave, by Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806
– 1861):
They say
Ideal Beauty cannot enter
The house of anguish. On the threshold stands
An alien image with enshackled hands,
Called the Greek Slave! as if the artist meant her
(That passionless perfection which he lent her
Shadowed not darkened where the sill expands)
To so confront man’s crimes in different lands
With man’s ideal sense. Pierce to the center,
Art’s fiery finger! and break up ere long
The serfdom of this world! appeal, fair stone,
From God’s pure heights of beauty against man’s wrong!
Catch up in the divine face, not alone
East griefs but west, and strike and shame the strong,
By thunders of white silence, overthrown.
This shows
exactly what I mean about transcending the intended image to reach
a new insight.
Hope you found this
inter-art translation exercise interesting! Have a friend select
a postcard or similar reproduction of a painting they like – don’t
ask them why they like it! Then write a poem inspired by it. Then
give the poem to the friend who gave you the picture, and see
if your vision accords with theirs. I think you will find the
exercise of considerable value to you.
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