Day 4 Ekphrastic Poetry

In modern usage, ekphrastic poetry is the vivid literary description of a specific work of art, such as a painting, sculpture, tapestry, church, and the like. For a full list of ekphrastic poems, check out Poetry & Paintings, an archived website presenting poems inspired and derived from paintings. Poets.org also discusses the history of ekphrastic poetry and provides links to several examples. The following poem by Auden is inspired by Pieter Brueghel’s The Fall of Icarus.

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Musée des Beaux Arts by W. H. Auden

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 Brueghel’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.

 

Listen to Auden read this poem.

Your turn: Be inspired. Let Herbert Draper’s Lament for Icarus inspire your own poem OR find another painting which you prefer and write your own ekphrastic poem. Make sure that you go beyond just describing the picture -- reflect upon the art and what ideas it provokes.

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Updated 21 August 2023.