For more than a couple of thousand years, poets have been embedding works of art in their poems. The ancient Greek word, recently revived, for this kind of behaviour is ekphrasis, which means literally ‘speaking forth’, the idea being that the poem puts to language, and thus in a sense publishes in a new way, the painting or sculpture or other artwork which has existed previously in its own right and on its own terms.The strategy adopted by the poet may be that of a describer or annotator; or it may be, for example, that of someone giving voice to a figure in a painting; or the artwork may be addressed in one fashion or another as though it were alive; and a number of other strategies are available.You will quickly recognise, too, that the work of art being ‘spoken forth’ need not have prior existence after all: Homer would not have been chastened if someone had established for him that there had never been an Achilles, let alone his marvel of a shield: and Virgil, contriving his ‘shield of Aeneas’, would probably have rejoiced the more at the news that his emulation of Homer had no foundation other than their joint genius. Happily, in the last couple of centuries, many ekphrastic poems have been written, and more recently much good academic reflection on the art has taken place. In this article I hope to contribute in a small way to the discussion, encouraged to a degree by the fact that I have already published a book of ekphrastic poems myself, and have recently completed the text of another. The Australian poet Peter Porter, who has been based for most of his life in London (though with frequent visits home), often brings to Australian scenes, practices and holdings a starker gaze than is customary in his native country—starker, and more tenaciously reflective. The poem below, from Porter’s Collected Poems Vol II (Oxford University Press, 1999) is called ‘Basta Sangue’ (Enough Blood).
In the National Gallery of VictoriaIs a nineteenth-century genre paintingShowing a ewe on guard beside the bodyOf her dead lamb while all around her sin-black crows stand silent in the snow. Each timeI pass the picture I find I shudder twice—Once because good taste is now endemicAnd I cannot let the sentimental goUnsneered at—I have gone to the trouble ofAcquiring words like ‘genre’ and will callThem to my aid—but secondly