PAINTING
The relationship between poetry and painting has always been close in the
history of civilization. Cave people who executed paintings of hunting probably
accompanied their work with a poetic description of the event that prompted
their artwork. When they showed their pictures to friends and family, their
words took on the elegance of their pictures and the excitement of their hunts.
Sometimes poets are inspired by a particular painting to write a poem. Da
Vinci's painting "Leda" may very well have been the inspiration for
Yeats' poem "Leda and the Swan."
Today poets still rely on paintings from time to time to inspire their verses.
For example, W. H. Auden wrote the following poem based on a painting by Breughel:
Musee des Beaux Arts
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 Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how
everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman
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.
Readers not familiar with the painting called "Icarus" by Peter Breughel can still make perfectly good sense out of the first part of the poem (down to the break), but as they wade into the second part of the poem, they may feel very frustrated that they do not understand the allusion to the painting. Those who do know the painting derive an added benefit to their enjoyment of the poem.
Go now to the painting by Breughel and see if you understand its relevance to the message of the poem.
Now that you have looked carefully at the painting, think about the following questions:
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