For centuries, painters and poets have been discussing the relationship between form and content, and have been comparing their respective arts. One of Western civilization’s earliest recorded statements about the correspondences between painting and poetry is the verse epistle entitled “The Art of Poetry” by the Roman poet Horace.
Now, contemporary poet Linda Pastan weighs in on those interwoven issues (form, content, and ekphrasis) with her recent ekphrastic poem, “Three Skulls on an Oriental Rug: Cezanne, Oil on Canvas.” (Several of Ms. Pastan’s other ekphrastic poems appear in her collection Carnival Evening.)
The speaker of this poem, a woman at an art museum, has been instructed to consider the painting’s “marriage / of form and color to create / a design” and to ignore its representational content, its three skulls. But she resists, averring that “To leach the personal / from the abstract / is a different kind of death.” How can a human being see three skulls in a painting and NOT think of death, or of one’s own death? How can a human being NOT wonder, sympathetically, about the bygone people to whom the skulls once belonged?
Pastan’s poem is not a refutation of every aspect of form: indeed, she takes great care with the form of her own poem, structuring each of the eight stanzas in three lines, and composing many musical phrases within those lines. The poem’s title is also carefully formalized, juxtaposing both aspects of the painting under consideration: its ostensible content (”Three Skulls on an Oriental Rug”) as well as its materiality (”Oil on Canvas”).
But the poem’s imaginative artistry is as skillful, if not more so, than its formal properties. In fact, that imaginative artistry is so great that it surpasses both perception (direct observation of the skulls) and intellectuality (critical dissection). The poem not only sees the skulls for what they are, but also brings those skulls back to life. In the last stanza of her poem, Ms. Pastan’s use of the single personifying word “bleeding” amidst a clot of critical jargon (”three ovoid objects”) demonstrates that the figurative impulses of our human minds are nearly irrepressible. Yes, we are creatures of sensation and perception and reason; but equally importantly, we are metaphor-making creatures. We bring things back to life, back into our own lives.
So if you’re teaching a class on ekphrasis, you might want to include this poem in your list of required reading. Right alongside Horace.
(Ms. Pastan’s poem is published in the current issue of Five Points.)
