The Yeats Journal of Korea/한국 예이츠 저널 DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.14354/yjk.2012.38.11
Vol. 38 (2012): 11-31
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures*1)
Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
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Abstract: Yeats, using the resources of ekphrasis, wrote some of the most important
poems of the twentieth century. Sometimes set in the liminal space of the museum,
Yeats’s poetry provides a sense of presence and concreteness, lyric subjectivity into
the polyvocal realm of a work of art, immediate engagement with another mind,
time, and place, prompting narrative, often of creativity itself. Ekphrasis expands
Yeats’s, as well as other twentieth-century poets’s, range of lyric expression.
Key words: Yeats, ekphrasis, genre, lyric, image
Author: Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux is professor in the Department of English,
Boston University, and Associate Provost for Undergraduate Affair. She is
the author of Yeats and the Visual Arts (Rutgers 1986; Syracuse 2003) and
Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts (Cambridge 2008), and
co-editor with Neil Fraistat of Reimagining Textuality: Textual Studies in the
Late Age of Print (Wisconsin 2002).
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제목: 예이츠의 시 속의 회화
우리말 요약: 예이츠는, 엑프레시스(미술품을 묘사하는 시)를 사용하여, 20세기 가장
중요한 시 몇 편을 썼다. 가끔 미술관의 공간에 배경을 둔, 예이츠의 시는 존재감과
구체성, 미술 작품의 다양한 목소리에 대한 서정적 주관성, 다른 마음과 시대와 장소
와의 직접적 참여, 종종 창의성 자체에 대한 대화의 촉진, 등을 자극한다. 엑프레시스
는, 다른 20세기 시인들 뿐 아니라, 예이츠의 서정적 표현의 영역을 확장한다.
주제어: 예이츠, 엑프레시스, 장르, 서정시, 이미지
저자: 엘리자베스 벌그만 르와조는 보스턴 대학교 영문과 교수이며 학부교무 부총장
이다. 저서는 예이츠와 시각예술(1986년 럿거즈대, 2003년 시라큐즈대)과 20
세기 시와 시각예술(2008년 캠브리지대)이 있고, 닐 프레이샛트.과 공동 저술
한 텍스트 다시 상상하기: 인쇄의 시대 말기에 텍스트 연구(2002년 위스콘신
대)가 있다.
____________________________________
* From a talk given at the Yeats Society of Korea 20th Anniversary International Conference,
Hanyang University, Seoul, October 2011.
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
Of the many ways in which Yeats used the visual
arts throughout his career,
writing on images, ekphrasis, was one of the most fruitful. The term
“ekphrasis” covers a fairly broad range of rhetorical activities, all having to
do with the representation in language of the visual world. Ekphrasis has
come to mean, in James Heffernan’s useful phrase, “a verbal representation of
a visual representation” (3), or, more specifically, a verbal representation of a
work of art. Poetic ekphrasis has a long history stretching back to Homer’s
description of Achilles’ shield and including such famous examples as Keats’s
“Ode on a Grecian Urn,” William Carlos Williams’ “Pictures from Bruegel,”
Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” and John Ashbery’s “Self Portrait in a
Convex Mirror.” It includes notional ekphrasis (representations of imagined
works of art), like Homer’s and Keats’s, as well as representations of real
works we can go back to and consult, as in the case of Ashbery. Ekphrasis
also happens in prose: in fiction (as, recently, in the work of A. S. Byatt)
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and in the kind of artwriting exemplified historically by Giorgio Vasari
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descriptions of works of art. Some of Yeats’s late poems “Lapis Lazuli” for
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one are indebted to ekphrasis of this last kind: from Pausanius’s Descriptions
of Greece he got Callimachus’s “long lamp chimney shaped like the stem/ Of
a slender palm” (Poems 295). And we might well talk about the “Dove or
Swan” section of A Vision, with its many descriptions of past monuments, as
ekphrastic art history.
I’m concerned here primarily with poetic ekphrasis, with its prevalence in
twentieth-century Anglo-American literature and with Yeats’s experiments in
the genre throughout his career. One thinks of some of the major poets of
the first half of the century: Yeats, Auden, Williams, Pound, Stevens,
Marianne Moore all wrote poems on works of art. Ekphrastic production
intensified and proliferated in the second half of the century; every poet, it
seems, has written at least one: Robert Lowell’s “For the Union Dead,”
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
13
Adrienne Rich’s “Mourning Picture,” Thom Gunn’s, “In Santa Maria del
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Popolo,” the list goes on, Seamus Heaney, Eavan Boland, Rita Dove, Jorie
Graham, James Merrill. Ted Hughes’ Crow began in the American artist
Leonard Baskin’s invitation to write a poem to accompany a book of his
engravings (1966), and more followed.
Yeats used the genre to write some of the twentieth century’s most
important poems: “Leda and the Swan” and “Lapis Lazuli,” as well as “The
Municipal Gallery Re-visited,” “Michael Robartes and the Dancer,” “A Bronze
Head,” “On a Picture of a Black Centaur by Edmund Dulac,” “The Statues,”
“Three Monuments,” section III of “News for the Delphic Oracle.” And there
are ekphrastic gestures in other well-known poems, including “Sailing to
Byzantium” and “Under Ben Bulben.”
Why has ekphrasis been so popular in the modern period? Murray Krieger
has argued that ekphrasis is the fundamental impulse in all literature toward
the stillness and presence commonly taken to characterize the image in
western cultures. It is certainly the case that the stillness and presence
attributed to the work of art have made ekphrasis particularly attractive to
poets acutely aware of an accelerated, mechanized world in which their words
seem especially ephemeral. Writing on the image may seem to fix and
ground the word in the concrete, to enable it to partake of the seeming
solidity and presence of the visible world.
Perhaps more importantly, poetic ekphrasis as a genre is characterized by
a set of conventions and a rhetorical situation (the poet contemplating the
work of art and speaking to an audience) particularly suited to the social
concerns of modern poets. The theoretical literature that grew up in the 1990s
around ekphrasis as a concrete instance of word-image relations is complex,
but its main argument is this: Ekphrasis poses poet against artist, word
against image, in a struggle for representational ground. The conventional
paragone, or contest, of word and image in western thought is played out in
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
particularly specific and visible terms in ekphrasis as the poet contemplates
the work of art and tries to make a poem at least equal to that work of art.
Such traditional devices of ekphrasis as prosopopeia (giving voice to the
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image Simonides’ definition of painting as mute poetry, poetry as a speaking
picture), overt interpretation, and spinning out narrative from the image’s
fixed moment, are all strategies by which the poet can turn the image to his
or her poetic uses. The confrontation of poet and work of art comes to
represent, in postmodern parlance, that of self and other. The interaction of
poet and work of art, then, enacts social relations marked by difference,
including gender: the image conventionally marked female under the male
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gaze. Indeed, ekphrasis plays out differences and gaps of many kinds and
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this is particularly true of modern poetic ekphrasis between life and death,
present and past, self and society, word and image. Wherever one turns in
reading modern ekphrasis, the major issues of our time balloon out of the
activity of looking at pictures, what the American poet Richard Wilbur wryly
called this “wholly blameless fun” (Poems 197).
The view of the social dynamics of ekphrasis I’ve been summarizing here
is that expressed primarily by W. J. T. Mitchell and played out by other
commentators, notably James Heffernan in his seminal survey Museum of
Words: The Poetics of Ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery. I think it is right
in some part: certainly a current of paragone runs through the genre’s rich
history, including through Yeats’s work, as we’ll see. I would like to suggest
here, however, that ekphrasis also plays out relations that are more complex,
more nuanced, more interesting, and more responsive to the range of human
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relationships and thought than the focus on contest suggests that ekphrasis
may be born of and express friendship, communion, and sympathy; that
humility before the image features as frequently as combativeness. Indeed,
friendship and contest may intertwine, sympathy and humility may be born of
competition. This possibility for exploring less dramatic, more mixed and
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
15
nuanced feelings is also one of the genre’s attractions.1)
I’m going to address first Yeats’s early ekphrases, touching on one
example, then turn to how Yeats used the resources of the genre in some of
the late, great poems, and what he shares with other ekphrastic poets of the
twentieth century. Yeats’s ekphrases not only occupy an important place in
his canon, but reverberate down through the century. What he did with the
genre, the uses to which he put it, the emotions and ideas its rhetorical
situation and conventions helped him explore are all part of the general
pattern of the genre’s history in the twentieth century.2)
Yeats’s early ekphrastic poems are not harbingers of his later success in
the genre. “On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy,”
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“In Church,” and “A Summer Evening” all written in the mid to late 1880s
−are early experiments with very short lives in Yeats’s canon. They join the
lengthy catalogue, down through the ages, of bad poems on pictures. “On Mr.
Nettleship’s Picture at the Royal Hibernian Academy” describes a painting by
his father’s Pre-Raphaelite friend who had by this time, in Yeats’s later
judgment, become “a painter of melodramatic lions” (Autobiographies 141).
A sketch of the painting (Fig. 1) was published in the Dublin University
Review in March 1886, the month before the poem appeared in the same
periodical. Yeats was 21. The painting is now lost, and Yeats may well have
worked off the sketch. Despite its limitations, this poem is interesting because
it shows Yeats early on testing out common conventions of ekphrasis and its
characteristic tensions. The detailed description of the picture uses the present
tense and those deictics pointing to the features of the scene to create
immediacy; the scene becomes an extension of the speaker’s space and ours:
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
Figure 1. Sketch of J. T. Nettleship, Refuge
Yonder the sickle of the moon sails on,
But here the Lioness licks her soft cub
Tender and fearless on her funeral pyre;
Above, saliva dripping from his jaws,
The Lion, the world’s great solitary, bends
Lowly the head of his magnificence
And roars, mad with the touch of the unknown,
Not as he shakes the forest; but a cry
Low, long and musical. (Poems 90)
If Yeats is trying his linguistic power over the image here, he does so by
demonstrating that his words can do away with the gap between viewer and
viewed, between the gallery goer who enters the exhibition at the Royal
Hibernian Academy and an on-the-spot witness to the fire the painting
depicts. And that he can open that gap again whenever he pleases: in the last
few lines, he steps back to ascribe meaning to the image, here more
grandiose than the occasion merits, but nevertheless demonstrating the word’s
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power to interpret “So ever moves/ The flaming circle of the outer Law.”
We can see Yeats making use of the complex position of the visitor to a
modern gallery. He’s both viewer and participant, amateur gallery-goer and
authoritative docent. Furthermore, though he sounds like a reliable transcriber
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
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17
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of the image such specific description! when we look more closely, he’s
not entirely so. Envoicing the silent image, Yeats gives the lion a roar, “low,
long and musical,” but in this sketch that lion’s jaw seems barely open. And
where is the dew drop on the blade of grass that Yeats describes?: “A
dew-drop hung/ Bright on a grass blade’s under side, might hear,/ Nor
tremble to its fall” (Poems 490). Yeats exercises the ekphrastic poet’s
prerogative to redraw the image to his own purposes. Presumably, this lion,
then, is a stand-in for the poet, threatened but still roaring musically. We
might read Yeats here as trying to bring the picture into some closer relation
to his own early sense of the poet’s heroism. In any case, readers protested
the musicality of the lion’s roar, Yeats offered a weak defense (Letters 1:9),
reprinted the poem in his first volume, The Wanderings of Oisin, and then
never again. He might well have later judged the poem as he did the highly
descriptive 1892 volume of ekphrastic poems by Michael Field: “unmitigated
guide-book,” the critical faculty doing the work of the creative (Uncollected
Prose 1:221).
The descriptive quality of “On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture” suggests one
motive behind Yeats’s interest in the genre: as a way to concreteness.
“Abstraction,” he concluded early on, made for bad poetry, yet he tended
toward vague notions of truth and beauty. The visual arts offered a
corrective: he was content, he later recalled, only when “my abstractions had
composed themselves into picture and dramatization” (Autobiographies 163).
This was a personal program to anchor his poems, but also part of a larger
sense of where he thought poetry should be headed. A “song should be,” he
advised in an early unpublished poem, “A painted and be[-]pictured argosy”
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(Under the Moon 36). If Pater set one agenda for modern poetry to aspire
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to the condition of music Ezra Pound, following a lead he saw Yeats taking,
expressed the counter impulse for embodiment, for presence, for the thingness
he and others thought the image possessed. Poetry was to be founded on the
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
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image “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an
instant of time,” in Pound’s famous definition of Imagism (Literary Essays 4).
“No ideas/ but in things,” urged William Carlos Williams (Collected Poems
2:55). “It could be argued,” says the poet J. D. McClatchy, “that modern
poetry was invented by the painters” (“Introduction” xi). Certainly, modern
poets have longed for some of the qualities of painting. “The writer will
always envy the painter,” observed James Merrill writing on Corot’s paintings
(“Notes on Corot” 312-13). And here’s Frank O’Hara addressing the painter
Larry Rivers:
You are worried that you don’t write? . . .
Don’t complain, my dear,
You do what I can only name. (Collected Poems 128)
Yeats’s desire to get for language some of the concreteness of picture and
dramatization is an early sign of O’Hara’s envy. If the poets are any
indicator, W. J. T. Mitchell is right in positing that in the twentieth century
Western culture experienced a “pictorial turn,” marked by the sheer
proliferation of images, a growing sense that understanding them is key to
understanding human expression, and, for practitioners of the word, a feeling
of heightened possibility as well as anxiety about the fate of the word in this
world of images.
Besides the desire for concreteness, there was another compelling and
very practical motive behind Yeats’s ekphrastic experiments in “In Church”
and “A Summer Evening,” both written for The Tract Society, for its popular
publication, A Girl’s Own Paper: it paid. Though Yeats self-consciously
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distanced himself from the implications of this venture he wrote to Katherine
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Tynan that “In Church” shows “how orthodox I can be” (Letter 1:160) he
had discovered what other poets would later learn, that in Western culture’s
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
19
love affair with the image in the age of mechanical reproduction, various
periodicals would pay for words to make sense of those images, to frame
their meanings for readers. The American poet W. D. Snodgrass explains how
he came to write the first of his poems on pictures, some of the best in this
century: “Some years ago,” he says, “a prominent art magazine suggested that
I should write a poem based on a painting or sculpture; they promised in
return to pay me well, print my poem handsomely, and offer it to a large,
distinguished audience. Noble aims those seemed to me” (In Radical Pursuit
63). Yeats wrote “In Church” (published on 8 June 1889) on a picture of the
same name, and “A Summer Evening” (published 6 July 1889) on a picture
called “An evening presence fills the place” to feed, as he said, the family
“‘swallow hole’” (Letters 1:160).
These were Yeats’s last experiments in the genre until 1920. He had not
lost interest in the visual arts: during those years he wrote essays on the
artists Althea Gyles and William Horton, on the symbolism of the
Pre-Raphaelites, on Blake’s illustrations; his letters are full of references to
painting; he formed lasting friendships with such artists as Edmund Dulac,
Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon; he had published the essay “Art and
Ideas” and part of his autobiographical account of growing up “in all things
Pre-Raphaelite” (Autobiographies 114) which he was extending; and he was
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busy using images in his work in other ways not least in his experiments in
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the theatre where the visual aspects of the plays their set designs, costumes,
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props mattered intensely to him. But ekphrasis clearly did not yield for him.
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There is a certain artificial quality to the genre at its most conventional poet
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contemplating the work of art and an attachment often to established culture
that did not suit the early Yeats. Although it has been put to radical uses
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against that established culture one thinks of Adrienne Rich’s feminist
“Mourning Picture” or Yeats’s own later censor-flaunting “Leda and the
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Swan” he had not yet worked through to that use.
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
When Yeats returned to ekphrasis in the 1920s to write some of the
century’s great poems using the genre, he did so with his historical view of
past works and their significance animated and expanded by travel, by the
education he’d received from such friends as Charles Ricketts and Charles
Shannon, and by his researches for A Vision. For Yeats, as for so many
ekphrastic poets from Homer through, for example, Robert Lowell in History,
works of art open the past into the visible world of the present. “This past,”
said John Ashbery, looking at Parmigianino’s Self Portrait in a Convex
Mirror, “Is now here: the painter’s/ Reflected face, in which we linger” (81).
“Here at right of the entrance this bronze head,” said Yeats gazing on a bust
of Maud Gonne (Poems 340). Assembled, works of art can narrate history.
“The Dove or Swan” section of A Vision, nearly set in its final form in the
1925 edition, charts the history of civilization in its works of art, and often
notes sight and representations of sight as means of understanding: the drilled
eyeballs of Roman statues indicate “the glance characteristic of a civilisation
in its final phase,” like our own (276). The paintings gathered in the
Municipal Gallery, Dublin, narrate both a national and a personal past:
“Around me the images of thirty years” (Poems 319). Both the emblematic
potential of works of art to represent their era to the future and their
apparent durability appealed to the aging Yeats troubled by the future of his
own civilization and his own work. When their makers were gone, works of
art remained, if not unchanged, then less changed than those makers. In the
stillness conventionally attributed to the work of art in ekphrasis, Yeats saw a
counter to the all-too-changing flesh, a state that promised eternal relief from
the pain and longing of old age: “Consume my heart away; sick with desire/
And fastened to a dying animal/ It knows not what it is; and gather me/ Into
the artifice of eternity,” he prays to the static mosaic sages in “Sailing to
Byzantium,” a poem that is a compendium of ekphrastic motives. The work
of art teaches the poet to sing his way into an eternal future: “O sages
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
21
standing in God’s holy fire/ As in the gold mosaic of a wall,/ Come from
the holy fire, perne in a gyre,/ And be the singing-masters of my soul”
(Poems 193). The image provides impetus for the word, instructs it in its
business, teaches it to be no “natural thing,” but a thing stilled into eternity.
As in “Leda and the Swan,” on a Hellenistic bas-relief, stillness yokes those
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contraries, death and continuing life “A sudden blow: the great wings
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beating still” (Poems 214) suggesting that both can be had simultaneously.
Yeats plays the double edge of Keatsian stillness: “stillness” meaning both
“continuing,” still beating, and “without movement,” dead.
As “Sailing to Byzantium” and “Leda and the Swan” indicate, in Yeats’s
later poems, works of art can offer, as they do to many ekphrastic poets,
meta-narratives of creativity. If “Leda and the Swan” suggests violence in the
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generative creative moment its monstrosity and immediacy the image,
“carved in Lapis Lazuli,” of the Chinamen climbing to a vantage point to
stare on all the tragic scene and play their mournful melodies suggests the
creativity of detached observation (Poems 295). One might, indeed, see “Lapis
Lazuli” as a much revised version of the poet’s position as expressed in “On
Mr. Nettleship’s Picture”: observer of the tragedy that happens to someone
else. This very trope of ekphrasis built into the ekphrastic situation of the
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observing poet motivated Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts” “About suffering
they were never wrong/ The old masters” (34). In a century of unprecedented
violence which people could observe via new media, but in which they could
not intervene, ekphrasis became one way of contemplating, by enacting,
bystanding, that “kind of modern fate,” as M. L. Rosenthal noted in writing
about Irving Feldman’s “Bystander at the Massacre” (34).
Also important to Yeats’s late use of ekphrasis was the social dynamic
inherent, as I’ve mentioned, in the genre. Following his experience in the
theater, dialogue and conversation became staple features of the poems, a way
of making the lyric polyvocal. Ekphrasis is one model for the poem as
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
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conversation the work of art functions as the first entry in a dialogue,
asking for response. In “Sailing to Byzantium,” Yeats addresses directly the
“sages standing in God’s holy fire/ As in the gold mosaic of a wall,” asking
them to use their power to instruct (Poems 193). In “The Municipal Gallery
Re-visited,” he carries on a conversation with his past through the images he
sees, describes, and reacts to as versions of history: “‘This is not’ I say/ ‘The
dead Ireland of my youth, but an Ireland/ The poets have imagined, terrible
and gay’” (Poems 320). In some of Yeats’s later ekphrases, the conversation
includes other commentators on the work. In “The Municipal Gallery
Re-visited,” remembered remarks by others, directly quoted and so made
present, join Yeats’s own words: he recalls Synge on Mancini’s portrait of
Lady Gregory, “‘Greatest since Rembrandt,’ according to John Synge” (Poems
320). In “Lapis Lazuli” what Yeats hears “that hysterical women say”
prompts his ekphrastic demonstration of how a poet can build civilization on
the crumbling remains of the past. “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” (1920),
his first poem in the genre after 30 years, is in the form of a conversation
with a fellow bystander: “He” and “She” debate, in high comedy, the lessons
pictures tell. “Michael Robartes” further makes explicit the situation implicit
in all ekphrasis: that there is a listener always present, often regarding the
work with the speaker, whose reactions the speaker may be gauging.
Browning’s “My Last Duchess” is perhaps the most dramatic precedent for
Yeats. In “Michael Robartes,” Yeats plays out what Browning’s speaker aims
to forestall: the disruptive responses of a woman with notions.
I would like to conclude this brief survey by looking more closely at
“Michael Robartes and the Dancer” and “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited,”
poems that, like “On Mr. Nettleship’s Picture” and “A Bonze Head,” illustrate
one of the most common features of twentieth-century ekphrasis: it happens
in the museum. The boom in twentieth-century ekphrasis can be readily
traced to the founding and flourishing of public art museums, and to the
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
23
well-illustrated books and expert commentary that they spawned and that
helped make the images in museums available and surrounded by
conversations the poet could join. Like other twentieth-century ekphrastic
poets, Yeats taps in these late poems the tensions and functions of
exhibitions, galleries, and museums as a place of words about images.
“Michael Robartes and the Dancer” (whose central image is probably
Bordone’s Saint George and the Dragon in the National Gallery of Ireland)
is set in an unnamed gallery.3) “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” is
explicitly structured as a walk through the museum Yeats helped found. As in
“A Bronze Head,” the movement from title to first line mimes the crossing
of the threshold into the museum, that sudden sense of stepping into a world
of images: “Around me the images of thirty years” (Poems 319). So different
in tone and aim, “Michael Robartes and the Dancer” and “The Municipal
Gallery Re-visited” both take up the tutelary aspect of ekphrasis that, as
suggested above, Yeats also called on in “Sailing to Byzantium.” What the
elder Philostratus did in the 2nd century when he instructed his young charge
by using the family art collection to illustrate lessons in Imagines, and Robert
Browning’s envoy in “My Last Duchess” deployed for political purposes,
Michael Robartes here tries on the woman he would mold. The exchange is
sharpened by the setting in the museum whose function has been, since the
founding of the public museum in the 18th century, explicitly educational. In
this comic seduction-by-looking-at-pictures gone wrong, Robartes tries to tap
the power of images to instruct, and plies with blunt force the license of
docents to make authoritative meaning:
He. Opinion is not worth a rush;
In this altar-piece the knight,
Who grips his long spear so to push
That dragon through the fading light,
Loved the lady; and it’s plain
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
The half-dead dragon was her thought,
That every morning rose again
And dug its claws and shrieked and fought. (Poems 176)
“Michael Robartes and the Dancer” might be read as a parody of one kind
of ekphrastic situation: the male poet-viewer gazing on the feminized image
(or the image of a female) and taming her with his interpretation. Further,
Robartes insists that his companion should function as a beautiful image,
folding the relation between viewer/poet and painting onto the relation
between lover and beloved: “But bear in mind your lover’s wage/ Is what
your looking-glass can show.” The poem plays both with the erotics of
couples looking at images of couples and with the erotics of posing the
beloved as an image. Adrienne Rich would take up this last some 35 years
later in one of the century’s most moving ekphrastic love poems, “Love in a
Museum”:
Now will you stand for me, in this cool light,
Infanta reared in ancient etiquette,
A point-lace queen of manners . . .
let me be
Always the connoisseur of your perfection.
Stay where the spaces of the gallery
Flow calm between your pose and my inspection . . . (Collected Early
Poems 113)
In Yeats’s poem, neither pupil nor image, however, settles neatly under
inspection or under linguistic command. Yeats has given his companion/image
voice. “She” ignores “etiquette” and disturbs the erotics of looking in the
museum by refusing the authority of the pictures and their (male) interpreters.
She does so by posing one kind of instructional institution, the museum,
whose docent would use images to teach her to banish opinions and be more
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
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like a painting, against another, the university (Oxford opened its doors to
women the year this poems was published): “May I not put myself to
college?” asks this new woman (Poems 76).
In “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited,” Yeats, entering the museum that
he had helped found for the newly-independent Ireland, returns to an
originating motive of Europe’s great public art museums: to collect and
preserve a nation’s past and thereby to create its identity.4) Much has been
written about Yeats’s controversial vision of Irish history here as based on an
idealized, Catholic, peasantry and a beneficent, Protestant, condescending
ruling class.5) I will add only that Yeats’s “dream of the noble and the
beggar-man” is partially indebted to the democratic ideals of early museums.
The Louvre, which opened in 1793 in the midst of the French Revolution,
was to represent the new republic to all its citizens. And, indeed, visitors
noted that the poor, as well as the wealthy, visited.6) In many ekphrastic
poems of the twentieth-century, however, issues of class trouble the poet. The
tension between the democratizing ideal of the museum and what seems the
reality of museum attendance, along with the pervading air of wealth and
privilege and the question of what making art accessible means, all surface.
For Lawrence Ferlinghetti, for example, writing “Monet’s Lilies Shuddering”
some 40 years after Yeats’s “Municipal Gallery,” the museum has become a
place of bourgeois banalities that co-opt the artist’s vision and originality for
easy middle class consumption:
Monet never knew
he was painting his ‘Lilies’ for
a lady from the Chicago Art Institute
who went to France and filmed
today’s lilies
by the ‘Bridge at Giverny’
a leaf afloat among them
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
the film of which now flickers
at the entrance to his framed visions
with a Debussy piano soundtrack
flooding with a new flourescence (fleur-essence?)
the rooms and rooms
of waterlilies
In part, “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” might be seen as an effort to
forestall the banalities Ferlinghetti sees by establishing the history Yeats sees
the paintings telling.
In the end, what makes for the disquieting power of “The Municipal
Gallery Re-visited” is less the historical lessons Yeats would tell through its
images than the way the poem taps the liminal nature of the museum. The
museum is, as critics have argued, a ritual space that mediates between the
artist and the public; between the real and the ideal; between the present and
the past; between the living and the dead.7) In “The Municipal Gallery
Re-visited,” Yeats, with “medieval knees,” is poised between the living and
the dead friends depicted in the pictures, suspended in the poem’s present
tense between the past and the future, the nation’s and his own:
Heart smitten with emotion I sink down
My heart recovering with covered eyes;
Wherever I had looked I had looked upon
My permanent or impermanent images. (Poems 320)
Like many modern ekphrastic poems, “The Municipal Gallery Re-visited” is a
personal utterance spoken out of the public space of the museum and taking
its subject from publicly-displayed objects whose meanings are inflected by
their public status. That the images Yeats sees are of friends intensifies the
liminality of the museum space: the museum is not only a portal to the past,
but a portal to his own becoming the past. Overcome by the power of
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
27
images to make the dead present (“And here’s John Synge himself” [Poems
321]), he is still the only remaining one alive. He is not yet image, but also
not quite man, or, rather, he is both image and man, living and dead, past
and present.
Yeats’s emotions are personal and individual, yet this is a public place, as
the title of the poem emphasizes, where the private has been made public.8)
In a phrase that fuses the intimacy of procreation with public generosity,
Hugh Lane, who gave his art collection to found the Municipal Gallery, is
described as the “‘onlie begetter’ of all these” (Poems 320). Yeats is
compelled also to turn the private over to the public. The poem’s final
statement moves to transform the poet’s feeling into public image, a stepping
back from the personal and a giving over to the public as Yeats sees himself
pass into a history that will be made by those in the future who will judge
him:
You that would judge me do not judge alone
This book or that, come to this hallowed place
Where my friends’ portraits hang and look thereon;
Ireland’s history in their lineaments trace;
Think where man’s glory most begins and ends
And say my glory was I had such friends. (Poems 321)
That the grand public sweep of this final statement settles uncertainly into the
−
−
poem is perhaps more portentous than the poem can bear bespeaks the
difficulties of liminality, of old age, and of renown.
Throughout his career, writing ekphrases enabled Yeats to ground the
subjective lyric in an object external to the self and one that was itself an
expression in and about the world.
Ekphrasis both secured for Yeats some
hold on the stability of a physical object (stillness, permanence) and
simultaneously opened lyric subjectivity into the polyvocal realm of the work
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Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux
of art and its various commentators, who were sometimes given voice in the
poem. The ekphrastic object offered immediate engagement with another
mind, another time, another place; it prompted narrative, often of creativity
itself; it offered a portal into other worlds. Responding meant engaging those
others with an audience whose presence (and even words) could be brought
into the poem, extending again the possibility for lyric expression beyond a
single consciousness. Ekphrasis is inherently dramatic; Yeats always
considered himself essentially a dramatist. He took advantage of the drama of
presence ekphrasis provided: “here,” “around me,” “here,” “here” again.
Ekphrasis could be situated in place and time, most especially in a museum,
itself a liminal space of dramatic tensions that Yeats loved in life and used
in his poems. What ekphrasis provided Yeats, then, as it provided so many
other poets of the twentieth century, was a means of expanding the range of
lyric expression, of engaging poetry with another art, and of poets with
artists, and with the audiences of both. It was perhaps one way of working
toward a vision of community that Yeats had first discovered as a child in
London’s Bedford Park, the new planned artists’s neighborhood where the
Yeats family had lived, and that found its nearly ideal expression in the
lively interchange of “painter, mosaic worker, the worker in gold and silver,
the illuminator of sacred books” in Byzantium (A Vision 279-80).
Notes
1) For a more extended exploration of ekphrastic capacities and some of the other ideas
explored here in relation to Yeats, see my Twentieth-Century Poetry and the Visual Arts
(Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2008).
2) There is much to say about Yeats’s ekphrastic inheritance from Pausanius through
Rossetti that I do not have time to discuss here.
3) See David Clark, Yeats at Songs and Choruses (Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1983)
90-92.
Yeats’s Poems on Pictures
29
4) As Catherine Paul notes (Poetry in the Museums of Modernism: Yeats, Pound, Moore,
Stein [Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002], 246, n.11), not all of the pictures referred to
in the poem can be identified with certainty, for there are no records of what was on
display in the museum in 1937. Richard Finneran in the notes to Poems (677-8) offers a
set of likely possibilities: Sean Keating, The Men of the West (1915, “Ambush”); Sir
John Lavery, St. Patrick’s Purgatory (1929-30, “Pilgrims at the Water-side”); Lavery, The
Court of Criminal Appeal (1916, “Casement upon Trial”); Lavery, Arthur Griffith (1921);
Lavery, Kevin O’Higgins; Lavery, The Blessing of the Colours (“A Revolutionary Soldier
Kneeling”); perhaps John Singer Sargent, Lady Charles Beresford (“A Woman’s
Portrait”), although drafts show Yeats was also thinking of Lady Lavery (Wayne
Chapman, “’The Municipal Gallery Re-visited’ and Its Writing,” Yeats Annual 10 [1993)]
177); Charles Shannon, Robert Gregory; probably Sargent, Sir Hugh Lane (1906);
probably Lavery, Portrait of Lady Lavery, though possibly also Hazel Lavery and Lady
Lavery (“Living”); Lavery, The Unfinished Harmony (1934; “Dying”); Antonio Mancini,
Lady Gregory (1908); John Butler Yeats, John M. Synge (1905). The Municipal Gallery
has suggested some additional possibilities in its two exhibitions of the poem with its
images (1959 and 1996): Lavery, Michael Collins: “Love of Ireland” (1922), a more
politically charged match with “Ambush”); Lavery, La Dame aux Perles (1901, “A
Woman’s Portrait”); and Lavery, Hazel, Lady Lavery at an Easel (c.1905, “Living”). The
gallery published a slide pack for the 1996 exhibition. For excellent readings of “The
Municipal Gallery Re-visited” with different emphases from my reading here, see Paul,
Museums 39-64 and Maureen Murphy, “Back to the Municipal Gallery: W. B. Yeats and
Modern Ireland,” in Conflicting Identities: Essays on Modern Irish Literature, ed. Robbie
B. H. Goh (Singapore: UniPress, 1997) 121-43.
5) See, for example, Seamus Deane, “The Literary Myths of the Revival” and “Yeats and
the Idea of Revolution” in Celtic Revivals: Essays in Modern Irish Literature, 1880-1890
(Winston-Salem: Wake Forest UP, 1987 [1985]) 28-37 and 38-50; and Richard Kearney,
“Myth and Motherland” in Ireland’s Field Day (Notre Dame: U of Notre Dame P, 1986
[1983]) 61-80.
6) Pierre Bourdieu and Alain Darbel, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their
Public, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman from L’Amour de l’art (1969)
(Stanford: Stanford UP, 1990) 18.
7) See, for example, Carol Duncan, Civilizing Rituals: Inside Public Art Museums (New
York: Routledge, 1995).
8) For a study of the private in relation to the public in 20th century lyric poetry and still
life, see Bonnie Costello, Planets on Tables: Poetry, Still Life, and the Turning World
(Ithaca: Cornell UP, 2008).
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Manuscript peer-review process:
receipt acknowledged: Feb. 20, 2012
revision received: Jun. 11, 2012
publication approved: Aug. 10, 2012
Edited by: Young Suck Rhee