SOURCE: Jessar, Kevin L. “Angels by Way of and in the Laundry: Richard Wilbur's Sacramental Ekphrasis.” Mosaic: A Journal for the Interdisciplinary Study of Literature 32, no. 4 (December 1999): 91-110.

Insofar as ekphrasis is usually defined as the verbal depiction of a visual object or artwork it would seem to constitute little more than either an attempt on the part of a poet or writer to exercise his/her descriptive talents or a mode of meta-discourse for exploring the nature of different artforms. Recently, however, and in keeping with a general concern with what is involved in the representation of another—be it person, event, or object—ekphrasis has come to be regarded as a far more serious activity. Thus tracing the history of the genre from Homer to present times, James Heffernan has argued that ekphrasis stages “a struggle for dominance between the image and the word” that is reflective of other kinds of power relations (1). Focusing more specifically on the “visual turn” that characterizes contemporary culture, W. J. T. Mitchell has similarly drawn attention to the many forms that ekphrasis can take, including the way that critics “picture” theory. For both Heffernan and Mitchell, inherent in ekphrasis is a certain ambivalence toward visual art, stemming from what Heffernan calls a “veneration and anxiety” about images (6), and taking the form of what Mitchell calls “ekphrastic hope and ekphrastic fear” (152).

In this context, the poetry of American writer Richard Wilbur—whose career-long preoccupation has been with what he calls “the proper relation between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit” (Responses 125)—provides a fascinating case in point. Born in 1921, the child of a father who was also an artist, specifically a painter, Wilbur published his first volume of poetry when he was twenty-six, followed by six other volumes of verse, as well as critical essays and translations of the work of dramatists like Molière and Racine, poets like Apollinaire and Baudelaire, and writers like Poe and Borges. Described by a reviewer in the New York Times as one of America's most “graceful and technically accomplished poets” (Richman 2), in addition to winning a National Book Award, he has twice been the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry—in 1956 for the volume entitled Things of This World and again in 1988 for New and Collected Poems. The previous year (1987) he was appointed Poet Laureate of the United States, the second American poet to be so honored.

Much of the scholarship on Wilbur to date has focused on the religious dimensions of his poetry, on how he ambivalently locates “the eternal through and in the temporal,” as Raymond Benoit puts it, converting the natural world “through his deft use of analogy and allusion, into a sacramental reality” (165-66). Indeed, in 1993 Christianity and Literature devoted a special issue to Wilbur, in which Cleanth Brooks, for instance, lauded him as “unparalleled in conveying the world of things at the same time that he allows those things … to function as symbols for a quality of experience that exists in a world beyond” (550). Almost nothing, however, has been written about Wilbur's ekphrastic poems—either how they function in relation to his overall poetic and spiritual concerns or how they relate to general interarts theorizing. In the following essay, therefore, I wish to demonstrate that a key component of Wilbur's attempt to mediate between “the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit” involves staging this dialectic in terms of the paragone between image and text, visual and verbal representation. As a way of establishing a framework for my argument, I will first identify the major points of intersection between ekphrastic theory and Wilbur's philosophy. Subsequently, I will provide a close reading of six of Wilbur's ekphrastic poems, five of which are representative of the way he uses specific paintings, and another which suggests the way he enlists architecture.

Fundamental for understanding ekphrastic theory, in general, and Wilbur's ekphrastic poems, in particular, is a recognition of the way that traditional Christian distinctions between the temporal/mundane and eternal/spiritual have an aesthetic analogue in Gotthold Lessing's classic distinction between literature as an art of time and painting as an art of space. Indeed, in current theorizing about interarts relationships one frequently finds a recourse to philosophical, if not religious, terminology, as when Murray Krieger attempts to explain the “advantages of having a work of art as an object of ekphrasis”:

If an author is seeking to suspend the discourse for an extended, visually appealing descriptive interlude, is he not better off—instead of describing the moving, changing, object in nature—to describe an object that has already interrupted the flow of existence with its spatial completeness, that has already been created as a fixed representation? Surely so: if he would impose a brief sense of being, borrowed from the plastic arts, in the midst of his shifting world of verbal becoming, the already frozen pictorial representation would seem to be the preferred object.

(8, emphasis mine)

For Wilbur, who tends to challenge or at least play with traditional Christian distinctions, featuring a visual object in a poem enables one to capture a sense of “being” and eternal completeness, at the same time that the ekphrastic mode provides the most powerful tool for locating the eternal in the temporal. Wilbur's concern is to locate a spirituality that does not ignore “the concrete and the actual in order to create a purely abstract, unreal realm” (Stitt et al. 185), and his strategy involves first constructing the visual artwork as representative of the spiritual realm and then forcibly integrating the static, atemporal image into a mundane, temporal sequence. Undermining the autonomy of the image by revealing its stasis and artifice in this manner, Wilbur enlists and subverts basic distinctions between the visual and verbal modes, and in doing so achieves what he feels is the core insight of both poetry and a religious sensibility. Thus as he explained in a 1968 interview: “all poets are sending religious messages because poetry is, in such great part, the comparison of one thing to another; or the saying, as in metaphor, that one thing is another … making an assertion of the unity of all things … out of a confidence in ultimate order and relatedness” (Hutton 54). In another interview, arguing that “the impulse of the spirit or soul to refine itself too far, to escape too well, must be resisted,” Wilbur expresses his suspicion of “any kind of idealism or spirituality which is contemptuous toward the body or what we call the material” and explains his concern with “bringing the body and the spirit to terms,” going on to assert: “As one of my poems says, in effect, the angels have got to come down and dwell among us, be useful to us” (Bogan & Kaplan 151-54). According to Nathan A. Scott, Jr., it is this aspect of Wilbur's poetic that accounts for his interest in the commonplace: his “reveling in the sheer ontological amplitude of the world” is his way of “reminding us that the route toward the mysterium tremendum leads through the quotidian,” consistent with “the Augustinian mystical-realist line of Christian thought that … emphasi[zes] the immediacy of the Divine Presence in every dimension and on every level of reality” (22, 10). Similarly, for Wendy Salinger, Wilbur's engagement with “thingness” is part of his “reverence for life—not as an abstraction but in its very holy and delectable particulars” (4, 10) and Charles Duffy notes, in a discussion of Wilbur's interest in the visual arts, that for Wilbur “the eye of the painter and the eye of the poet is devout because it guards the things of this world as sacred objects” (177). Focusing more specifically on the Christian aspects of Wilbur's work, Marjory Scheidt Payne emphasizes his ability to understand “the interdependence of our impulses to aspire beyond the world and at the same time to embrace it with joy” (571), while John Gery describes him as a “poet of unities” in whom “the assumptions of the believer are everywhere evident” (113).

Thematically, Wilbur's greatest expression of how the eternal inheres in the temporal can be found in two of his major poems, one of which has the punningly provocative title “A World without Objects Is a Sensible Emptiness” and which was published in the 1950 volume Ceremony and Other Poems. The ostensible setting in “A World” is the desert, and the poem begins with a speaker who is drawn to “a land of sheer horizon” but who is also wary of how the “tall camels of the spirit … connoisseurs of thirst” would lead us “to drink / Of pure mirage” (283-84).¹ Reminding his soul that “those prosperous islands are accurst / That shimmer on the brink / Of absence,” he resists his nihilist impulses by noting that “auras, lustres” emanate from the tangible world, and that “all shinings need to be shaped and borne.” In the last three stanzas, the poem then identifies three such “shinings” of this world, which in ascending scale are: visual artworks (“painted saints” with their halos), natural phenomena (“the hills' bracken tiaras made / Gold in the sunken sun”), and finally the divine nativity (“the supernova burgeoning over the barn, / Lampshine blurred in the stream of beasts … light incarnate”). This, the poem argues, is “the spirit's right / Oasis,” or as Benoit puts it: “Christ, who reconciles heaven and earth, can be found where the idea is made flesh, where the star shines over the barn” (165).

A second major poem in which Wilbur similarly but more playfully binds spirit to matter is “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World.” Taking its title from the words of St. Augustine, the poem explores this situation in the context of what Wilbur sees as the reverse attraction: “Plato, St. Teresa, and the rest of us in our degree have known that it is painful to return to the cave, to the earth, the quotidian” (Hill 121). The setting, in the case of Wilbur's poem, is indeed “quotidian,” for as he has explained: “You must imagine the poem as occurring at perhaps seven-thirty in the morning; the scene is a bedroom high up in a city apartment building; outside the bedroom window, the first laundry of the day is being yanked across the sky” (Responses 124). Staged in terms of the soul awakening from the “halcyon feeling” of sleep by the “cry of pulleys” of a clothes line, the first stanzas of the poem envision that “Outside the open window / The morning air is all awash with angels” who, in the form of wind, dance through the blouses, bedsheets, and smocks drying on the line, seeming both to occupy and playfully mock these intimations of human forms. After this fleeting and whimsically humorous evocation of contact between the ethereal and tangible, the poem turns in the second half to a more sober reconciliation of the two worlds; at first reluctant to participate in the “the punctual rape of every blessed day,” the soul inevitably “descends once more in bitter love / To accept the waking body,” and in the concluding stanza the value of laundering is seen to reside in the way that it will afford “clean linen for the backs of thieves,” just as lovers are exhorted to “go fresh and sweet and be undone” and “the heaviest nuns” will be able to “walk in a pure floating / Of dark habits, / Keeping their difficult balance.”

In this poem, therefore, not only does Wilbur employ a series of oxymorons to suggest the necessarily muddled nature of human affairs and the mixed nature of the embodied or corporealized soul but he also effects a dexterous reconciliation of opposites in the humorous way that he addresses such a serious topic. Appropriately, one detects a similar tone and balancing act in his comment on the poem in a 1964 interview: “I can believe in angels by way of and in the laundry. I find laundry a great help to the conception of angels, and I suppose I'm saying in that poem that I don't really want to have much truck with angels who aren't in the laundry, who aren't involved in the everyday world. It's a poem against dissociated and abstracted spirituality” (Frank & Mitchell 25).

What, then, we might ask, is there about ekphrasis that makes it an appropriate mode for Wilbur's stated concern with finding “the proper relation between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit”? By way of answering that question it may first be helpful to consider more generally why, as a poet, he should be interested in non-verbal forms of representation. At the most basic level, as Wilbur stated in a 1966 interview, one reason was his father's vocation: “being brought up in the house of a painter gave me a busy eye, I think, and made me responsive to painting” (McKnight & Huston 36). Similarly, in another interview of 1968, he explained that from the beginning his own creativity took the form of “a love affair not merely with words but some of the other arts, too” (Hutton 46). Conversely, but to the same effect, in describing the attitudes toward the arts at this time, he complained about the reductive tendency to restrict music, architecture, and painting to a single type of representation, proclaiming that as a poet he himself refused to “accept any limitations or prohibitions or exclude anything in the name of purity,” using “Love Calls Us to the Things of This World” as an example (Responses 123).

Although it may be true, as Duffy has noted, that most of Wilbur's ekphrastic poems were composed early in his career—“when his esthetic was naturally shaping itself” (176)—the poem entitled “Wyeth's Milk Cans,” which dates from 1983, suggests that his interest in the visual arts and their relationship to poetry was ongoing. In attempting generally to explain this attraction, Nathan Scott has argued that it derives from Wilbur's concern with how to define the proper role of the human imagination “in relation to a world before whose riches and amplitude the appropriate attitude of the mind is one of gratitude,” and for Scott the way out of this dilemma for Wilbur was to give his meditations on imagination an “allegorical turn,” whereby painting and sculpture were cast as the promise and product of the human imagination (24). To the extent that ekphrasis involves the paragone of word and image, however, a converse explanation of Wilbur's interest in the visual arts can be found in an interview of 1983 in which he stated: “I think I have always been interested in the five senses and in the ranking of those senses, for example, in medieval theology. There the eye is supreme, the most spiritual. And I have always been interested in the way that certain poets rebel against the eye” (Jackson 144).

An early example of Wilbur's use of ekphrasis can be found in “L'Etoile” (373), a poem which takes its name from Edgar Degas's 1876 painting by that name and which appeared in Wilbur's his first collection of verse aptly titled The Beautiful Changes and Other Poems (1947). Degas's canvas … depicts a ballerina in an upward spiral, behind whom stand the half-forms of other ballerinas and a man in black attire and shoes, visible from the head down. In Wilbur's three-stanza poem, the first describes the zenith of the ballerina's dance, while the last evokes the mundane world through which she will plod after the performance. Overall, the poem functions as an excellent example of the way that a poet creates a narrative by extending what Lessing terms the “pregnant moment” that the painting depicts, and in doing so also emphasizes the atemporality of visual art and its ethereal remoteness from the real world. To the viewer of Degas's L'Étoile, as Wilbur's dynamic description of the painting suggests, the frozen, abstract quality of the image is at first concealed by reason of the way that a dance in itself features a movement through time. But, in a painting, only a single moment can be captured and in doing so the action must be rendered motionless, whereby it represents a stilled moment of perfection, of “light” and “flight” nearly etherealized. Yet insofar as the ballerina's performance can be described in terms of reaching “a moment toward her dance's flight” it belongs to a temporal sequence, and thus by transmuting the frozen image on the canvas into narrative, Wilbur recalls us to what is real and reminds us that the image is drawn from the tangible world, even as it is separate from and seeks to rise above it.

In addition, the narrative trajectory that the poem charts in describing the painting is that of a fall—a fall from grace, from this still and pure moment—in keeping with Wilbur's belief that the spiritual is located in the tangible and temporal. Thus in the first stanza we are encouraged to see how the music “lifts” the ballet star upward from her “tiptoe on the boards,” but the second stanza suggests how “Even as she aspires in loudening shine / The music pales and sweetens, sinks away.” The “fixt feet of the maître de ballet”—the man in black—anchor this falling motion, which finally comes to rest in a Lethe-like image in the third stanza which concludes by projecting the way that the ballerina after the performance will succumb to the “yawns” of slumbering forgetfulness.

Within the painting itself, as Wilbur describes it, the maître de ballet's “fixt feet,” a pedestrian image (as it were) which Wilbur invokes in a deliberately and somewhat comically heavy manner (through alliteration), suggests a world outside the still moment of the dance. In contrast to the “tiptoe” of the ballerina, his feet are “fixt” or anchored in this world, intimating reality beyond the dance, beyond even the painting. At the same time, to the degree that his feet are featured in the painting, they are “fixt” in the sense of having a frozen quality, and thus expose the painting's artifice—the way that it simultaneously borrows from and denies the actual world.

In the final stanza the poem ceases to rely on details in the painting and limits the autonomy of the picture by substituting images of its own, which serve explicitly to contextualize the painting in time. Thus thrice using the expectant verb form “will,” Wilbur describes the way that after the performance the ballerina “will turn and walk” down “metal halls” to where an “ancient woman will unmesh / Her small strict shape,” and “yawns will turn her face / Into a little wilderness of flesh.” None of these elements is found in Degas's canvas, although all of them are predictable and in this sense evoked by the painting. Indeed, there is something both ironic and ambivalent about the way that Wilbur simultaneously constricts the painting by moving beyond it and by surrounding it with new images even while he pays tribute to its continued force and vibrance.

The poem's constriction (and expansion) of the painting, including its substitution of images, constitutes evidence of what Mitchell calls ekphrastic fear—i.e., the fear that in the process of describing the mute and static object in a painting it will come alive, and that the differences between the verbal and visual will break down, thereby delimiting the poet's control of the image. But the poem also contains an element of ekphrastic hope—i.e., the belief that the words have the power “to make us see.”

According to Mitchell, it is also herein that the poetic use of ekphrasis gives “way to a more general application that includes any ‘set description intended to bring person, place, etc. before the mind's eye’” (153). This is almost certainly Wilbur's aim in the final stanza of “L'Etoile,” where the poem unabashedly offers its own images in lieu of (or at least supplementary to) those offered by the painting, and in this respect there is a sense in which the poem comes to compete with the painting in the presentation of images—both limiting, and revealing the limits of, the painting and attempting to appropriate the visual arts's descriptive power. Almost in the manner of Swift, by describing the somewhat sordid aftermath of the dancer's descent from the moment of her perfect flight the poem serves to deflate the ethereal pretensions of the image's depiction of that moment.

A final way in which the tension between the tangible and the abstract is played out in the last stanza pertains to the ambiguous nature of sleep. On the one hand, the dancer's descent into the stasis of slumber ironically completes but reverses the movement from the stilled moment of the painting to real life that began in the second stanza, just as by ending with the intangible quality of sleep the poem seems to suggest a possible ambivalence about the emphasis on the tangible. On the other hand, however, the stasis of slumber differs greatly from the abstractedness and atemporality of a painting; indeed, in real life, the poem tells us, stasis is comprised of forgetfulness and unconsciousness, Lethe-like submersion, but which is only temporary and more desirable than the endless and idealized moment of perfection that the image in a painting like that of Degas's L'Étoile has to offer.

In “A Dutch Courtyard” (362), also one of Wilbur's early ekphrastic poems, the focus is on a painting with this title by Pieter de Hooch, a 17th-century artist noted for the realism of his depiction of interiors and garden scenes. In the painting that Wilbur features, de Hooch presents an interior courtyard in which a woman in profile is sharing a tall glass of ale with two smiling cavaliers, to the right of which group stands a young girl, while to the left a churchyard is visible in the distance beyond the walls …. Somewhat in the manner of Keats's “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” Wilbur's concern is with the emotional experience of the viewer as he/she confronts the almost fierce autonomy of de Hooch's painting, which depicts a scene of conviviality even as it resists any intrusion from the outside. Thus while the poem begins with the speaker expressing his delight in looking at paintings, he immediately notes that such pleasure is qualified by the way that they are “Immune to us,” and then using the de Hooch painting as an example he explains the nature of this immunity: “This courtyard may appear / To be consumed with sun, / Most mortally to burn, / Yet it is quite beyond the reach of eyes / Or thoughts.” Turning next to the human figures in this painting, he draws attention to the girl who “will never turn” to the viewer but instead “smiles” unceasingly “toward the seated cavalier” who “will not proffer you his pot of beer.” Given such frustrating imperviousness, one can perhaps understand the “despair” that leads to the extreme response of the American industrial magnate that Wilbur humorously describes in the concluding stanza of the poem:

In despair,
Consumed with greedy ire,
Old Andrew Mellon glowered at this Dutch
Courtyard, until it bothered him so much
He bought the thing entire.

The poem, itself, however, reveals a deeper connection between art and life, a greater degree of ekphrastic hope, than the sense of deprivation that seems to have fueled Mellon's desire to own the painting—and establish the National Gallery in Washington to house it, as it were. As Wilbur presents it—using the metaphor of “tenants” and extending it with a pun on “Propriety”—Mellon's rage at the power of the image is based largely on its occupation of two spaces; how it masquerades as realistic while simultaneously intimating, by its static quality, an apprehension of the eternal. But by dramatizing the painting's remoteness from the real world and immunity to time in terms of an enormously powerful man sputtering angrily at a picture that will not yield to him, Wilbur also makes the painting part of the tangible world and locates it in the context of a human history of frustration and competition.

Wilbur further brings the painting closer to the tangible world by revealing likenesses between the canvas and Mellon. For instance, the courtyard that is “consumed with sun” and which appears “mortally to burn” resembles “old” Andrew Mellon who “glowered” at it and was “Consumed by greedy ire.” As in the case of the falling motion in “L'Etoile,” such words also counteract the separation of the painting from the world of the viewer by suggesting that both worlds—the courtyard (including the 17th-century it depicts) and that of the robber barons—are fallen ones. Indeed, insofar as the speaker notes of the canvas that “this place and moment oxidize,” it could be said that the image itself is subject to deterioration and as such is not entirely static.

Moreover, linking the various realms and thus suggesting their interdependence is the concept of entirety and imperviousness itself. Not only does the speaker begin by emphasizing the “wholly blameless fun” of viewing pictures, but what prompted Mellon, who “bought the thing entire,” was the seeming self-sufficiency of the painting or the way it seemed to exist “quite beyond the reach of eyes / or thoughts.” Linking the image to Mellon by reference to its completeness is, of course, doubly ironic, because it is the painting's distance from real life that constitutes its limitation, just as it was its refusal to allow access that made Mellon feel deprived and in need of owning it. In all these ways, then, Wilbur demonstrates ekphrastic hope and a belief in the unity of the secular and the sacred, returning the frozen realm of the painting to a closer relation to the tangible world, even while acknowledging that it is the image's pretension to being real that vexes him and so infuriated Mellon.

Another of Wilbur's ekphrastic poems, “Museum Piece” (292), also explores the impact of visual art on the viewer, but in a much more humorous way, coming to focus finally on the bedroom of Degas and the use he makes of a painting by El Greco. The initial setting of the poem is a museum where the “good gray guardians / Patrol the halls on spongy shoes,” while another “dozes … against the wall / Disposed upon a funeral chair.” In contrast to all this lethargy—stasis, one might say—is the activity featured in the paintings on display. First of these is a “Toulouse” of which the guards are “Perhaps suspicious,” although here the passing reference and the subjunctive adverb seem more designed to suggest what Mitchell calls “ekphrastic indifference” (152). Where pictorial activity is mainly to be found, in turn, is in a work by Degas, which Wilbur humorously introduces as depicting a “dancer” who “pirouettes / Upon the parting” of the dozing guard's hair, and then goes on to describe more reverently:

See how she spins! The grace is there,
But strain as well is plain to see.
Degas loved the two together:
Beauty joined to energy.

As in the case of “L'Etoile,” therefore, Wilbur again evokes the notion that a painting can paradoxically depict movement even as it exists in a gravity-defying state—of “grace”—beyond time, but he also emphasizes its vulnerability and dependence on the quotidian and mundane world, and reminds us that art comes out of the effort of real human beings. Thus in the final stanza he literally returns us to time with his own counterimage of exhaustion which takes the form of an anecdote about Degas:

Edgar Degas purchased once
A fine El Greco, which he kept
Against the wall beside his bed
To hang his pants on while he slept.

Not only does this image suggest that arrest/rest is part of the real world, but it also suggests that even a painter like Degas tires of the pretension and vanity of images. Similarly the poem stages the movement from ekphrastic hope to ekphrastic fear, reversing the power relation by shifting attention from the active Degas dancer, who mocked the inactivity and torpor of the guards, to the El Greco, which Degas marginalizes to floor space beside his bed and emasculates by covering with his pants. Moreover, the image's stasis, once the locus of its power, is converted into its essential vulnerability; the image has no power of its own—it must rely on its owner to be exhibited, to project its force. Its depiction of “beauty joined to energy,” its pretension through its dynamic subject to being real, is severely compromised as the painting is transformed into a mundane household object. And finally, the choice of El Greco—noted primarily for his paintings of religious subjects—as the object of such irreverence adds the perfect finishing stroke to Wilbur's concern with the sacramental grounding of the spiritual in the temporal and mundane.

Among visual artworks, architecture poses a special challenge for the ekphrastic poet, since as a structure it seems to have a static timeless quality while in the form of dwellings it has a direct connection to the human world of time. In “Wellfleet: The House” (319), Wilbur's way of handling this problem is to focus on an old English mansion on the sea-coast, which seems to resist intrusion in the sense of being uninhabited and presumably locked up. Thus the poem begins by describing the way that “the house believes / It's guarded, garlanded in a former while” and occupies an atemporal realm.

Here one cannot intrude, the stillness being
Lichenlike grown, a coating of quietudes;
The portraits dream themselves, they are done with seeing;
Rocker and teacart balance in iron moods.

But temporal aspects soon begin to play across this spatial stillness, and the house begins to swell with movement, the combined result of the intrusion of natural phenomena and the viewer's perception of them: “at certain hours … light / Floods at the seaside windows,” making the “yellow floorboards swim” and “the dazzled clock / Boom with a buoy sound.” Suggestive of a fallen world, in turn, but also emphasizing the mixed blessings of such a state, is the way that “the wallowed light … lays on all within a mending blight,” whereby trespassing “for the transient here is no offense.” Similarly, the central irony or strategy of the poem involves invoking the concept of eternity associated with the ocean and playing off the notion of time as change with the notion of time as endless duration or the unchanging, so that the wave of temporal phenomena washing over the mansion—making its “chambers seem / Alluvial as that champed and glittering rock”—simultaneously reinforces the house's connection to the world of human affairs and its imperviousness to that world. Thus the poem concludes: “One feels at home here. Nowhere in ocean's reach / Can time have any foreignness or fears.”

Insofar as poetry is associated with sound, whereas images are linked with silence, music is another artform that can be enlisted by the ekphrastic poet, which Wilbur does brilliantly in a poem entitled “Wyeth's Milk Cans” (25). In this poem, however, he also paradoxically attempts the opposite feat of trying to turn words into spatial shapes and thus reproduce the static qualities of visual art. Andrew Wyeth's painting … depicts two metal milk cans placed side by side in tall grass to the left of a white-picket farmyard structure and against the backdrop of sloping countryside. According to Bruce Michelson, it is natural that Wilbur would focus on Wyeth, since this American painter “is comparably stubborn in his interest in the natural mundane, in his faith that life as seen still has eloquence left in it, that the moods and mysteries of what we perceive are neither simple nor redundant” (216). In this context, just as Wyeth's painting is designed to suggest the significance, if not the beauty, of such seemingly unaesthetic objects as milk cans, so Wilbur's strategy is to wonder what awesome sounds one would hear if these milk cans were used as “bells” and “tolled” their tale. As an ekphrastic exercise, however, Wilbur's concern is also to make the pattern of his poem approximate the shape or visual features of Wyeth's painting. Thus like Wyeth's stark landscape and two milk cans, Wilbur's poem is limited to a spare two stanzas, each consisting of a mere three lines. Like the “hill and field” that in Wyeth's painting “Harden” in the distance, and like the way that “summer's easy / Wheel-ruts lie congealed,” each stanza has a set or rigid quality. In this way, the poem exemplifies what Mitchell calls the extension of ekphrasis into a general “aestheticizing of language” whereby the visual arts become “a metaphor, not just for verbal representation of visual experience, but for the shaping of language into formal patterns that ‘still’ the movement of linguistic temporality into a spatial, formal array. Not just vision, but stasis, shape, closure, and silent presence … are the aims of this more general form of ekphrasis” (153-54).

To the extent that “Wyeth's Milk Cans” attempts “to make us see,” it embodies ekphrastic hope, even competing with the image, trying to replicate the static quality of Wyeth's painting, just as the poem further attempts to demonstrate its superiority by re-injecting sound, temporality, and movement into an extremely static/silent image. Thus not only does the first stanza describe the painting, but the second challenges/transforms it by asking “What if these two bells tolled?” and then goes on to provide the answer: “They'd make the bark-splintering / Music of pure cold.” While this integration of various artforms reveals a catholic or unified sensibility, in suggesting the kind of frozen music that visual art would produce the poem also implies a catastrophic destruction of the image. Picturing such a calamity suggests anxiety or ekphrastic fear about the damage that would occur if the poem were to succeed in its attempt to make the image come alive. As much as there is the desire to break down the barriers between the eternal and the temporal, so much is there also a fear—envisioned perhaps as a punishment for human arrogance—that doing so would unleash a fundamental destructive element.

A historical painting about destruction—and the way it relates to the ekphrastic project—is indeed the focus of Wilbur's “The Giaour and the Pacha” (352). This poem, moreover, exemplifies what Mitchell calls the “narrowest of meanings of the word ekphrasis as a poetic mode, ‘giving voice to a mute art object’” (153), and which for Krieger constitutes the most direct means of freeing “the limited enclosure of the frozen, sensible image into an unbounded temporal flow” (10). Wilbur's poem borrows its title from Eugene Delacroix's 1856 painting, which dramatically depicts an armed and triumphant warrior (the Giaour) astride his rearing horse in the moment prior to his execution of his adversary (the Pacha), cowering beneath his horse's hoofs. Wilbur's major strategy here is first to describe/evoke the dreadful moment that the canvas captures but then to imagine the psychological insight experienced by the warrior, one which drains the moment of its triumph and numbs, if not visually dissipates, the victorious Giaour himself.

In the first stanza of the poem, the use of the past tense serves to foreground the notion of the stilled moment in visual art:

The Pacha sank at last upon his knee
And saw his ancient enemy reared high
In mica dust upon a horse of bronze,
The sun carousing in his either eye.

The poem, however, quickly shifts to the present tense as the Giaour's eye “of a sudden clouds, and lifts away / The light of day, of triumph.” This movement anticipates the poem's final shift in tone and tense in the last two stanzas when the painted Giaour is actually given a voice and begins to interrogate the action that has been frozen on the canvas—even to the point of inquiring anxiously about what the consequences of his actions will be. As Donald Hill notes, he ironically recognizes that “his victory marks the end of his purpose in life” (38), so that in the final lines of the poem he prays “That I may end the chase, and ask not why.”

Of course, “asking why” is precisely what a figure in a painting cannot do, and thus the Giaour's new-found voice in itself exposes the distance of the canvas from real life. Even though it represents a scene from the tangible world, the image is mute until the poet makes it speak; moreover only through words or verbal art is it possible to suggest internal turmoil or the psychic crisis preceding the Giaour's final action:

Is this my anger, and is this the end
Of gaudy sword and jeweled harness, joy
In strength and heat and swiftness, that I must
Now bend, and with a slaughtering shot destroy
The counterpoise of all my force and pride?

In this way, the poem doubly comes to speak for the painting—not only giving voice to the Giaour but also interpreting the action that the image has frozen, changing a dramatic painting into a dramatic monologue.

The poem further undermines the autonomy of the image by recasting the power relations that are involved on all levels. Whereas in the voiceless stasis of the painting the Giaour appears to control his destiny, the poem disenfranchises him: he is given a voice but must use it to plead “O sky, / Come loose the light of fury on this height.” This shift in the Giaour's position is literally rendered and further dramatized by the direction of gaze in the poem. The first stanza reveals the Pacha sunk low gazing on the Giaour, who reared high, is associated with the firmament. By the poem's final stanza, however, it is the Giaour who looks to the sky in supplication. The Giaour's virtual ascension in the painting over the Pacha and the mundane realm is minimized in the poem by his loss of the will to act and his entreaties to an authority greater than himself.

The poem brings the static canvas closer to this world by giving the Giaour a voice even as it simultaneously and ironically abstracts the Giaour by absorbing him into an ethereal mist. The expectations created by the image's pregnant pause are interrupted at the precise moment of his expected glory: “secretly, the cloak [of the Giaour] becomes aware / Of floating, mane and tail turn tracery.” At this point the image is reigned in, and the Giaour, “imbedded in the air,” “stares / And feels the pistol fall beside his knee.” The Giaour's disappearance in an ethereal mist at the moment of his triumph and acquisition of voice, which we otherwise might expect would bring him closer to the tangible world, ironically reveals the Giaour's true distance from the actual. In doing so, in reversing and conjoining the relations of the physical and spiritual, the poem could be said to replicate what Wilbur has said about his own creative process and the connection between the shape and meaning, medium and message: “No poem of mine is ever undertaken as a technical experiment. … Nor does my poem ever begin as the statement of a fully grasped idea; I think inside my lines and the thought must get where it can amongst the moods and sounds and gravitating particulars which are appearing there” (Responses 118).

In Wilbur's poetry, then, one finds a variety of traditional ekphrastic strategies being used for the somewhat new “religious” purpose of sacramentally locating the eternal/spiritual through and in the temporal/mundane; these strategies include transforming the “pregnant moment” captured by the visual artwork into a narrative sequence, evoking a broader context or narrative of circumstances surrounding the painting's viewing, describing the movement of temporal aspects across a still picture plane, reproducing the static quality of a painting, and giving voice to a mute spatial object. These strategies, consistent with Heffernan's definition of ekphrasis, constitute different means of “making explicit the story that visual art tells only by implication” (5).

Furthermore, Wilbur's works reveal two aspects of ekphrasis or two attitudes toward the relation of language to image—namely, ekphrastic hope and ekphrastic fear. Ekphrastic hope, or the attempt to make us “see” the painting or sculpture that is verbally described, involves showing how the static canvas that appears to capture some eternal or spiritual essence is integrally connected to the temporal, tangible world. This emphasis on time, on the image's relation to temporal circumstances, however, also suggests ekphrastic fear and takes the form of revealing the limits of the image and exposing its static, artificial quality.

The tension in Wilbur's ekphrastic poems, then, between ekphrastic hope and fear reflects the greater tension between the tangible world and the intuitions of the spirit that permeates all of Wilbur's work; he both desires and resists the unity of the image with the text, of the eternal with the mundane. In his works, elements of ekphrastic hope and fear often occupy the same poem, in keeping with what Krieger has generally observed of the ekphrastis impulse: “every tendency in the verbal sequence to freeze itself into a shape (—or we can use ‘form’ or ‘pattern’ or some other metaphor borrowed from the spatial arts—) is inevitably accompanied by a counter-tendency for that sequence to free itself from the limited enclosure of the frozen, sensible image into an unbounded temporal flow” (10).

In Wilbur's case, however, the dynamics of ekphrasis are further complicated by the fact that the very images he selects have a realistic quality, deriving their power by virtue of their manipulation and appropriation of the tangible world. Ironically, herein lies both the audacity and vulnerability of such images; they depend upon the tangible for their subject and, ultimately, for their resonance, even as they invite us to embrace an abstracted version of reality; they ask us to believe that they are part of our world even as by reason of their timelessness they ask us to abstract ourselves from it. Using Krieger's phrasing, we might say that the images that Wilbur features in his poem serve to provide “a brief sense of being … in the midst of his shifting world of verbal becoming,” but they pretend, all the same, to belong to that very world of time and change. Requiring us to negotiate between elements that are at once borrowed from and removed from real life, such images serve as the perfect backdrop for Wilbur's ultimate rejection of abstracted spirituality.

Similarly, because instead of featuring the stylized, flat figures found in Byzantine mosaics or icons Wilbur chooses artworks that have as their subjects seemingly realistic, three-dimensional images of graceful (or exhausted) dancers, convivial courtiers, and furious warriors, they are, in terms of the paragone between image and text, more assertive. Their incursion into the narrative and temporal domain of text is more egregious, and the need to resist them is more urgent. The result is a tension between image and text, the tangible and intangible, that creates a multiply layered ambivalence in Wilbur's poetic, a “sacramental” sense of reality that infuses his best ekphrastic (and non-ekphrastic) works and enables him to articulate a spirituality that “is not abstracted, not dissociated and world-renouncing” but rather accords with the Augustinian notion that “Love calls us to the things of this world” (Responses 125).²

Notes

1. All quotations from Wilbur's poetry are from the 1988 volume, New and Collected Poems. Because the poems are relatively short, parenthetical documentation refers to the page/s on which they appear in this collection.

2. I wish to thank Professor Elizabeth Bergmann Loizeaux for her sage and encouraging advice and Nancy Siegel for her loving support during my drafting of this essay.

Works Cited

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———. Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976. New York: Harcourt, 1988.