Poetic Speech

7/24/2019 Poetic Speech

1/17

Poetic Speech and the Silence of Art

Shimon Sandbank

Comparative Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Summer, 1994), pp. 225-239.

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2/17

SUMMER 1994

Volume 46, Number

SHIMON SANDBANK

Poetic Speech and the

Silence of Art

W

E SEE NO BIRDS in the paintings of Paolo Uccello : this

is how Italo Calvino's sh ort text, The Birds of Paolo

Uccello, begins (3 ) . What has become of the birds that accord-

ing to Vasari once studded his canvases? asks Calvino. MThohas

scared them away? And the answer: Most certainly it is th e sol-

diers, who rend er the highways of the air impassable with the ir

spears, and with the clash of weaponry silence trillings and

chirrupings. More than on e writer had depicted the aged Uccello

surrounded by his bird paintings. In his most famous surviving

works, however, what catches the atte ntion is the absence of

birds, an absence that lies heavy on the air, alarming, menacing

and ominous.

These surviving paintings presuppose others which may have

been painted bu t have since been lost: scenes that precede the

above-a world all trillings and peckings and beating wings, taken

by surpr ise an d scattered to the winds by the invasion of the war-

riors-and othe r scenes tha t follow them: the counteroffensive of

the birds, who swoop down in serried flocks and perch on helmets,

shoulder plates an d elbow guards (3 -4) . Calvino's text is now

brimming with eddies of feathers and grasping talons, a horror

not unlike Hitchcock's in The

irds On e cries for help ; on e casts

aro und for a shield to protect oneself an d finds oneself grasping a

wing with feathers spread . Finally, even man, having already trans-

formed himself into crustacean by donning a rmo ur , is metamor-

phosed into bird. In the final exchange between crustacean and


3/17


4/17

S I L E N C E A R T P O E T R Y

paysans chi.tifs,-aprt.s avoir conte mple une nlaisonne tte d'olj. rnon tait une

n~aigreunlee, s'ecria: "Que c'est beau Mais que font-ils dans cette cabane? a quoi

pensent-ils, quels sont leurs chagrins? les recoltes ont-elles &ti.bonnes? ils on t sans

doute des hcheances

a

payer?" (579)

Balzac expresses his admiration in a brief exclamation "Que c'est

beau " ) an d immediately abandons the painting itself. All the rest

of what h e has to say refers to what is missing from the painting-

the unseen people inside the little cottage-and to what must be

missing from it: their thoughts and worries.

The same holds for Calvino's birds: they could not possibly ap-

pear in Uccello's surviving battle scenes. They may have appeared

in scenes that preceded or followed the surviving paintings, but

time sequentiality is excluded from painting, a nd what preceded

or followed the scenes we have cannot possibly appear in them.

The absence of birds in these scenes is therefore as inevitable as,

or even more inevitable than, the absence of thoughts in the

winterscape Balzac was admiring. Both birds a nd thou ghts had to

be absent by force of the innate limitations of the visual med iu m.

Thus, Balzac's starting poin t, like Calvino's, is absence. But does

Balzac also destroy presence like Calvino? The word seems inad-

equa te in this case. Calvino lets the absent birds o ust the prese nt

soldiers; Balzac d oes no t let the absent thoughts oust the depicted

winter scene, nor are they incompatible with it. The lean peasants,

the small cottages, the frost, all suggest them. At the same time , he

cannot wait to leave the visual scene behind and turn to the

thoughts the pa inter could n ot include in it. With his prom pt en-

trance into the sphere of thought and feeling the writer has

tur ned his back o n the visible, which, though no t destroyed, is su-

perseded.

Th us both writers seem primarily engaged n ot in transposing to

language the form of a visual object, but in superseding it. Only by

being left behind could the landscape Balzac saw activate his

imagination, or Uccello's painting produce Calvino's text.

In t he two ekphrastic texts we have exam ined , the starting point

is an absence, a limitation of the visual a rt. Why should a writer use

the limitations of anoth er art to create his own? Does ekphrastic

poetry involve a game of power? The "creative mind' s desperate

insistence upon priority," in Harold Bloom's formulation

(13) ,

comes naturally to mind. Bloom's concept of poetic history as


5/17

C O M P R T I V E L I T E R T U R E

different mediums. Reni Girard's theory of sexual rivalry, in De-

ceit, Desire, a?zd the lVovel,

seems equally called for, perhaps even

mo re so, since by presenting the Other as model for imitation as

well as rival, this theory may d o more justice to the paradoxical

relation between p oet a nd painter.' Th e ekphrastic poet seems to

de pe nd o n the p regna nt lacunae of art, on its infinitely intriguing

silence, just as he or she seems determined to redeem it by means

of poetic speech .

Whatever the psychology of the case, the history of the sister

arts certainly testifies to a less than harm onious relat ion between

the two. The transformations of the u t pictura poesis topos show

that poetry, except for some notable cases such as Leonardo's

Treatzse on E- aznti?zg,

has usually been placed above the fine arts,

mainly due to its capacity for direct abstraction and hence for

more explicitly and thoroughly addressing spiritual matters; thus

it is seen as having greater religious, moral, and philosophical

value. Th e visual arts, on the oth er h an d, have been shown to suf-

fer from a nu mb er of inhe ren t weaknesses: their limitation to visu-

ally perceptible objects, their restriction to a single moment of

time and a single place, their inaccessibility to sound and other

sensory phe nome na , a nd of course their incapacity for the logical

an d abstract (Markiewicz,pass i m ) .

And yet, the visual impact of painting an d its iconic immediacy

and suggestive silence have always aroused the envy of poets. Even

a Romantic like Coleridge, in a period which is supposed to have

been freeing itself from pictorialism, tries over and over again to

sketch what he cannot describe in words.

0

Christ, it maddens

me that I am no t a painter or that painters are not I, he writes in

his

vote books,

attem pting to describe the appearance of birch trees

(1495 f.65) . In ou r own century, the same exemp tion from ab-

stract meaning, which had been considered a fault, has elevated

painting to the rank of ultimate model, an d Cizan ne 's thingy

apples to the ideal at which poetry too must aim. William Carlos

Williams writes,

the progression from the sentiment, the thought philosophy ) or the concept

to the poem itself, that was the secret meaning inside the term transition durin g

the years xvhen the painters following Cezanne began to talk of sheer paint: a

picture a matte r of pigments upon a piece of cloth stre tched on a fram e. It is the

making of that step, to come over into the tactile qualities, the words themselves


6/17

S I L EN C E , A R T , P O E T R Y

from the period before the turn of the cen tury. And it is the reason xvhy painting

and the poem became so closely allied at tha t tirne. It was the work of the painters

following Ckzanne and the Irnpressionists that, critically, opened up the age of

Stein, Joyce and a good many other s. It is in the taking of tha t step over frorn

feeling to the imaginative object, on the c loth, on the pa ge, that defined the te rm,

the rnodern term-a work of ar t, what it rneant to thern. ut~b io~qnphj80-81)

What Williams here calls the coming over into the tactile quali-

ties, much more natural to painting than to poetry, could only

enhance the position of painting as both model an d rival. No won-

der a collection of essays on painting by twentieth-century poets

reveals as one of its leitmotifs poets' en \y of painters:

STEPHEN When they paint, painters are exercising somePENDER

of the qualities essential to good writing. Apart from the most ob-

vious of these-the organizing power of the visual imagination-

they observe what Blake called 'minute particulars.' They create

images and they store memories. For all these things writers may

envy them J.D. McClatchy 140).

HOWARD The poet walks thro ugh the museum an dE~IEROY

among so many an d so diverse conceptions a nd manners of treat-

men t he sees, he hears, especially two things: silence an d light

.

His own art , in the comparison, begins to s ee m .t he merest

pitifullest chatter, compounded of impatience and opinion

(McClatchy

1'78-79).

ROBERTCREELEYThere is n o 'answer' to any th ing. A painter

(possibly a musician) can assert this more effectually, more rel-

evantly, than any oth er 'artist.' He can be present all at one time,

which no writer can quit e be-because h e has to 'g o on '

(McClatchy 221).

CH,SRI.ES 'We live in the center of a physical poetry,'OSII.INSON

says Wallace Stevens. This is surely the basic fact which would

make a poet want to paint or, if he couldn't do that, to compre-

hend the painter's way of regarding the physical poetry they both

share

.

When words seem too abstract, the n

I

find myself paint-

ing the sea with the very thing it is composed of-water

.

(McClatchy 266, 268) .

JAMESMERRILLThe writer will always envy th e pain te r. Even

those who write well a bo ut pa inting, h e will envy for having

learned to pay close att ent ion to appearances (McClatchy 312) .


7/17

C O M P A R AT IV E L I T E R T U R E

picked up fr om WlcClatchy's collection, all have to do with the

transition Williams talks about from the semantic to the tactile, a

transition poets feel is easier in the wordless visual medium. In

Archibald Macleish's famous Ars Poetics, it is in terms of word-

lessness and motionlessness that the non-semantic poem, the

poem that is rather than means, is defined.

T4Tilliams,who seriously tries to turn his convictions into prac-

tice, is unexpectedly an exception among ekphrastic poets. He

seems readier than many of his fellow ekphrastic poets to pursue

his envy to a constructive conclusion and get as close as possible to

the tactile qualities of the paintings h e writes about , free from

sentiment, tho ugh t o r concept. His much-admired Pictures

from Brueghel show an astounding resistance to meanings be-

yond the immediate appearances of Brueghel's paintings. Even in

a poem pregnan t with mythical meaning like Landscape with the

Fall of Icarus

(4 ) ,

he insists on juxtaposing the spring landscape

with the drowning Icarus in purely spatial and visual terms: near

the edge of the sea versus off the coast.

A measure of the unbridgeable gap between the media, how-

ever, is that even Williams cannot help imposing some concepts

o n the sheer pai nt of Bru egh el's canvas. An ironic

unsignificantly an d quite unnoticed is added to the final refer-

ence to Icarus's fall, expressing, however minimally, outrage a t the

indifference of the world to its dreamers:

Unslgnificantlv

off the coast

ther e mas

a splash quite unno ticed

this was

Icarus drow ning

Williams also puts when Icarus fell at the beginning of the poem,

thus making clear what he judges to be the philosophical (th ough

not visual) center of the picture; in addition, he presents the en-

tire plot of the picture in the past tense, thus taking us back from

the purely perceptual present to the remembered myth and its

philosophical implications.

Thus, in the final analysis Williams too does what is inaccessible

to painting an d open only to language. He judges, ironizes, moves


8/17


The physical bias of much modern poetry, then, does not ex-

em pt poets from the urge to lend their visual objects the

differe7ztia

specifics

of the verbal. A salient case in point is Rilke. His

Dingdichtung, inspired by Ckzanne and Rodin, is often seen as a

hero ic attempt-perhaps th e hero ic attempt beside Gerard Manley

Hopkins's-to subject poetic language to the physical inscape of

things (Hartman

95).

His famous sonnet on the Archaic Torso of

Apollo, with all its seeming glorification of a purely physical pres-

ence , insistently dismisses the physical:

W e c a n n o t k n o w h is l e g e n d a r y h e a d

w i t h eyes l i ke r i pen i ng f ru i t . A n d ye t h i s t o r so

is stil l su f f use d w i t h br i l l i ance f ro m i ns i de ,

l i ke a l a m p , i n w h i c h h i s g az e , n o w t u r n e d t o l o w ,

glea ms i n all i ts pow er. Otherr\~ise

t h e c u r v e d b r e a st c o u l d n o t d a z z l e y o u s o , n o r c o u l d

a s m i le r u n t h r o u g h t h e p la cid h i p s a n d t h i g h s

t o t ha t dark cen t e r xvhere procrea t i on f l a red .

O t h e r a i s e t h is s t o n e w o u l d s e e m d e f a c e d

b e n e a t h t h e t r an s l u ce n t ca sc ad e o f h e s h o u ld e r s

a n d w o u l d n o t g l is t en l i k e a wil d b e a s t ' s f u r :

w o u l d n o t , f r o m all t h e b o r d e r s o f t s e l f ,

bur s t l i ke a s t ar: f o r h ere t he re i s n o p lace

t h a t d o e s n o t s e e y o u . Y o u r n us t c h a n g e yo ur l i f e .

( 6 1 )

This poem throughout focuses on absence, on what the torso

lacks: its lack of head, of genitals, of arms. Rilke attributes the

statue's impact to these gaps in the visual, to what is invisible and

non-physical-the mysterious interiorization of the gaze. T h e

poem 's e nd, with its famous moral call to a change of life, is alto-

gether beyond the physical.

Formally, this sonne t is miles apar t from Calvino's The Birds of

Uccello. Nevertheless, they share a certain deep structure . Rilke's

starting point, like Calvino's, is absence. Tho ugh the two absences

ar e different in kind-Calvino's absence of birds derives from an

inherent limitation of the visual medium, its inability to present

time-sequentiality, while Rilke's absence of head, arms, an d geni-

tals is cont ingent , a result of the ravages of time-both serve as

springboards to a destruction of the physical presence of the work

of art concerned. Both Rilke's defaced stone and Calvino's


9/17

C O M P R T I V E L I T E R T U R E

and absent, now swoop down in counteroffensive. Both writers

have deleted their visual objects so as to clear imaginative space

for themselves, as Harold Bloom would p ut it.

In addition, they have reaffirmed the traditional topos of the

resilience of poetry, in contrast to art. You shall shin e more

brigh t in these contents , Shakespeare assures the beloved, refer-

ring to his sonnets, than unsu7ept stone besmeared with sluttish

time. Rilke shows how the statue's physical de ter ioration results

in an enduring spiritual resilience, like poetry; it has become a

eu nu ch , but , as Hopkins puts it in a letter to Bridges, it is for the

kingdom of heave n's sake. Now as imm aterial as a poe m, the

statue has overcome art's inability to deal with spiritual matters

an d actually become a poem.'

One is reminded of Gertrude Stein's frivolous but profound

pictures, described in a lecture she delivered during her 1934

American tour. I always liked, she says, looking out of win-

dows in museums. It is more complete, looking o ut of windows in

museums, than looking ou t of windows anywhere else (91 ). But

the n, during a long hot summer in Italy, she began to sleep an d

dre am in fron t of oil paintings. She still looked o ut of the win-

dows of the museums, but it was no longer necessary. There were

very few people in the galleries in Italy in the summers in those

days an d the re were long benches a nd they were red an d they were

comfortable at least they were to me an d the guardia ns were indif-

fer en t or amiable and I would really lie down a nd sleep in f ron t of

the pictures. You can see that it was not necessary to look out of

the windows.

Is that no t what Calvino a nd Rilke are doing? They look o ut of

windows or sleep an d dr eam , but they must do it in a museum in

front of paintings. Uccello and the torso must be th ere for Calvino

and Rilke to turn their backs on and dream. Even in a time of

physical poetry , ekphrastic poets thus half turn their back to the

physical painting. Rather than engaging exclusively in carrying

the forms of art over to poetry, they concentrate on the absences

of art to the advantage of poetry. An ekphrastic poem therefore

remains what M.J.K~lrrik,n an entirely different contex t, calls a

presence based on absences. It is from the perspective of what it

excludes that the ekphrastic poet reads his visual object, an d the


10/17

SILENCE , ART,

POETRY

c a n t t o p o et s , w h o s e ve ry m e d i u m , l a ng u a g e, is e m b o d i e d i n t h e

s o u n d s o f s p e e c h . H o w is t h e s i le n ce o f a rt t r ea t ed i n e k p h r a s t ic

poe t ry?

T h e p r e g n a n t s i l en c e o f p a in t in g s a n d s ta tu es o f t e n e n a b l e s po-

e ts t o e n d o w t h e m w i t h a n o t h e r , la rg ely a b s e n t , e l e m e n t : m e n t a l

p h e n o m e n a . T h o u g h t s o r f ee l in g s m a y b e s u g ge st ed i n p a in ti ng

a n d s c u l p t u r e t h r o u g h v is ua l c l u e s , b u t i n t h e fi na l a na ly sis o n l y

l a ng u a g e ca n r e n d e r t h e m i n all t h e ir n u a n c e s ( M e r r i m a n 1 6 2 ) .

T h e s i len ce o f R o d i n s

The Thi zker

e n a b l e s t h e C h i l e a n po e t

G a b r ie la M istra l t o i n d u l g e i n t h e T h i n k e r s t h o u g h t s , i n w h a t s h e

i m a g in e s t o b e h i s m e d i t a t io n o f d e a t h :

Con el mento n caido sobre la rnano rud a,

el pensador se acuerd a que es carne d e la huesa,

carne fatal, delante de l destino desnuda,

carne que odia la muerte, y temblo d e belleza.

(Kranz, Bildgrdicht 62

Mistra l reads The Thinker f r o m a d o u b l e p er sp ec ti ve o f e x cl u -

s io n : t h e e x c lu s i o n o f v o i ce , w h i c h le av es o p e n t h e T h i n k e r s

t h o u g h t s , an d t h e e x c lu s io n o f t h e t h o u g h t s t h e m s e lv e s w h i c h ,

t h o u g h s u g g e s te d b y fa cia l e x p r e s s i o n a n d b o d y l a n g u a g e , c a n n o t

p os sib ly b e r e p r e se n t e d d ir e ct ly , a n d r e m a i n o p e n t o m a n y i n te r -

pre ta t i ons .

U n l i k e R i l k e s t o r s o ,

R o d i n s s ta tu e i s n o t e l im i n a t e d t o b e r e-

p la c ed b y i n w a r d n e s s . I ts i n w a r d n e s s h a v i n g b e e n s u g g e s t e d by i t s

p hy sic al p r e s e n c e , i t h a r m o n i z e s w i t h , r a th e r t h a n s u p e r s e d e s , i t .

S i n k i n g c h i n , c o ar se h a n d , m u s c l e s , c r a c ke d sk in -r a th e r t h a n b e -

i n g n e g a t e d , t h e s e s er ve as a n o b j e c t i v e c o r re l a ti v e t o a m i s s i n g

i n w a r d n e s s r e s to r e d by t h e p o e m . A t t h e s a m e t i m e , t h e y a re d o u -

b l y r e d u c e d : t h r o u g h b e i n g r e le g a te d t o t h e s ta tu s o f c or re la ti ve

o r s i g n , a n d by b e i ng c o n f i n e d , qua s i gn s , t o a s in g le m e a n i n g .

T h i s r e d u c t i o n , h o w e v e r , is far m i l d e r t h a n t h e t o ta l n e g a t i o n o f

p r es e nc e t h e s i le n ce o f a rt c a n p r o d u c e . A p o e t m a y r e j ec t t h e vi-

sual c l u e s t h e p a i n te r o f f e r s , o r c h o o s e t o f o l lo w t h e m i n a p artia l

o r id io s yn c ra t i c m a n n e r . I n a s o n n e t b y M a n u e l M a c h a d o o n

M a n e t s The Balco?zj ( K r a n z , Bildgedicht 3 1 6 ) w h a t t h e p a i n ti ng

Interestingly, Rilke's sonne t Friiher Xpollo, the counter part to the

Xrchaischer Torso in that it open s the first part of ~ V e u eGedichte as the Torso

opens the second part, describes a different ..\pollo from the perspective of an-

other absence, that of the future: it is Apollo in the process of preparing to pro-


11/17

COMPARAT I VE L I T E RAT URE

foregroun ds an d illuminates, i.e. the two ladies on the balcony, is

largely ignored by the poe t, who focuses instead on the dark back-

ground and the thoughts of the silent man standing there, oblivi-

ous to present goings-on, daydreaming of f ~ ~ t u r eoys. Similarly, in

a q uat rain on Du re r' s hfela?zcolia, the poet William Watson dis-

misses sea, ear th, a nd heaven, which occupy half of Durer' s work,

as irrelevant to the interior life of silent Melancholy, whose inner

fantom alo ne is suppose d to hold he r fixed gaze (Kra nz,

Meisterwerke 339) . T he elimination of physical detail is particularly

striking in an emblematic picture like this, which naturally calls,

on the contrary, for a thorough iconological interpretation of its

physical detail.g

Q ~ ~ i t eften, however, as in Mistral's Rodin, the silence of art is

used in a way that follows an d supports physical presence, tho ugh

at the expense of complexity.

A

witty manner ist device often used

in this context is the thematization of art's silence: the device by

which a painting's silence, deriving of course from a limitation in-

herent to the medium, is misread as belonging to the specific

theme presented. Thus Laokoo?z's silence, or that of Michel-

angelo's Slave, is interpreted as deriving from heroic stoicism;

:Mo?za Lisa's silence is attributed to her sphinx-like nature or her

experience of the world;' Michelangelo's Night, in the Medici

Chapel, is said to be mute by nature, not by art.' T he silence of art

in such cases is not exploited to smuggle in absen t tho ughts, bu t is

wittily misread as a positive trait of the work's theme.

The same device is also applied to another absence, that of

movement. T he reason why Miche langelo's Moses does no t jum p

up from his seat, says on e poet, is that he is in cont rol of his pas-

sions (Kranz, Meisterwerke

2 75).

And his Night is said in another

poem to be immobile because night is immobile (30 3) . Similarly,

the lovers' immobility on the verge of sailing to Cythera, in

Watteau's L'Embarquement pour Cjthdre, is thematized by the Bel-

gian poet Albert Giraud into their wish to be ever on the way,

never to arrive:

11s n e o o n t pa s p l us l o i n q u e l e u r g e st e c h a r m a n t ,

C a r p o u r l e u r t e n d r e c o e u r t o u t e l a p o k s ie

C f . T h 6 o p h i l e G a u t i e r 's e i g h t - p a g e M e l a n c h o l i a , d i s cu s s ed b y K r a n z i n

Weisterwerke321-24.


12/17

SILENCE.

ART POETRY

De l'amoureux volage e4tda ns l'en1barquement.

(Kranz, \ r~strriurrkr389)

The misreading that constitutes this device, taking an exclusion

for an intended inclusion, is double-edged.On the one hand it

seems to testify to a generosity on the part of the poet, who, in-

stead of exploiting an absence in the visual medium to promote

his own, interprets it to serve the artist's purpose. On the other

hand , this service depends on the poet's discretion, and h e knows

it. Not only is TVatteau himself unable to give us more than the

vaguest visual clue, let alone directly tell us that his lovers' immo-

bility has to do with a wish never to arrive; he can hardly make it

clear, as it turns out, in a Dutch poem on the same painting,

whether they are sailing to the island or back from it (Kranz,

hf ist rw rk

392-93).

There is a dismissal of ar t as such in the poe t's

refusal to acknowledge its limitations, its ou7n terms, when pre-

tending to regard its exclusions as intended by the artist. In fact,

intent ions remain as inaccessible to art as ever. Being ~vordless ,t

can never be precise about them.

At this point, however, some ekphrastic poems perform an as-

tounding v tp face. Precisely by being wordless, they say, ar t is able,

no t only to express spiritual truths, but to do it better than words.

Silence comes neare r the spirit tha n the merest pitifullest chat-

ter tha t is poetry. Language's superiority to ar t in expressing the

non-visible is reversed in to an inferiority. Now the visual medium

can do it better, not by force of its physical presence, but by the

way it excludes sound and noise.

This infinitely pregnant silence of art has been our starting

point: it is that which attracts poets to art in the first place. But

rivalry is at work here too. The silence that poets a re after is differ-

en t from, more than, the silence of art. In MallarmC's Sainte, the

stained-glass image of Saint Cecilia is both evoked an d el iminated

by poetic speech, but poetic speech too is eliminated in its turn to

clear space, no t for the visual silence that has been left behin d, but

for another silence, the silence into which words reach after

speech. The musicienne d u silence the poem finally achieves is

not the stained-glass saint, but that which is absent from all

stained-glass windows and rises musically out of, and beyond,

words.


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C O M P A R A T I V E L I T E R A T U R E

the relation between art and poetry from the perspective of ab-

sence, or rather of two absences: of sound and of movement.

These two limitations of the visual medium are here reversed into

its triumph. It is, however, a double-edged triumph, deeply

marred by exclusion.

Silence dominates the first one-and-a-half stanzas. The u rn is a

bride of quietness, a foster child of silence. It is "stilln-that is,

again, silent, or , if taken as adverb, still unravished by (on e sus-

pects) the poet , who will soon a nd inevitably "ravish" the urn's

"ditties of no tone" by his insistent voice. He would have preferred

to pipe to the spirit, not to the sensual ear , but is doomed to the

latter. His frantic questions concerning the illustrations on the

urn-what legend, what me n, what maidens, what struggle, what

pipes-enact the verbal rape of ar t' s silence. But they also bring

out art's impotence in comparison with speech. For it can answer

none of these questions. There is a silence in art which is not only

numinous ("Thou, silent form, dost tease us ou t of thought" ), but

also infinitely sad, ever frustrating man's thirst for being "told,"

for the absent voice:

A nd , l it t le to wn , thy s tr eet s for everm ore

Wi l l s i len t b e ; and no t a sou l to t e l l

W h y h o u a rt d e s o la t e , c a n e ' e r re t u r n .

Th e second absence, motionlessness, dominates the second half

of stanza and the entire third stanza. Here again a limitation

seems to be turned inside out and become triumph . Art's exclu-

sion of movement and time becomes timelessness, in the sense of

etern ity. Impotenc e becomes power."ut, as has often be en

shown, there is too much insisting ("Ah happy, happy And

happy More happy more happy, happy"). Th er e is also an

odd use of "cannot" where "need not" seems the better choice:

"thou canst no t leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be

bare"; "she cannot fade"; "happy boughs that cannot shed Your

leaves." Since it is bad for one to leave one' s song, for trees to be

bare, for a girl to fade, or for boughs to shed their leaves,

shouldn't the exemption from all these be presented as privilege

("thou need not leave thy song" etc.) rather than incapacity?

One obvious answer is that timelessness is an incapacity inas-

much as it precludes consummation. Keats, it has been often said,


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wants both timelessness and time, both fulfillment a nd exempt ion

from decay. All hu ma n passion far above could also be read

ironically, as a backhanded compliment: love as depicted o n the

ur n is deathless, but only because it is lifeless. The problem with

this answer is that it applies to never canst thou kiss, which signi-

fies an incapacity to consummate one 's love, bu t no t to she can-

not fade, where the incapacity would strangely mean an incapac-

ity to grow old. Therefore, I think the incapacity so often repeated

here has to d o with a rt's incapacity to articulate change . Both the

lack of consummation and the exemption from aging derive from

the innate limitation of art. Its claim to eternity only hides the ab-

sence that lies behind it. Its song, youth, a nd leaves cannot choose

but to be eternal.

The frustration that counterbalances art's triumph is lent great

emotional force in the four th stanza. A third limitation is now as-

cribed to art: its confinement to a single place. If the green altar

towards which the procession is heading may or may not be de-

picted on the urn, the town it has left is certainly not. Miould it

otherwise be described as being by river or sea shore , or moun-

tain-built ? Having been left behind , it is excluded from the scene.

Unlike silence and immobility, this limitation cannot be reversed

into achievement. The eternal silence echoing in those empty

streets is the negative side of art's eternity and silence, an exclu-

sion of change a nd voice which is an exclusion of life.

In the last stanza we a re back, it seems, to triumph. Art will al-

ways remain a friend to man, teaching him beauty. The negative

silence of the four th stanza renews in silent form its original ex-

tra-verbal power (o r rather extra-rational, for it teases us out of

th ou gh t ). But the stanza is notoriously ambiguous. Life-men

and maidens, pastoral-becomes cold marble in art. Th e urn's fi-

nal message is authoritative, almost patronizing, but is its beauty

the whole truth ? It has left ou t motion and decay: can t rut h leave

them o ut an d be trut h? Th e quotation marks at the e nd, whether

applying to the entire last two lines or only to a part, confine the

beauty-truth equation to art's own not necessarily absolute per-

spective. The u rn may believe the overlapping of t ruth an d beauty

to be all we need to know on ear th, but is it? The poem has pre-

pared us to doub t it.


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C O M P A R I T I V E LITER TURE

Keats s od e seems to have very little to d o with the Calvino text

from which I started. It neithe r begins with what the ur n excludes

nor end s with its destruction. The

con tent of the ur n s decora-

tions, on the contrary, fills the poem and is enthusiastically as-

serted. On anoth er level, however, the poem does something not

dissimilar to Calvino s essay. Heaping stillness on quie tness on si-

lence in its first two lines, it makes the absence of voice its insistent

starting point. As it proceeds, another absence, motionlessness,

becomes the only perspective from which o the r figures on the u rn

are perceived. Th e youth singing beneath the trees is evoked, not

as a youth singing, but as a youth who ca nn ot leave his song. And

the same holds for the lover who can never kiss, etc. And then

comes the little town which is not there, imagined from the per-

spective of being ever empty, ever a non-town.

Like Calvino, Keats lets absence take over. What finally prevails

is the melody that is no t heard, change tha t is left ou t, the town

that is left behind. Keats too, presumably singing a hymn to art,

reads his urn f rom the perspective of its omissions. But the u rn is

also there. If Keats sleeps and dreams , he does so in th e presence

of the urn, whether real or fictitious. Ekphrastic poetry wants to

supersede art, but first needs the art it wants to supersede. There is

a double movement of attraction and supersession, dependence

and negation. I have dealt with the second half of the story only.

The status of the ekphrastic poem as a poem not quite self-suffi-

cient, but calling for its completion by an externa l visual text, is

the oth er half. But this would call for an oth er pa per.

Hebrew University Jerusalem

Works

ited

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SILENCE

ART POETRY

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Documents

Poetic Speech