101 ways of teaching a poemPoems about paintings and poems speaking to poems

Alan PulvernessNorwich Institute for Language Education

(NILE)

LMCS SIG PCE, IATEFL ManchesterApril 2015

The sky is so perfect it looks like a painting Kate Tempest Brand New Ancients

About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position:

About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;

Musée des Beaux ArtsW H Auden

About suffering they were never wrong,The Old Masters: how well they understoodIts human position: how it takes placeWhile someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waitingFor the miraculous birth, there always must beChildren who did not specially want it to happen, skatingOn a pond at the edge of the wood:They never forgotThat even the dreadful martyrdom must run its courseAnyhow in a corner, some untidy spotWhere the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horseScratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns awayQuite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mayHave heard the splash, the forsaken cry,But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shoneAs it had to on the white legs disappearing into the greenWater, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seenSomething amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.

According to Brueghelwhen Icarus fellit was spring

a farmer was ploughinghis fieldthe whole pageantry

of the year wasawake tinglingwith itself

sweating in the sunthat meltedthe wings' wax

unsignificantlyoff the coastthere was

a splash quite unnoticedthis wasIcarus drowning

Landscape with the Fall of IcarusWilliam Carlos Williams

No one even noticed as he splashed and hit the sea bed

Kate Tempest Icarus

As far as mental anguish goes, the old painters were no fools.

Musée des Beaux Arts RevisitedBilly Collins

As far as mental anguish goes, the old painters were no fools. They understood how the mind, the freakiest dungeon in the castle, can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest or an end table complete with genitals. And they knew that the truly monstrous lies not so much in the wildly shocking, a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say, but in the small prosaic touch added to a tableau of the hellish, the detail at the heart of the horrid. In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony, for instance, how it is not so much the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries, not the hooded corpse in a basket, but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare branch;

how, what must have driven St. Anthony to the mossy brink of despair was not the big, angry-looking fish in the central panel, the one with the two mouse-like creatures conferring on its tail, but rather what the fish is wearing: a kind of pale orange officer's cape and, over that, a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires, a sensible buckled chin strap, and, yes, the ultimate test of faith -- the tiny sword that hangs from the thing, that nightmare carp, secure in its brown leather scabbard.

About suffering they told bloody lies,The Old Masters

sweet poses, prettifying sanctity, turn crimes to candy in the name of art.

Caravaggio gets it right, of course;not for him the blithe denial of pain

and young Isaac with his head twisted, held downand even at the knife’s point screaming still.

2 Galleria degli Uffizi

Caravaggio gets it right, of course;not for him the blithe denial of pain;when a boy’s told he’s going to be slainbecause some god wills it he’s going to scream himself hoarse;he’ll fight and fight against the manic forceof this crazed old man; arms and shoulders strainto shake his grip and be free, yet in vaintill the ram appears from a thicket of gorse. There’s an angel staying the killer’s hand and a jolly fine church up on a hillbut what you remember is the weird frownof the interrupted Abraham, and young Isaac with his head twisted, held downand even at the knife’s point screaming still.

Bibliography

• Peter & Michael Benton Double Vision Hodder 1990

• Paul Durcan Crazy about Women National Gallery of Ireland 1991

• Paul Durcan Give me your hand Macmillan 1994• Peter Porter Mars André Deutsch 1988

• Carol Ann Duffy Answering Back: Living poets reply to the poetry of the past Picador 2008