PAINTING

The relationship between poetry and painting has always been close in the history of civilization. Cave people who executed paintings of hunting probably accompanied their work with a poetic description of the event that prompted their artwork. When they showed their pictures to friends and family, their words took on the elegance of their pictures and the excitement of their hunts.

Sometimes poets are inspired by a particular painting to write a poem. Da Vinci's painting "Leda" may very well have been the inspiration for Yeats' poem "Leda and the Swan."

Today poets still rely on paintings from time to time to inspire their verses. For example, W. H. Auden wrote the following poem based on a painting by Breughel:

Musee des Beaux Arts

About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.

In Breughel's Icarus, for instance:

How everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the plowman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.