Ekphrastic Poetry examples with poems and paintings. Ekphrastic is a term that refers to the translation of one art form into another, such as a poem inspired by a work of art, or a tv show based on a novel. This presentation is of interest to teachers of English, creative writing, theater, art, and art history.

1. Ekphrastic Poetry
• Dr. Lisa Weckerle
• Communication Studies at Kutztown University
• weckerle@kutztown.edu

3. Paolo Uccello, St. George and the Dragon
Oil on canvas. National Gallery, London.
Not my Best Side U. A. Fanthorpe
Not my best side, I'm afraid.
The artist didn't give me a chance to
Pose properly, and as you can see,
Poor chap, he had this obsession with
Triangles, so he left off two of my
Feet. I didn't comment at the time
(What, after all, are two feet
To a monster?) but afterwards
I was sorry for the bad publicity.
Why, I said to myself, should my conqueror
Be so ostentatiously beardless, and ride
A horse with a deformed neck and square hoofs?
Why should my victim be so
Unattractive as to be inedible,
And why should she have me literally
On a string? I don't mind dying
Ritually, since I always rise again,
But I should have liked a little more blood
To show they were taking me seriously.

4. Early Sunday Morning
Somewhere in the next block
someone may be practicing the flute
but not here
where the entrances
to four stores are dark
the awnings rolled in
nothing open for business
Across the second story
ten faceless windows
In the foreground
a barber pole, a fire hydrant
as if there could ever again
be hair to cut
fire to burn
And far off, still low
in the imagined East
the sun that is again
right on time
adding to the Chinese red
of the building
despite which color
I do not believe
the day
is going to be hot
It was I think
on just such a day
it is on just such a morning
that every Edward Hopper
finishes, puts down his brush
as if to say
As important
as what is
happening
is what is not.

6. Approaches to Writing Poetry about Visual Art*
• Describe how the artwork is organized or presented.
• Relate the work of art to something else it makes you think of.
• Write about the experience of looking at the art.
• Speculate about how or why the artist created this work.
• Imagine a story behind what you see presented in the work of art.
• Speak to the artist or the subject(s) of the painting, using your own
voice.
*adapted from Honor Moorman’s article “Backing Into Ekphrasis:
Reading and Writing Poetry about Visual Art.”
Old Woman Frying Eggs by Diego Velázquez

8. Grant Wood, American Gothic (1930)
Oil on composition board, 30 inches x 25 inches. Art Institute
of Chicago.
American Gothic
These two
by now
the sun this high
ought to be
in mortal time
about their businesses
Instead they linger here
within the patient fabric
of the lives they wove
he asking the artist silently
how much longer
and worrying about the crops
she no less concerned about the
crops
but more to the point just now
whether she remembered
to turn off the stove.
.

9. Rembrandt’s Late Self Portraits
You are confronted with yourself. Each year
The pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care
Runs with self-knowledge. Here
Is a humility at one with craft.
There is no arrogance. Pride is apart
From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift
The way you want. Your face is bruised and
hurt
But there is still love left.
--Elizabeth Jennings
Self-Portrait by Rembrandt van Rijn (1659)

10. The Starry Night
That does not keep me from having a terrible
need of — shall I say the word — religion. Then
I go out at night to paint the stars.
— Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky.
The town is silent. The night boils with eleven
stars.
Oh starry night! This is how
I want to die.
It moves. They are all alive.
Even the moon bulges in its orange irons
to push children, like a god, from its eye.
The old unseen serpent swallows up the stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how
I want to die:
into that rushing beast of the night,
sucked up by that great dragon, to split
from my life with no flag,
no belly,
no cry.
-- Anne Sexton Vincent Van Gogh, The Starry Night

11. Approaches to Writing Poetry about Visual Art
(Additional prompts from Dr. Weckerle)
• Adopt the point of view of a person, animal, or object in the
artwork
• Imagine what happens if you put the artwork into action. What
would it look like in a minute? A year? A century?
• Create a dialogue between the artist and the subject of the
artwork, or a dialogue between two different artworks
• Imagine what the artwork would sound like, smell like, taste like,
feel like.
• Think about what is absent or out of place in the artwork

13. The Man with the Hoe
Bowed by the weight of centuries he leans
Upon his hoe and gazes on the ground,
The emptiness of ages in his face,
And on his back the burden of the world.
Who made him dead to rapture and despair,
A thing that grieves not and that never hopes.
Stolid and stunned, a brother to the ox?
Edwin Markham
Jean-Francois Millet, Man with a Hoe (1862)

14. Katsushika Hokusai, The Great Wave at Kamagawa (1823-29)
Woodprint. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. The
Howard Mansfield Collection.
The Great Wave: Hokusai
It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color
of their
Boats. It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earthcolored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a
mountain leans
Against the sky.
Donald Finkel

15. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Musee des Beaux Arts
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman 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.
--W. H. Auden

16. Pieter Brueghel the Elder, Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
--William Carlos Williams

17. The Tall Figures of Giacometti
We move by means of our mud bumps.
We bubble as do the dead but more slowly.
The products of excruciating purges
we are squeezed out thin hard and dry.
If we exude a stench it is petrified sainthood.
Our feet are large crude fused together
solid like anvils. Ugly as truth is ugly
we are meant to stand upright a long time
and shudder without motion
under the scintillating pins of light
that dart between our bodies
of pimpled mud and your eyes.
--May Swenson

19. Brueghel's Winter
Jagg'd mountain peaks and skies ice-green
Wall in the wild, cold scene below.
Churches, farms, bare copse, the sea
In freezing quiet of winter show;
Where ink-black shapes on fields in flood
Curling, skating, and sliding go.
To left, a gabled tavern; a blaze;
Peasants; a watching child; and lo,
Muffled, mute--beneath naked trees
In sharp perspective set a-row--
Trudge huntsmen, sinister spears aslant,
Dogs snuffling behind them in the snow;
And arrowlike, lean, athwart the air
Swoops into space a crow.
--Walter de la Mare
Pieter Brueghel, Hunters in the Snow (1565)