Ekphrasis Quotes Flashcards
(23 cards)
Jorie Graham: structure?
Told is sestets with the even line indented - it has visual appeal
Jorie Graham - focus on the body?
‘See how they hurry / enter / their bodies’
As in the fresco the figures appear in various stages of embodiment - some are fully fleshed, others as skeletons
Jorie Graham - they desire to be able to speak?
‘they hurry to congregate / they hurry / into speech’
desire for humanity and community
Jorie Graham - the work of the artist?
‘each tendon / they press’
but she wonders ‘is it better, back?’
According to Helen Vendler (leading poetry critic) ‘for Graham, that one is never at rest in
the body’
Jorie Graham - movement to a different place?
‘In his studio / Luca Signorelli’ … ‘broke into the body’
Jorie Graham - the actions of Signorelli?
‘cut into bone and sinew’
‘with beauty and care’
Jorie Graham - Signorelli’s mind?
‘climb into / the open flesh and / mend itself.’
The Starry Night - epigraph?
‘That does not keep me from having a terrible need of - shall I say the word - religion. Then I go out at night and paint the stars.’
Vincent Van Gogh in a letter to his brother
Repeated at the end of 2 / 3 stanzas?
‘Oh starry starry night! This is how / I want to die.’
The Starry Night - Description of the black tree?
‘one black-haired tree slips up like a drowned woman’
The Starry Night - night sky reflects the turbulent mind?
‘The town is silent. The night boils with eleven stars.’
Winter Landscape - the composition?
Stanzas one and two are a metred transcription of the foreground and middle ground of the landscape.
‘The three men coming down the winter hill’ is the first line - the suspension of the main verb does not appear until line 11 ‘Are not aware’
Winter landscape - colours?
Stressed position of ‘brown’ picks out the essential colour in the foreground
Winter landscape - the movement of the men?
‘Returning cold and silent to their town’
‘Returning to the drifted snow’
Winter landscape - repetition?
‘a pack of hounds’
repeated in the first and last stanza, suggesting that this is one moment in time
Winter landscape - who the men are walking towards?
‘The long companions they can never reach’
Winter landscape - time’s suspension?
‘What place, what time, what morning occasion’
Auden - those with knowledge?
‘About suffering they were never wrong / The Old Masters’
They are presented as figures of omniscience who are never wrong about the nature of suffering, reaffirming the timeless greatness of art as it is set in a museum
Auden - people are over death?
‘even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course’
Auden - the shift to a specific example?
Beginning of second stanza - ‘In Brueghel’s Icarus, for instance’
Auden - the reaction of the ploughman?
‘for him it was not an important failure’
Auden - when Icarus fell from the sky?
‘everything turns away / quite leisurely from disaster’
Auden - what the ship saw?
‘Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky’
‘sailed calmly on’
