Hefferman, Ekphrasis and Representation

7/27/2019 Hefferman, Ekphrasis and Representation

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Ekphrasis and RepresentationAuthor(s): James A. W. HeffernanReviewed work(s):Source: New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre (Spring, 1991),pp. 297-316Published by: The Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469040 .

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Ekphrasis and Representation*James A. W. Heffernan

N THE AVIARY of contemporary critical discourse, ekphrasis s anold and yet surprisingly unfamiliar bird. The literary represen-tation of visual art is at least as old as Homer, who in theeighteenth book of the Iliad describes at length the scenes depictedon the shield of Achilles. According to the OxfordClassicalDictionary,the use of the word ekphrasis o denote this kind of description datesfrom about the third century A.D., and the OED tells us that by1715 the word had entered the English language.' Now it hasentered the world of academic conferences. In November 1986, itwas the topic of the Tenth International Colloquium on Poetics atColumbia University, and just a few months later, it was the topicof a session at the first International Conference on Word andImage in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, this ancient term is still strug-gling for modern recognition. The Princteon Encyclopediaof Poetryand Poetics, for instance, offers articles on the eclogue and the elegy,but nothing on ekphrasis even in the enlarged edition of 1974. Andwhile ekphrasishas finally found its way into the subject headingscovered by the MLA International Bibliography,only six items haveappeared under this heading since 1983.This does not mean, of course, that scarcely anyone is writingabout the literary representation of visual art; it simply means thatscarcely anyone is using the word ekphrasisto do so-even in thediscussion of such paradigmatically ekphrastic poems as Keats's "Odeon a Grecian Urn." Thirty years ago, shortly after Earl Wassermanpublished The Finer Tone, Leo Spitzer took him to task for writingfifty pages on the ode without ever identifying it as an example ofekphrasis, and a dozen years later Murray Krieger saluted Spitzerfor having "profitably taught us" to see the ode in this way.2 ButSpitzer's lesson has not been very well learned. Helen Vendler's

*My thanks to Stuart Curran and George T. Wright, who made helpful suggestionson an earlier version of this essay, and also to Michael Riffaterre, who invited meto deliver the original version of it at the Columbia colloquium mentioned in theopening paragraph.New LiteraryHistory, 1991, 22: 297-316


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298 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

thirty-six-page commentary on Keats's poem in her book on hisodes makes no mention of ekphrasis, and the same is true of anotherwise thoroughgoing essay on Shelley's "Ozymandias" that ap-peared a few years ago in Studies in Romanticism.3Most surprisingof all, perhaps, the word ekphrasiscan scarcely be found in a specialissue of Word and Image that was wholly devoted to the topic ofpoems on pictures.4All right, it may be asked, so what? Why should the fate of aword disturb us? If critics like Helen Vendler can write splendidlyilluminating pages on the poetic treatment of visual art withoutusing the word ekphrasis, why do we need it at all? Why not leaveit with the ancient Greek rhetoricians who first gave it to us? Myanswer to these questions is that ekphrasisdesignates a literary mode,and it is difficult if not impossible to talk about a literary modeunless we can agree on what to name it.5 I use ekphrasisas the nameof a mode that I want to define and survey before considering tworemarkable specimens of it in detail. As a prelude to specific ex-plications, I want to formulate a definition of ekphrasis itself, or-more presumptuously--to sketch out a comprehensive theory of it.In the past twenty years, the single most influential attempt toarticulate a theory of ekphrasis is Murray Krieger's essay of 1967,"Ekphrasisand the Still Movement of Poetry; or, LaokodnRevisited."6Krieger's essay might also have been called Joseph Frank revisitedor W. J. T. Mitchell anticipated, for in the face of Lessing what itseeks to demonstrate is the "generic spatiality of literary form."' Tothis end, Krieger elevates ekphrasis from a particular kind of lit-erature to a literary principle. The plastic, spatial object of poeticimitation, he says, symbolizes "the frozen, stilled world of plasticrelationships which must be superimposed upon literature's turningworld to 'still' it" (5). Almost inevitably, Keats's "Ode on a GrecianUrn" serves as Krieger's prime example, but he also finds ekphrasisin rather different poems, such as in Marvell's "Coy Mistress," wherethe ball, he says, is a "physical, spatial . . . emblem of [the speaker's]mastery over time" (20). In Krieger's essay, then, ekphrasis becomes"a general principle of poetics, asserted by every poem in theassertion of its integrity" (22).Krieger's theory of ekphrasis seems to give this moribund terma new lease on life, but actually Krieger stretches ekphrasis to thebreaking point: to the point where it no longer serves to containany particular kind of literature and merely becomes a new namefor formalism.8 So it has appeared, in any case, to critics of Hei-deggerian persuasion, to those who believe that only a hermeneuticsof contingent historicity and existential temporality can explainliterature to us. In the eyes of such critics, as Michael Davidson has


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 299recently observed, Krieger's theory of ekphrasis would hermeticallyseal literature within the well-wrought urn of pure, self-enclosedspatiality, where the ashes of new criticism now repose (ashes stillglowing, I should probably add).' So Krieger's ekphrastic principlehas been shaken. According to Davidson, it has been underminedeven by certain kinds of poems about paintings-specifically by whatDavidson calls "the contemporary painterly poem." This Davidsoncontrasts with what he calls the "classical painter poem," a poem"about" a painting or work of sculpture which imitates the self-sufficiency of the object. "A poem 'about' a painting," Davidsonwrites, "is not the same as what I am calling a 'painterly poem,'which activates strategies of composition equivalent to but not de-pendent on the painting. Instead of pausing at a reflective distancefrom the work of art, the poet reads the painting as a text, ratherthan as a static object, or else reads the larger painterly aestheticgenerated by the painting" (72).Davidson's formulation helps him to explain such postmodernpoems as John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror," whichis based on Parmigianino's painting of the same name but whichquestions the ideas of stability, self-sufficiency, and authentic self-representation that Parmagianino's work ostensibly tries to convey.Yet Davidson hardly formulates a new theory of ekphrasis. Havingthrown out Krieger's ekphrastic principle and replaced it with adiachronic polarity between "classical"and "contemporary," he leavesus with no coherent sense of the synchronic mode that might containthem both, as well as with an oversimplified view of classical ekphrasis,which often treats the work of art as considerably morethan a staticobject. In Homer's account of the scenes depicted on the shield ofAchilles, for instance, many of the scenes turn into narratives.

The weaknesses of these two theories of ekphrasis--the one toobroad, the other too polarized-help us to see what we need. Ifekphrasis is to be defined as a mode, the definition must be sharpenough to identify a certain kind of literature and yet also elasticenough to reach from classicism to postmodernism, from Homerto Ashbery. What I propose is a definition simple in form butcomplex in its implications: ekphrasis is the verbal representationofgraphic representation.This definition excludes a good deal of what some critics wouldhave ekphrasis nclude-namely literature about texts.'o It also allowsus to distinguish ekphrasis from two other ways of mingling literatureand the visual arts--pictorialism and iconicity. What distinguishesthose two things from ekphrasis is that each one aims primarily torepresent natural objects and artifacts rather than works of rep-resentational art. Of course pictorialism and iconicity may each


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300 NEW LITERARY HISTORYremind us of graphic representation. Pictorialism generates in lan-guage effects similar to those created by pictures, so that in Spenser'sFaerie Queene, for instance, John M. Bender has found instances offocusing, framing, and scanning." But in such cases Spenser isrepresenting the world with the aid of pictorial techniques; he is notrepresenting pictures themselves. The distinction holds even whena pictorial poem can be linked to the style of a particular painter.We know, for example, that the austere clarity of William CarlosWilliams's "The Red Wheelbarrow" owes something to the photo-graphs of Alfred Stieglitz and to the precisionist style of CharlesSheeler, the American photographer-painter whom Williams metshortly before he wrote the poem.12 But Williams's poem makes noreference to Sheeler or Stieglitz and does not represent any one oftheir pictures; instead, it uses the verbal equivalent of pictorialprecision in order to represent a set of objects.Iconicity is more complicated than pictorialism because it embracessounds and sets of relations as well as visual properties.'3 But visualiconicity, which is what concerns me here, is a visible resemblancebetween the arrangement of words or letters on a page and whatthey signify, as in Herbert's "Easter Wings." Like pictorialism, visualiconicity usually entails an implicit reference to graphic represen-tation. The wavy shape of an iconically printed line about a stream,for instance, will look much more like Hogarth's line of beauty thanlike any wave one might actually see from a shore.14 But once again,iconic literature does not aim to representpictures; it apes the shapesof pictures in order to represent natural objects.These three terms-ekphrasis, pictorialism, and iconicity--are notmutually exclusive. An ekphrastic poem can use pictorial techniquesto represent a picture and can be printed in a shape which resemblesthe painting that it verbally represents.'15 But ekphrasis differs fromboth iconicity and pictorialism because it explicitly represents rep-resentation itself. What ekphrasis represents in words, therefore,must itself be representational.The Brooklyn Bridge may be consid-ered a work of art and construed as a symbol of many things, butsince it was not created to represent anything, a poem such as HartCrane's The Bridge is no more ekphrastic than Williams's "The RedWheelbarrow."'6When we understand that ekphrasis uses one medium of rep-resentation to represent another, we can see at once what makesekphrasis a distinguishable mode and what binds together all ek-phrastic literature from Homer to John Ashbery. Comparing suchdisparate phenomena as classic and postmodern ekphrasis, recentcritics tend to see only differences between the two. While classicekphrasis, they say, salutes the skill of the artist and the miraculous


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 301verisimilitude of the forms he creates, postmodern ekphrasis un-dermines the concept of verisimilitude itself. Thus Ashbery's "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror" has been called by Richard Stamelman"a radical criticism of the illusions and deceptions inherent in formsof traditional representation that insist on the ideal, essential, andtotalized nature of the copied images they portray."'7 Nothing sonakedly deconstructive can be found in Homer's account of Achilles'shield, but if Ashbery's poem is a "meditation on difference" ratherthan on likeness, as Stamelman says (608), Homer's account ofAchilles' shield is a meditation on both, a verbal tribute to graphicverisimilitude and a sustained commentary on the difference betweenrepresentation and reality. Describing the ploughmen depicted onAchilles' shield, Homer writes, "The earth darkened behind themand looked like earth that has been ploughed / though it was gold."'8Homer thus reminds us that he is representing representation, andby explicitly noting the difference between representation and reality,he implicitly draws our attention to the friction between the fixedforms of graphic representation and the narrative thrust of hiswords. Shortly after describing the earth made of gold, Homer tellsus that the cattle depicted elsewhere on the shield were "wroughtof gold and of tin, and thronged in speed and with lowing / out ofthe dung of the farmyard to a pasturing place by a sounding / river,and beside the moving field of a reed bed" (18.574-76).Homer does two things in this passage: first, he reminds us againof the difference between what is represented (the cattle) and thespecific medium of representation (gold and tin); second and moreimportantly, he animates the fixed figures of graphic art, turningthe picture of a single moment into a narrative of successive actions:the cattle move out of the farmyard and make their way to a pasture.From Homer's time to our own, ekphrastic literature reveals againand again this narrative response to pictorial stasis, this storytellingimpulse that language by its very nature seems to release andstimulate. That is why I must disagree with Krieger when he treatsekphrasis as a way of freezing time in space, and also with WendySteiner when she defines ekphrasis as the verbal equivalent of the"pregnant moment" in art-the literary mode "in which a poemaspires to the atemporal 'eternity' of the stopped-action painting."'9The "pregnant moment" of an action is the arrested point whichmost clearly implies what came before the moment and what is tofollow it. But as the example from Homer shows, ekphrastic literaturetypically delivers from the pregnant moment of graphic art its em-bryonically narrative impulse, and thus makes explicit the story thatgraphic art tells only by implication.20In fact, since the picture of a moment in a story usually presupposes


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302 NEW LITERARY HISTORYthe viewer's knowledge of the story as a whole, ekphrasis commonlytells this story for the benefit of those who don't know it, movingwell beyond what the picture by itself implies. In his third-centuryA.D. Imagines, for instance, Philostratus the Elder tells of a singlepainting that shows how Hermes was born on the crest of Olympus,how the Horae cared for him there, how they wrapped him inswaddling clothes and sprinkled flowers on him, and how-whenthey turned to help his mother-he slipped out of his swaddlingclothes and walked down the mountain.2 This tendency to translategraphic art into narrative persists in the ekphrastic literature ofevery period. In Dante's Purgatorio, we are told that the widowdepicted with the Emperor Trajan on the sculptured wall of theFirst Terrace not only converses with him but gradually persuadeshim to help her.22 In Childe Harold'sPilgrimage, Byron explains-orimagines on paper-the whole process by which the Dying Gaul ofRome's Capitoline Museum actually dies.23 In "Self-Portrait in aConvex Mirror," John Ashbery retells Vasari's story of how Par-magianino produced his picture. And in a recently published col-lection of contemporary poems on pictures, almost every one ofthe poets--as Robert Druce observes--tries to explain the pictureby constructing a narrative.24These examples do not prove that ekphrasis inevitably entailsnarrative or that language itself does either. A poem such as WilliamCarlos Williams's "Hunters in the Snow"-an ekphrastic responseto Breughel's Return of the Hunters concentrates entirely on whatthe picture actually contains and what its spatial relations are. Butthe persistence of storytelling in ekphrastic literature shows at thevery least that ekphrasis cannot be simply equated with spatialization.On the contrary, the history of ekphrasis suggests that languagereleases a narrative impulse which graphic art restricts, and that toresist such an impulse takes a special effort of poetic will.I will return to this point in a moment when I come to Keats's"Ode on a Grecian Urn." Before doing so, however, I want toconsider one other strand in the ekphrastic tradition: prosopopoeia,or the rhetorical technique of envoicing a silent object. Etymolog-ically, ekphrasismeans simply "speaking out" or "telling in full." Torecall this root meaning is to see more clearly what has been notedby scholars such as Leo Spitzer and Jean Hagstrum: the genealogicallink between ekphrasis and sepulchral epigrams. These inscriptionson ancient statues, tombs, and funerary columns allowed the mutestill object to identify itself in statements like, "I am the tomb offamous Glauca" (third century B.C.) and "I am the column ofXenvares, son of Meixis, upon his grave" (600 B.C.).25 Philostratus


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 303clearly reflects the influence of such epigrams when he gives a voiceto Apollo in the painting of Hermes: "He looks as though he wereabout to say to Maia, 'Your son whom you bore yesterday wrongsme; for the cattle in which I delight he has thrust into the earth,nor do I know where in the earth. Verily he shall be thrust downdeeper than the cattle' " (103).Sepulchral inscriptions not only initiate a line of developmentreaching from passages like this one to the speech of Keats's silenturn; they also look forward to something that a comprehensivetheory of ekphrasis should at least touch upon: picture titles. I havetried to distinguish ekphrasis from pictorialism and iconicity, but Isee no reason to close its borders against any kind of writing thatis explicitly concerned with a work of art, and unless representationrequires the absence of the thing represented, a picture title is averbal representation of the picture. It answers precisely the kindsof questions answered by sepulchral inscriptions--Who is it? Whatis it?-and it begins the work of interpreting the picture for us.26At the same time, it may also begin the work of converting thepicture into a narrative. In 1818, Henry Fuseli exhibited at theRoyal Academy a picture with the following title: Dante, in his descentto hell, discovers amidst the flights of hapless lovers whirled about in ahurricane, the forms of Paolo and Francesca of Rimini; obtains Virgil'spermissionto address them, and being informed of the dreadful blow thatsent them to that place of tormentat once, overcomeby pity and terror,drops like a lifeless corpse upon the rocks.27This of course is an extreme example of title as narrative: thekind of title that painters of historical or literary subjects felt boundto furnish when they could no longer presume their audience knewthe story they tried to depict. Yet much shorter titles can also servea narrative function. Take for instance the title that J. M. W. Turnerused for a seascape showing a small boat approaching a bigger one:'Nowfor the Painter' (Rope). Passengers Going on Board. ExemplifyingTurner's addiction to puns, the word Painter in this title refers atonce to the artist and--in a nautical sense--to the rope that will beused to tie the boats together while the passengers are boarding.Turner's title is therefore doubly narrational, connecting the momentdepicted with the moment to come for the figures in the pictureand for the artist himself. But to think about the moment to comefor the artist is to discover an irresolvable conflict between graphicstasis and narrative movement. On one hand, the phrase Now forthePainteranticipates the moment after the one depicted, the momentwhen the rope will be attached; on the other hand, the phrase alsodesignates the impossible moment when the painter will depict the


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304 NEW LITERARY HISTORYanticipatory action that is "now" before us, but that in real ornarratable time could only be a "then" by the time he set to work.So the title mischievously asks us to imagine figures simultaneouslymoving and fixed, patiently posing for the painter who will "now"depict them.All by themselves, then, picture titles can express precisely whatekphrasis so often delivers: a radical critique of representation. Thebest known example from our own century is of course the titlethat Rend Magritte conceived for his painting of what looks verymuch like a pipe: Ceci n'estpas un pipe. The title goads us to inferthat this is not a pipe because it is the picture of a pipe, but sincethe pipes we see in the real world do not usually present themselvesin perfect profile or hang suspended in midair with no visible meansof support, we must conclude that this is not a picture of an actualpipe but rather-as Michel Butor observes-a picture of depiction,a graphic representation of the way pipes are conventionally rep-resented in advertisements and textbooks: perfectly profiled, sus-pended in space, and labeled "pipe."28Thus Magritte's title or legend,which is literally written along the bottom of the painting itself,parodies the textbook labeling of pictures, undermines the as-sumptions on which such labeling is based, and implicitly showshow graphic and verbal representation together generate misrep-resentation. But Magritte's title does more than parody textbooklabels; it also summons up for radical re-viewing the whole traditionof inscription and prosopopoeial envoicing that stands behind thehistory of ekphrasis. To read the inscribed picture in light of thistradition is to hear the famous nonpipe impudently and prosopo-poeially piping: "Je ne suis pas une pipe."If a truly comprehensive theory of ekphrasis must make someroom for picture titles, as I have been arguing, it must also openitself up to the vast body of writing about pictures which is commonlyknown as art criticism. Had I world enough and space, I think Icould show that art criticism deserves a place in the genre of ekphrasisas a whole.29 But for now I chiefly wish to show how graphic artis represented in ekphrastic poetry and how a knowledge of ek-phrastic traditions can help us understand this kind of representationin specific poems. Traditionally, I have argued, ekphrasis is nar-rational and prosopopoeial; it releases the narrative impulse thatgraphic art typically checks, and it enables the silent figures ofgraphic art to speak. I want to argue now that in "Ode on a GrecianUrn" and "Ozymandias," Keats and Shelley use these ekphrastictraditions to reflect on representation: not just on a particular workof graphic representation, but on the nature of representation itself.


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 305Consider first what Keats does with the ekphrastic tradition ofprosopopoeia that flows from the sepulchral epigrams I mentionedearlier. He opens the first stanza of his famous ode by apostrophizingthe Grecian urn as a "still unravish'd bride of quietness."o30 Thenhe himself threatens to ravish the bride by making her speak. "Whatleaf-fring'd legend," he asks, "haunts about they shape [?]" (1. 5).The quest for legend not only shows the narrative impulse assertingitself from the very beginning of this ekphrastic poem; it also signifiesthe urge to envoice the urn, for the word legend originally meant"to be read," and when a sepulchral inscription was read aloud bya traveler, the inscribed object spoke. But Keats's urn bears noinscription and refuses to answer the kinds of questions normallyanticipated and answered by inscribed monuments. "What men orgods are these?" the speaker asks. Instead of saying something like,"I am the tomb of famous Glauca" or "My name is Ozymandias,"the urn speaks only silence, voicing neither story nor circumstantialfacts, saying nothing at all until it produces a final conundrum thattranscends narrative and circumstance alike: "Beauty is truth, truthbeauty" (1. 49).To think of the poem in terms of timeless transcendence, however,is to miss the insistent pressure of narrative within it, and thestrength of poetic will required to resist that pressure. We can judgethe strength of Keats's resistance by contrasting the ode with asonnet that he wrote two years earlier, "On a Leander [Gem] whichMiss Reynolds, My Kind Friend Gave Me." In this little poem aboutan engraved gem representing Leander's ill-fated swim across theHellespont, Keats follows the ekphrastic tradition of generating anarrative from the still moment of graphic art. Just as Byron turnsthe sculpture of the dying Gaul into the complete story of his death,Keats turns the engraved figure of Leander into the complete storyof his drowning, and the very last line of the poem says of Leander:"He's gone-up bubbles all his amorous breath."3' In the ode,however, Keats checks the narrative impulse by restricting it to theworld outside the urn. He can tell the story of actual passion becauseit changes, moving from desire to consummation and satiety--"aheart high sorrowful and cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parch-ing tongue" (11. 29-30). But since the lovers depicted on the urnare figures "above" all human passion, they are also above change,so that their lives-or rather their mode of existence--cannot benarrated.Yet part of what teases us out of thought in this poem is preciselyits narrativity. Even though Keats suppresses the narrative impulsethat ekphrasis typically releases, he does not simply exchange the


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306 NEW LITERARY HISTORYlanguage of temporality for the language of spatiality, as WilliamCarlos Williams does in "Hunters in the Snow." He does not simplyrepresent the lovers as figures deployed in space. Instead he callsthem into life as his auditors, and to these imagined auditors hespeaks a language of temporality that is paradoxically and repeatedlyaffirmed by denial. If the pregnant moment of graphic represen-tation enables us to see readily what precedes and what will followit, we can only conclude that Keats perversely chose to misread thefigures on the urn. For the moment we identify them with the livingfigures they represent, we must also imagine them completingtheaction signified by the pregnant moment of pursuit, and thus pro-viding a narratable answer to the question which any picture of anarrested act provokes: "What will happen next?" To this question,which is conspicuously missing from the series of questions askedin the first stanza, the only possible answer allowed by Keats'snegation of narrative would seem to be: "nothing." Yet that is notthe answer Keats gives. On the contrary, he uses the language ofnarration--or more precisely of prediction--to say what will happenin the absence of change. In other words, he tells a storyof change-lessness. In place of the actual moment-to-be so strongly impliedby the pregnant moment represented, he tells us what will happento figures simultaneously quickened by desire and arrested by art.What will and must happen-the ugly truth devouring the graphicbeauty-is that the lovers will become unbearably frustrated:

Bold lover, never, never canst thou kiss,Though winning near the goal-yet, do not grieve;She cannot fade, though thou has not thy bliss,For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair! (11.17-20)

These lines are profoundly self-contradictory. To imagine the figureson the urn as lovers caught in a state of permanently arrested desireis to expose them to the strain of time even as we profess to exemptthem from it. To tell the lover not to grieve is to endow him withthe capacity to do so, and thus to imply that he will do so forever,for by the very nature of graphic representation, the lover is power-less-both physically and psychologically--to do anything other thanwhat he is already doing. If by chance he is grieving in the eternalnow of the moment represented, he can never obey the speaker'scommand. He can never stop grieving.


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 307The prohibition of grief is just one illustration of the way Keats's

language excites the expectation of change even while ostensiblycelebrating the beauty and joy of changelessness. If the songs ofthe melodist are "for ever new" (1. 24), each song would have tobe different, or at least played differently, from the one before; ifthe lovers face the prospect of "more happy love! more happy,happy love!" (1. 25), they are simultaneously offered an increase intheir happiness and reminded that changelessness means no increaseat all-simply more of what they now possess, which is forever lessthan what they do not now and therefore never can possess: thehappiness "still to be enjoyed" (1. 26).I have ventured this far into Keats's ode only to suggest what wemay learn by reading it as a specimen of ekphrasis, which typicallyrepresents the arrested moment of graphic art not by re-creatingits fixity in words but rather by releasing its embryonically narrativeimpulse. Keats's poem simultaneously excites and frustrates thisimpulse, fully exploiting all the expectations that the depiction ofdesire provokes, yet building up against any advance to gratificationan impregnable wall of negatives: "Bold lover, never, never canstthou kiss, / Though winning near the goal." Keats's poem thus makesexplicit what all ekphrasis implicitly reveals: the inseparability ofrepresentation and misrepresentation. On the one hand, the ek-phrastic conversion of graphic art into narrative seems to restorethe totality that is just fractionally represented--hence misrepre-sented-by graphic art; on the other hand, the Heraclitean flow ofnarrative overrides--and hence misrepresents--the reality of whatcan be experienced in a single instant, or what might be experiencedforever if, as Kenneth Burke suggests, we could move beyond theprocess of becoming into the eternal present of pure being.32 ButKeats's own language defines the being of the figures on the urnas process. Though "far above" all breathing human passion, theyare also said to be "For ever panting," forever breathing in andout-the essential act of life as we know it. By thus exposing theconflict between graphic and verbal representation, Keats makes ussee that neither one of them can ever fully represent being-nomatter how near the goal they come.The conflict between graphic and verbal representation offers usa generally neglected way of interpreting the key terms in the urn'sstatement: beauty and truth. In treating Keats's ode as a poem ofsymbolic action, Kenneth Burke equates "beauty" with "act" and"truth" with "scene," the universe in which action occurs (460). Butsince the poem repeatedly threatens to undermine the fixed beauty


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308 NEW LITERARY HISTORYof graphic art with the language of narration, the urn's statementcan be read as a final commentary on the conflict between the two.Up to the very moment when the urn finally speaks, the poemseems to tell us that we cannot have both at once, that we mustchoose between the narratable truth of a passionately mutable lifeand the immutable beauty of graphic art. We must sacrifice one tothe other just as the lives of the lovers must be sacrificed to thebeauty of the poses they hold forever in marble, and just as thelife of the little town must be sacrificed to a ritual from which noneof its inhabitants will ever return. Recall the final line of the stanza:"O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede / Of marble men andmaidens overwrought" (11.41-42). The brilliant puns here work likethe ambiguous drawing of the duck-rabbit. Because each aspect ofthe drawing negates the other, we can see the drawing as either aduck or a rabbit but not both at the same time. Likewise, the words"brede" and "overwrought" can signify either a living breed of menand maidens overwrought with unbearably prolonged desire, or adecorative braid of unbreeding marble figures done in bas-relief onan urn that is thus embroidered or "overwrought" with them. Insteadof fusing truth and beauty, the puns ask us to choose between them:between the narratable truth of living desire, which may in timebecome overwrought, and the timeless beauty of graphic art, whichturns human figures into well-wrought formal patterns.33In equating truth and beauty, then, the urn affirms what thepoem has so far denied. By the very act of speaking, the urn crossesthe line between graphic and verbal representation, between thefixed, silent beauty of graphic stillness and the audible movementof speech. By the very act of speaking, the urn boldly declares thatgraphic art can speak, that graphic and verbal representation areone, that language achieves its greatest beauty and highest truthwhen it transcends narrative, when it represents not what has beenand what will be but what is. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty." In thesecond half of this chiastic utterance, the verb drops away, so thatlanguage assumes the juxtapositional effect of graphic art. Enteringand envoicing the mute still object, language abandons its narrativeimpulse and gives itself up to graphic stasis.Keats thus subsumes a radical critique of graphic representationwithin a work of iconophilic homage. Having repeatedly shown theconflict between the beauty of graphic stasis and the narratabletruth of action, he dissolves the conflict by taking graphic art asthe model for a language of transcendence that aspires to representbeing rather than becoming. Yet verbal representation does notthereby dissolve into graphic representation, for the work of graphic


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 309art on which Keats finally models his language is itself mediated bylanguage. The urn is as imaginary as the little town emptied by thereligious ritual depicted on it; we cannot know the urn exceptthrough Keats's words.34 Keats pays his tribute, therefore, to anobject created by language, or more precisely to the idea of graphicrepresentation, which language alone expresses here.For this reason, Keats's tribute to graphic representation cannotfinally be separated from his critique of it. His poem actualizes thepotential that ekphrasis has always possessed--the capacity to ques-tion and challenge the art it ostensibly salutes. We have overlookedthis potential because, I think, we have too often uncriticallyacceptedLessing's view of ekphrasis as the mere replication of graphic art,an act of homage demeaning to the freedom and intellectual dignityof literature.35 Keats's poem makes the act of homage a work ofcritique, a verbal demonstration of all that must be sacrificed tomake the idea of graphic representation at once beautiful and true.This critical strain underlying the ostensible iconophilia of Keats'sode subtly connects it with another conspicuous example of romanticekphrasis: Shelley's "Ozymandias." But Shelley's poem is explicitlyiconoclastic. While Keats demonstrates that ekphrasis can criticizegraphic art in the very act of paying homage to it, Shelley goes onestep further, undermining the assumption that graphic art itself canpay lasting and unequivocal homage to what it represents. Thepoem is short enough to be quoted in full:

I met a travellerfrom an antique land,Who said--"Two vast and trunkless legs of stoneStand in the desart .. . Near them, on the sand,Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that its sculptor well those passions readWhich yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,The hand that mockedthem, and the heart that fed;And on the pedestal, these words appear:My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings:Look on my Works,ye Mighty,and despair!Nothing beside remains. Round the decayOf that colossal Wreck,boundless and bareThe lone and level sands stretch far away."''36

Shelley's sonnet questions what Keats's ode takes wholly for granted:the imperishability of graphic art. While Keats confidently predictsthat the urn will survive the wasting of the present generation asof so many others that came before it, Shelley foresees the ultimatedissolution of the statue. And to signify the imminence of this


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310 NEWLITERARYISTORYdissolution, Shelley complicates the opposition between graphic stasisand narrative movement in an extraordinary way: he verbally per-petuates a moment in the history of a statue. Sculpted to representenduring greatness, it is gradually disintegrating, and Shelley catchesit at a pregnant moment of transition between erectness and pros-tration: the standing legs recall the self-assertive majesty of theoriginal monument while the shattered, half-sunk visage looks aheadto its final oblivion-its ultimate leveling-in "the lone and levelsands."In the sestet of this sonnet, Shelley follows ekphrastic traditionby recording the words on the pedestal and thus envoicing thestatue, which resoundingly declares, "Look on my works, ye Mighty,and despair." But these words simply accentuate the transitionalstatus of the monument. The single meaning they originally conveyedhas disintegrated into a double meaning that looks backward andforward in time. Like the statue on which they are inscribed, thewords at once recall the invincible assurance of Ozymandias andforetell the coming dissolution of his works.The expression fixed on the shattered, half-sunk face, therefore,cannot serve as the pregnant moment of a narrative to be ekphras-tically inferred or furnished about the life of Ozymandias himself.Instead, the fixity of the expression signifies the rigidity of Ozy-mandias's despotic arrogance, which has petrified his face in a "sneerof cold command" that the sculptor has at once imitated and obeyed,since he undoubtedly worked under orders from the ruler himself.Ozymandias sought to perpetuate his power through the mediumof sculpture, through "lifeless things" that would permanently rep-resent his personality. But the sculptor's hand mocks the passionsthat it represents, and time in turn mocks any aspirations that thesculptor might have had for the immortality of his art. Forevercommitted to one unchanging expression, neither Ozymandias northe sculptor can command or control the leveling effects of time,which convert the face of power into an object of ridicule or-aswith the grandiloquent inscription--impose upon its twisted featuresa meaning radically different from the one originally intended, sothat what were once the frown and wrinkle and sneer of absoluteauthority become at last the marks and signs of desperation.

Shelley thus reveals that in spite of its claims to permanence, boththe matter and the meaning of graphic art can be fundamentallychanged by time, reconstituted by successive interpretations. AsWilliam Freedman has recently shown (see note 3), the whole poemis a study in mediation. After the opening words it is spoken notby the poet himself but by a "traveller" he has met, which is of


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 311course Shelley's way of personifying or envoicing a text-his notyet definitely identified literary source."3 The poet draws the voiceof the traveler from the text just as the traveler himself draws thevoice of Ozymandias from the inscription on the pedestal. And ineach case the relation is mediated. Shelley reads a text in whichthe traveler reports his reading of an inscription.Before quoting the inscription and thus envoicing the statue asa whole, however, the traveler reads and envoices the sculptedvisage. Its "frown, / And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,"he says, "Tell that the sculptor well those passions read, / Which yetsurvive, stamped on these lifeless things, / The hand that mockedthem, and the heart that fed." The sculpted face graphically rep-resents the expression of the living ruler, which originally signifiedpassions that the sculptor has inferred or "read" from it. Betweenthe sculpted face and the actual one, therefore, stands the inter-pretive act of the sculptor, who knows how to read faces well andto represent them in stone so that their expressions can be read--can tell us what they signify. Yet the sculpted face tells us as muchabout the sculptor's ability to read Ozymandias as about Ozymandiashimself. As a result, we are led to compare the sculptor's readingof the ruler with the inscription-the ruler's own reading of himselfand his works.To compare the graphic representation and the verbal self-rep-resentation is to see that each corroborates the other. Ozymandias'sstatement can be read as a comment on the statue-clearly one ofhis most stupendous works-and the statue can be read as a graphicresponse to the statement, a way of interpreting it in stone. Neitherstatue nor statement, however, communicates what Ozymandias pre-sumably intended by them both: an immutable assertion of hispower. The meaning of both changes radically as the all-too-per-ishable medium in which they are wrought disintegrates.The fact that the inscription will disintegrate along with the statueshould cause us to question an inference that Shelley's iconoclasmtempts us to draw-which is that language surpasses graphic art inits power and durability. Paraphrasing what Horace said of his odes,Shelley might have said of this sonnet, "Exegi monumentum petraperennius"--I have built a monument more lasting than stone.Raising up his own little tower of words to mark the inexorableleveling of the ancient statue, Shelley makes manifest what virtuallyall ekphrasis latently reveals: the poet's ambition to make his wordsoutlast their ostensible subject, to displace graphic representationwith verbal representation. Yet the fate of everything wrought andinscribed by order of Ozymandias should prompt us to ask how


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312 NEW LITERARY HISTORYlong any work of representation, whether verbal or graphic, canendure. If words cut into stone cannot last, what will happen towords written on paper or even printed in a book? Will Shelley'sown poem last as long as the statue of Ramses II, which was alreadywell over a thousand years old when Didorus Siculus described itin the first century B.C.?38Shelley's sonnet leaves us with questions just as disturbing as thoseraised by Keats's ode. Though Keats is ostensibly iconophilic andShelley iconoclastic, each in his own way stages a struggle for powerbetween rival modes of representation and makes us see that neithergains absolute victory over the other. Neither verbal narrative norgraphic stasis can fully represent being; neither words nor sculpturecan make absolute claims to permanence, stability, or truth. In thesetwo ekphrastic poems, then, Keats and Shelley use the verbal rep-resentation of graphic art as a way to reveal the ultimate inadequacyof all representation.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGENOTES

1 In what is probably the earliest definition of the term, which was extensivelyused by Greek rhetoricians of the first five centuries A.D., it is called simply "adescriptive account bringing what is illustrated vividly before one's sight." (ShadiBartsch, Decoding the Ancient Novel: The Reader and the Role of Description n Heliodorusand Achilles Tatius [Princeton, 1989] p. 9.) In the Greek rhetorical handbooks, statuesand paintings were treated among the objects suitable for ekphrastic description, butonly after the fifth century did ekphrasiscome to denote the description of visualart exclusively (Bartsch, p. 10).2 See Leo Spitzer, "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or Content vs. Metagrammar,"ContemporaryLiterature,7 (1955), 208, and Murray Krieger, "Ekphrasisand the StillMovement of Poetry; or, Laokodn Revisited," in The Poet as Critic, ed. Frederick P.W. McDowell (Evanston, Ill., 1967), p. 8; hereafter cited in text.3 Helen Vendler, The Odes of John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 116-52;William Freedman, "Postponement and Perspectives in Shelley's 'Ozymandias,' "Studiesin Romanticism,25 (1986), 63-73.4 See Word and Image, 2 (1986).5 Murray Krieger calls ekphrasis "a classic genre" ("Ekphrasis," ), but this wouldput it on a par with epic and tragedy. Since no formal or syntactic features distinguishthe literary representation of visual art from other kinds of literature, and since itcan appear withinany recognized genre from epic to lyric, it may be more appropriatelytermed a mode, like pastoral or elegy. But while those two can be largely definedby their subject matter, the subject matter of ekphrasis requires us to define it interms of representation.6 See n. 2 above. In "Words on Pictures: Ekphrasis," Art and Antiques(March 1984),80-91, John Hollander surveys examples of ekphrasis from Homer to our own timeand makes some suggestive comments on them, but he does not attempt to construct


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 313a theory of ekphrasis as a literary mode. In a revised version of this essay, "ThePoetics of Ekphrasis,"Wordand Image, 4 (1988), 209-19, Hollander coins the usefulphrase "notional ekphrasis" (209) to designate poetic representations of imaginaryworks of art.7 See Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form in Modern Literature," first published in SewaneeReview, 53 (1945) pp. 221-40, 433-56, 643-53; and W. J. T. Mitchell, "Spatial Formin Literature: Toward a General Theory," in The Language of Images, ed. W. J. T.Mitchell (Chicago, 1980), pp. 271-99.8 Krieger repeatedly denies that he is subjecting poetry to a static formalism. "Inresistance to the ekphrastic impulse," he says, "it cannot be too often urged that theaesthetic desire for pure and eternal form must not be allowed merely to freezethe entity-denying chronological flow of experience in its unrepeatable variety"("Ekphrasis," 4). But if the "ekphrastic impulse" is a formalizing tendency that mustbe resisted, can the "ekphrastic principle" embrace both fixity and movement? Morerecently, in Theoryof Criticism:A Tradition and its System(Baltimore, 1976), Kriegerhas written that "the critic's descriptions of the object in formal and spatial terms... are his weak metaphors, which, if he takes them too seriously, will distort-byfreezing-the object" (p. 39). If ekphrasis is simply a weak metaphor for poeticintegrity and a continuing threat to poetic vitality, its critical value is minimal. Tomaximize its critical value, we must first identify the distinguishing features ofekphrasis as a literary mode.9 Michael Davidson, "Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem," Journal ofAestheticsand Art Criticism,42 (1983), 71; hereafter cited in text.10 In a paper on "Postmodern Ekphrasis" delivered at the Columbia Colloquium,Linda Hutcheon applied the term ekphrasisto such postmodern phenomena as theincorporation of newspaper articles in the novels of Julio Cortazar and John Fowles.Likewise, in a dissertation titled "Figures in the Carpet: The Ekphrastic Traditionin the Realistic Novel" (Rice University, 1981), Mack L. Smith broadly defines ekphrasisas the introduction of any work of art-whether verbal or literary-into anotherwork of art, so that his examples range from the discussion of portraiture in AnnaKarenina to the debate about Hamlet in Ulysses.My own definition of ekphrasisrestsupon what I believe to be a fundamental distinction between writing about picturesand writing about texts.11 John M. Bender, Spenser and LiteraryPictorialism,(Princeton, 1972), pp. 40-80,pp. 105-48.12 See William Marling, William Carlos Williamsand the Painters, 1909-1923 (Athens,Ohio, 1982), pp. 80-83.13 Iconicityhas come to mean any "natural" or "motivated" similarity between wordsand what they signify, so that it includes not only onomatapoeia and texts withvisually significant shapes (concrete poetry) but also certain kinds of syntax. RomanJakobson, for instance, sees iconicity in Caesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered" becausethe order of the clauses corresponds to the chronological order of the events theysignify. See Roman Jakobson, Word and Language, vol. II of Selected Writings (TheHague, 1971), pp. 345-59. For extensive discussion of iconicity in literature, see theentire issue of Wordand Image, 2 (1986), especially the introduction by Max Nanny(pp. 197-208).14 I am thinking particularly of Ian Hamilton Finlay's "XM poem" (1963), whichappears in An Anthology of ConcretePoetry, ed. Emmet Williams (New York, 1967),n. p. (poems printed in the alphabetical order of the authors' names).15 See for instance W. D. Snodgrass, "W. D. Assists in Supporting Cock Robin'sRoost," in Word and Image, 2 (1986), 74-75.16 Crane himself tried (unsuccessfully) to use one of Joseph Stella's paintings of


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314 NEWLITERARYISTORYthe Brooklyn Bridge as a frontispiece to The Bridge, and he described the poem inexplicitly pictorial terms, speaking of its "architectural method" and comparing theinterdependence of its sections to the interdependence of the frescoes in the SistineChapel; see John T. Irwin, "Foreshadowing and Foreshortening: The PropheticVision of Origins in Hart Crane's The Bridge," Word and Image, 1 (1985), 288-89.But however much Crane's poem may resemble or evoke a painting by Stella orany other work of art, the bridge that Crane represents is not itself representational;it is an object serving a practical purpose in the real world. I should add that Irecognize the considerable differences between the panoramic scope of The Bridgeand the minimalist focus of "The Red Wheelbarrow." The only point I wish to makehere is that while each poem may remind us of pictures, neither one is ekphrasticin the strict sense I have proposed.17 Richard Stamelman, "Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism in Ashbery's'Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror,' " New LiteraryHistory, 15 (1984), 607-30; hereaftercited in text.18 Homer, TheIliad, tr. Richmond Lattimore (Chicago, 1951), 18.548-49, emphasisadded; hereafter cited in text. See also Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas:"The pictured sea flowed surging, all of gold" (Virgil, TheAeneid, tr. Robert Fitzgerald[New York, 1983], 8.671).19 Wendy Steiner, Picturesof Romance:Formagainst Context n Painting and Literature(Chicago, 1988), pp. 13-14.20 I do not mean here that a picture cannot tell a story, or that it cannot tell astory without the aid of a text, or that pictures differ essentially from texts becausetexts tell self-sufficient stories while pictures do not. Since a poem such as "Ledaand the Swan" does not tell a self-sufficient story while a painting such as Gains-borough's Two Shepherd Boys Fighting does, I am not speaking categorically aboutwhat pictures and texts can or cannot do. I merely describe what ekphrasis traditionallydoes with graphic art.21 Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, tr. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library(London, 1931), 1.26.101-5. According to Philostratus, the painting also shows howHermes playfully hides Apollo's cattle, dons his swaddling clothes again to seeminnocent, and then steals Apollo's weapons (105). The painting here described mayconsist of several distinct panels representing successive phases of the story, asRenaissance frescoes would later do, but Philostratus makes no mention of panels;he speaks only of what is "in the painting" (ev -ui ypaoqi).22 See Dante, Purgatorio, 10.73-93.23 See George Gordon, Lord Byron, Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, vol. III of LordByron: The CompletePoetical Works(Oxford, 1980), p. 171, 4.1252-69.24 See Word and Image, 2 (1986) and Robert Druce's "A Foreword to the Poems,"p. 46.25 I quote the first statement from an epigram of Theocritus in vol. II of theGreekAnthology, tr. W. R. Paton (New York, 1917), 145, and the second from PaulFriedlander and Herbert Hoffleit, Epigrammata:GreekInscriptions n Verse(Berkeley,1948), p. 9. See also Spitzer 221-22n. and Jean Hagstrum, TheSisterArts:The Traditionof LiteraryPictorialismin English Poetry rom Dryden to Gray (Chicago, 1958), pp. 22-23. pp. 49-50. (For reasons given in 18n., Hagstrum calls the verbal representationof graphic art "iconic" rather than "ecphrastic.").26 "The unique purpose of titling," writes John Fisher, "is hermeneutical; titlesare names which function as guides to interpretation." ("Entitling," Critical Inquiry,11 [1984], 288.) This is particularly obvious in the case of Renaissance emblems,which are scarcely intelligible without their titles. Thus the legend PRUDENZA tellsus how to construe the quattrocento relief of an old man with three faces-one


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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 315young, one middle-aged, one old-as signifying awareness of past, present, andfuture. (Erwin Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts [Chicago, 1982], p. 151 and fig.29.) In Renaissance emblem books, the title or legend can become a catecheticalprosopopoeia, with the picture made to answer a series of questions about itssignificance: under the woodcut of a naked lady standing on a wheel in the middleof the sea in Geoffrey Whitney's A Choiceof Emblemes:And OtherDevices (1586; rpt.New York, 1969), for instance, we read: "What creature thou? OccasionI doe showe.On whirling wheele declare why dost thou stande? / Bicause, I still am tossedtoo, andfroe." [The emblem is reproduced in Rosemary Freeman, English Emblem Books(London, 1948), p. 2.] It may be objected that titles and legends of this kind donot represent the picture so much as they denote what the picture represents, andthe objection gathers force when applied to modern paintings such as Joan Miro'sHead of a Woman 1938), which simply depicts a long-beaked, saw-toothed, grotesquelyfat bird. If we follow Nelson Goodman's theory of graphic representation (Languagesof Art [Indianapolis, 1976], pp. 27-31), we would have to say that such a picturerepresents the head of a woman as a bird, just as the quattrocento relief representsprudence as a three-headed man and Whitney's woodcut represents "occasion" (i.e.,opportunity) as a lady at sea on a wheel. The relation between a picture and itstitle or legend, however, is not unidirectional but reciprocal, so that the title representsthe picture quite as much as it guides us to see what the picture represents. As iswell known to anyone who has ever looked from a painting to its title and backagain, title and picture can each serve as signifier to the signified of the other. Eventhe ultimately minimalist title "Untitled," as Hazard Adams notes, "seems to presumea viewer, and it seems to presume to teach by negation . . . how it should be viewed"("Titles, Titling, and Entitlement To," Journal of Aestheticsand Art Criticism,46 [1987],13). In balking our desire to be told what the picture represents, such a title goadsus to consider what the word "Untitled" represents, what kind of picture it negativelysignifies.27 Cited in Annals of the Fine Arts, ed. James Elmes (London, 1817-20), III, 292.28 Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture (Geneva, 1967), p. 77. See also MichelFoucault, This is not a Pipe, ed. and tr. James Harkness (Berkeley, 1982).29 Michael Baxandall explicitly connects art criticism to ekphrasis in the introductionto his Patternsof Intention: On the HistoricalExplanation of Pictures(New Haven, 1985),pp. 1-11. See also Svetlana Alpers, "Ekphrasisand Aesthetic Attitudes in Vasari'sLives,"Journal of the Warburgand CourtauldInstitute, 23 (1960), 190-215.30 John Keats, "Ode on a Grecian Urn," in The Poems of John Keats, ed. JackStillinger (Cambridge, Mass. 1978), p. 372; hereafter cited in text by line.31 John Keats, "On a Leander which Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend Gave Me,"in Stillinger, p. 94.32 Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," in his A GrammarofMotives (Berkeley, 1969), p. 449; hereafter cited in text.33 Nancy Goslee argues that Keats uses the contrast between the sculpturesqueand the picturesque to symbolize the opposition between the timeless, objectiveserenity of classic culture and the restless, time-bound subjectivity of modern or"romantic" culture (Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing and Statuary in Blake, Keats, andShelley [Tuscaloosa, Ala., 1985], p. 5). Keats's "Urn," which Goslee does not treat,aptly illustrates her central point. Though the urn is sculpted marble, as the finalstanza plainly indicates, the restless probing for specific answers in the opening stanzasuggests the picture of a specific time and leaf-fringed place, and the situation ofthe youth "beneath the trees" is likewise picturesque. But while these picturesquequalities of the urn provoke the speaker's curiosity and sympathy with the mood ofan erotic moment, the sculpturesque qualities of the urn-the timeless serenity of


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316 NEWLITERARYISTORYits "cold marble"--leave the speaker himself cool, detached, and objective.34 The line about "marble men and maidens overwrought" clearly tells us that theurn is sculptured marble rather than painted pottery, but the object itself has neverbeen positively identified. From the evidence assembled by Ian Jack I infer thatKeats composedhis urn from a variety of sources: neo-Attic vases, the Elgin Marbles,and the paintings of Claude Lorraine. See Ian Jack, Keats and the Mirror of Art(Oxford, 1967), pp. 217-19.35 Lessing does not use the term ekphrasis,but he describes the verbal representationof graphic art as nothing but copying: "Instead of representing the thing itself, [thepoet] imitates an imitation and gives us lifeless reflections of the style of anotherman's genius rather than his own." (Laocoon:An Essay on the Limits of Painting andPoetry, tr. Edward Allen McCormick [Baltimore, 1984], p. 45.)36 I quote from Shelley'sPoetryand Prose, ed. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers(New York, 1977), p. 103.37 The text that Shelley's traveler most likely personifies is Diordorus Siculus's firstcentury B.C. description of a statue of Ramses II, but various other sources havebeen proposed; see Freedman, pp. 63-64.38 Similar questions arise from Yeats's "Lapis Lazuli," where all things are said tofall, where the marble handiwork of Callimachus survives only in the poet's ekphrasticevocation of "draperies that seemed to rise/When sea-wind swept the corner" (11.31-32), and where the figures carved in lapis already bear the signs of dissolution:dents, cracks, and discoloration. But unlike Shelley, who ekphrastically turns thebroken statue into a history of gradual annihilation, Yeats draws from the disinte-grating lapis a narrative of renewal: "All things fall and are built again / And thosethat build them again are gay" (11.35-36). Thus, while every dent and crack anddiscoloration in the lapis may be read as "a water-course or an avalanche" (1. 45),and may thus signify devastation and weeping for "Old civilisations put to the sword"(1. 27), the poet imagines the climbing figures reaching their goal: the little halfwayhouse sweetened by "plum or cherry branch" (1.47) (the stuff of leaf-fringed legend),where "mournful melodies" (1. 53) rejuvenate with gaiety the ancient, glittering eyesof the two Chinamen. (W. B. Yeats, "Lapis Lazuli," in The Poems:A New Edition, ed.Richard J. Finneran [London, 1984], pp. 294-95.)

Hefferman, Ekphrasis and Representation

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