James a. W. Heffernan. Ekphrasis and Representation

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Ekphrasis and RepresentationAuthor(s): James A. W. HeffernanSource: New Literary History, Vol. 22, No. 2, Probings: Art, Criticism, Genre (Spring, 1991), pp.

297-316Published by: Johns Hopkins University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/469040Accessed: 11-11-2015 20:36 UTC

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Ekphrasisand

Representation*James A. W. Heffernan

N THE AVIARY of contemporary ritical discourse, ekphrasis s anold and yet surprisingly nfamiliar bird. The literary epresen-tation of visual art is at least as old as Homer, who in the

eighteenth book of the Iliad describes at length the scenes depictedon the shield of Achilles. According to the Oxford lassicalDictionary,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. n November 1986, itwas the topic of the Tenth International Colloquium on Poetics atColumbia University, nd just a few months later, t was the topicof a session at the first nternational Conference on Word andImage in Amsterdam. Nevertheless, his ancient term s still strug-gling for modern recognition. The Princteon ncyclopedia f Poetryand Poetics, or nstance, offers rticles on the eclogue and the elegy,but nothing on ekphrasis even in the enlarged edition of 1974. Andwhile ekphrasis as finally found its way into the subject headingscovered by the MLA International ibliography, nly six items haveappeared under this heading since 1983.

This does not mean, of course, that scarcely anyone is writingabout the literary epresentation f visual art; it simply means thatscarcely anyone is using the word ekphrasis o do so-even in thediscussion of such paradigmatically kphrastic poems as Keats's "Odeon a Grecian Urn." Thirty years ago, shortly fter Earl Wassermanpublished The Finer Tone, Leo Spitzer took him to task for writingfifty ages on the ode without ever identifying t as an example ofekphrasis, and a dozen years later Murray Krieger saluted Spitzerfor having "profitably aught 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.

NewLiterary istory, 991, 22: 297-316

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298 NEW LITERARY HISTORY

thirty-six-page ommentary on Keats's poem in her book on hisodes makes no mention of ekphrasis, and the same is true of an

otherwise thoroughgoing ssay on Shelley's "Ozymandias" that ap-peared a few years ago in Studies n Romanticism.3 ost surprisingof all, perhaps, the word ekphrasis an scarcely be found in a specialissue of Word nd Image that was wholly devoted to the topic ofpoems on pictures.4

All right, t may be asked, so what? Why should the fate of aword disturb us? If critics ike Helen Vendler can write splendidlyilluminating pages on the poetic treatment of visual art withoutusing the word ekphrasis, hy do we need it at all? Why not leave

it with the ancient Greek rhetoricians who first gave it to us? Myanswer to these questions s that ekphrasis esignates a literary mode,and it is difficult f not impossible to talk about a literary modeunless we can agree on what to name it.5 use ekphrasis s 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, want to formulate definition f ekphrasis tself, r-more presumptuously--to ketch out a comprehensive theory of it.

In the past twenty years, the single most influential ttempt to

articulate a theory of ekphrasis is Murray Krieger's essay of 1967,"Ekphrasis nd 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 s the "generic spatiality f literary orm."' 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 urningworld to 'still' t" (5). Almost inevitably, Keats's "Ode on a GrecianUrn" serves as Krieger's prime example, but he also finds kphrasisin rather different oems, such as in Marvell's "Coy Mistress," wherethe ball, he says, s a "physical, patial . . . emblem of [the speaker's]mastery ver 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 kphrasis to thebreaking point: to the point where it no longer serves to containany particular kind of literature nd merely becomes a new namefor formalism.8 o it has appeared, in any case, to critics of Hei-deggerian persuasion, to those who believe that only a hermeneuticsof contingent historicity nd existential temporality can explainliterature o us. In the eyes of such critics, s Michael Davidson has



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EKPHRASIS AND REPRESENTATION 299

recently bserved, Krieger's theory of ekphrasis would hermeticallyseal literature within the well-wrought rn of pure, self-enclosed

spatiality, where the ashes of new criticism now repose (ashes stillglowing, 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 y 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 f 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. nstead of pausing at a reflective istancefrom the work of art, the poet reads the painting as a text, ratherthan as a static object, or else reads the larger painterly estheticgenerated by the painting" 72).

Davidson's formulation helps him to explain such postmodernpoems as John Ashbery's "Self-Portrait n a Convex Mirror," whichis based on Parmigianino's painting of the same name but whichquestions the ideas of stability, elf-sufficiency, nd authentic self-

representation hat Parmagianino's work ostensibly ries to convey.Yet Davidson hardly formulates new theory of ekphrasis. Havingthrown out Krieger's ekphrastic principle and replaced it with adiachronic polarity etween "classical" nd "contemporary," e leavesus with no coherent sense of the synchronic mode that might ontainthem both, s well as with n oversimplified iewof classical ekphrasis,which often treats the work of art as considerably more han 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 certain kind of literature nd 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 s the verbal representation fgraphic representation.

This definition xcludes a good deal of what some critics would

have ekphrasis nclude-namely literature bout texts.'o t also allowsus to distinguish kphrasis from wo other waysof mingling iteratureand the visual arts--pictorialism nd iconicity. What distinguishesthose two things from ekphrasis is that each one aims primarily orepresent natural objects and artifacts rather than works of rep-resentational art. Of course pictorialism and iconicity may each



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remind s of graphic representation. Pictorialism generates in lan-guage effects imilar o those created by pictures, o that n Spenser'sFaerie Queene,for instance, John M. Bender has found instances offocusing, framing, and scanning." But in such cases Spenser isrepresenting he world with he id 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 tyle of CharlesSheeler, the American photographer-painter whom Williams met

shortly efore he wrote the poem.12 But Williams's poem makes noreference to Sheeler or Stieglitz nd does not represent ny one oftheir pictures; instead, it uses the verbal equivalent of pictorialprecision in order to represent a set of objects.

Iconicity s more complicated than pictorialism ecause 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, s in Herbert's "Easter Wings." Like pictorialism, isual

iconicity usually entails an implicit reference to graphic represen-tation. The wavy shape of an iconically printed ine about a stream,for nstance, will ook much more like Hogarth's line of beauty thanlike any wave one might ctually ee from shore.14 But once again,iconic literature oes not aim to represent ictures; t apes the shapesof pictures n order to represent natural objects.

These three terms-ekphrasis, ictorialism, nd iconicity--are otmutually xclusive. An ekphrastic poem can use pictorial echniquesto represent picture nd can be printed n a shape which resemblesthe painting that t verbally epresents.'15 But ekphrasis differs romboth iconicity nd pictorialism because it explicitly epresents rep-resentation tself. What ekphrasis represents n words, therefore,must itself be representational. he 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 nything, poem such as HartCrane's The Bridge s no more ekphrastic han Williams's "The RedWheelbarrow."'6

When 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 iterature 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 nd the miraculous



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verisimilitude f the forms he creates, postmodern ekphrasis un-dermines the concept of verisimilitude tself. Thus Ashbery's Self-

Portrait n a Convex Mirror" has been called by Richard Stamelman"a radical criticism f the illusions and deceptions inherent n formsof traditional representation hat insist on the ideal, essential, andtotalized nature of the copied images they portray."'7 Nothing sonakedly deconstructive an be found in Homer's account of Achilles'shield, but if Ashbery's poem is a "meditation n difference" atherthan on likeness, as Stamelman says (608), Homer's account ofAchilles' shield is a meditation on both, a verbal tribute to graphicverisimilitude nd a sustained commentary n the difference etween

representation nd reality. Describing the ploughmen depicted onAchilles' shield, Homer writes, The earth darkened behind themand looked like earth that has been ploughed / though t was gold."'8Homer thus reminds us that he is representing epresentation, ndby explicitly oting he difference etween representation nd reality,he implicitly raws our attention to the friction etween the fixedforms of graphic representation and the narrative thrust of hiswords. Shortly fter describing he earth made of gold, Homer tellsus that the cattle depicted elsewhere on the shield were "wroughtof gold and of tin, and thronged n speed and with owing / out ofthe dung of the farmyard o a pasturing place by a sounding / river,and beside the moving field of a reed bed" (18.574-76).

Homer does two things n this passage: first, e reminds us againof the difference between what is represented the cattle) and thespecific medium of representation gold and tin); second and moreimportantly, e animates the fixed figures of graphic art, turningthe picture of a single moment nto a narrative f successive ctions:the cattle move out of the farmyard nd make their way to a pasture.From Homer's time to our own, ekphrastic iterature reveals againand again this narrative response to pictorial tasis, 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' f the stopped-action painting."'9The "pregnant moment" of an action is the arrested point which

most clearly mplies what came before the moment and what is tofollow t. But as the example from Homer shows, kphrastic iteraturetypically elivers from he pregnant moment of graphic art its em-bryonically arrative mpulse, and thus makes explicit the story hatgraphic art tells only by implication.20

In fact, ince the picture of a moment n a story sually presupposes



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the viewer's knowledge of the story s a whole, ekphrasis commonlytells this

storyfor the benefit of those who don't know it,

movingwell beyond what the picture by itself mplies. In his third-centuryA.D. Imagines, or instance, Philostratus he 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 o translategraphic art into narrative persists in the ekphrastic iterature of

every period.In Dante's

Purgatorio,we are told that the widow

depicted with the Emperor Trajan on the sculptured wall of theFirst Terrace not only converses with him but gradually persuadeshim to help her.22 In ChildeHarold's Pilgrimage, yron explains-orimagines on paper-the whole process by which the Dying Gaul ofRome's Capitoline Museum actually dies.23 In "Self-Portrait n 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--asRobert Druce

observes--triesto

explainthe

pictureby constructing narrative.24These examples do not prove that ekphrasis inevitably ntails

narrative r that anguage itself oes 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 n ekphrastic iterature hows at thevery east that ekphrasis cannot be simply quated with patialization.On the

contrary,he

historyof

ekphrasis suggeststhat

languagereleases a narrative mpulse which graphic art restricts, nd that toresist such an impulse takes a special effort f 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 n the ekphrastic radition: prosopopoeia,or the rhetorical technique of envoicing a silent object. Etymolog-ically, ekphrasismeans simply speaking out" or "telling n full." Torecall this root meaning is to see more clearly what has been noted

byscholars such as Leo

Spitzerand

Jean Hagstrum:the

genealogicallink between ekphrasis and sepulchral epigrams. These inscriptionson ancient statues, tombs, and funerary olumns allowed the mutestill object to identify tself n statements ike, "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.).25Philostratus



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clearly reflects he 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 nto 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. havetried to

distinguish kphrasisfrom

pictorialismnd

iconicity,ut I

see no reason to close its borders against any kind of writing hatis explicitly oncerned with a work of art, and unless representationrequires the absence of the thing represented, a picture title s averbal representation f the picture. It answers precisely the kindsof questions answered by sepulchral inscriptions--Who s it? Whatis it?-and it begins the work of interpreting he 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 the

Royal Academya

picturewith the

followingitle: Dante, n his descent

to hell, discovers midst heflights f hapless overs whirled bout in ahurricane, heforms f Paolo and Francesca of Rimini; obtains Virgil'spermission oaddress hem, nd being nformed f the dreadful lowthatsent them o that place of torment t once, overcome ypity nd terror,drops ikea lifeless orpse pon the rocks.27

This of course is an extreme example of title as narrative: thekind of title that painters of historical r literary ubjects felt boundto furnish when they could no longer presume their audience knewthe

story heytried to

depict.Yet much shorter titles an also serve

a narrative function. Take for nstance the title hat J. M. W. Turnerused for a seascape showing a small boat approaching a bigger one:'Nowfor the Painter' Rope).PassengersGoingon Board. ExemplifyingTurner's addiction to puns, the word Painter n 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 s therefore oubly narrational, onnecting he momentdepicted with the moment to come for the figures n the pictureand for the artist himself. But to think about the moment to comefor the artist s to discover an irresolvable onflict etween graphicstasis and narrative movement. On one hand, the phrase Nowforthe ainter nticipates he moment fter he 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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anticipatory action that is "now" before us, but that in real ornarratable time could

onlybe a "then"

bythe time he set to work.

So the title mischievously sks us to imagine figures imultaneouslymoving and fixed, patiently posing for the painter who will "now"depict them.

All by themselves, hen, picture titles can express precisely whatekphrasis so often delivers: a radical critique of representation. hebest known example from our own century s of course the titlethat Rend Magritte conceived for his painting of what looks verymuch like a pipe: Cecin'estpas un pipe. The title goads us to inferthat this is not a

pipebecause it is the

pictureof a

pipe,but since

the pipes we see in the real world do not usually present themselvesin perfect profile r hang suspended in midair with no visible meansof support, we must conclude that this s 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 ep-resented in advertisements nd textbooks: perfectly profiled, sus-pended in space, and labeled "pipe."28 hus Magritte's itle r legend,which is literally written long the bottom of the painting itself,

parodiesthe textbook

labelingof

pictures,undermines the as-

sumptions on which such labeling is based, and implicitly howshow graphic and verbal representation ogether generate misrep-resentation. But Magritte's title does more than parody textbooklabels; it also summons up for radical re-viewing he whole traditionof inscription nd prosopopoeial envoicing hat stands behind thehistory f ekphrasis. To read the inscribed picture in light of thistradition s to hear the famous nonpipe impudently nd prosopo-poeially piping: "Je ne suis pas une pipe."

If atruly comprehensive theory

ofekphrasis

must make someroom for picture titles, s I have been arguing, it must also openitself p to the vast body of writing bout pictures which s commonlyknown as art criticism. Had I world enough and space, I think Icould show that rt criticism eserves a place in the genre of ekphrasisas a whole.29But for now I chiefly wish to show how graphic artis represented in ekphrastic poetry and how a knowledge of ek-phrastic raditions an help us understand this kind of representationin specific poems. Traditionally, have argued, ekphrasis is nar-rational and

prosopopoeial;it releases the narrative

mpulsethat

graphic art typically hecks, and it enables the silent figures ofgraphic art to speak. I want to argue now that n "Ode on a GrecianUrn" and "Ozymandias," Keats and Shelley use these ekphrastictraditions o reflect n representation: not ust on a particular workof graphic representation, ut on the nature of representation tself.



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Consider first what Keats does with the ekphrastic tradition of

prosopopoeiathat flows from the

sepulchral epigramsI mentioned

earlier. He opens the first tanza of his famous ode by apostrophizingthe Grecian urn as a "still unravish'd bride of quietness."o30 Thenhe himself hreatens o ravish the bride by making her speak. "Whatleaf-fring'd egend," he asks, "haunts about they shape [?]" (1. 5).The quest for egend not only shows the narrative mpulse assertingitself rom hevery beginning of this kphrastic oem; it also signifiesthe urge to envoice the urn, for the word legendoriginally meant"to be read," and when a sepulchral inscription was read aloud bya traveler, the inscribed

object spoke.But Keats's urn bears no

inscription nd 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 ike,"I am the tomb of famous Glauca" or "My name is Ozymandias,"the urn speaks only silence, voicing neither story nor circumstantialfacts, aying nothing at all until t produces a final conundrum thattranscends narrative nd circumstance like: "Beauty is truth, ruthbeauty" (1.49).

To think f thepoem

in terms f timelessranscendence, however,is to miss the insistent pressure of narrative within it, and the

strength f poetic will required to resist hat 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 ittle poem aboutan engraved gem representing Leander's ill-fated wim across theHellespont, Keats follows the ekphrastic tradition of generating anarrative from the still moment of graphic art. Just as Byron turnsthe

sculptureof the

dyingGaul into the

complete storyf his

death,Keats turns the engraved figure of Leander into the complete storyof his drowning, nd the very ast 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 mpulse by restricting t to theworld outside the urn. He can tell the story f actual passion becauseit changes, moving from desire to consummation and satiety--"aheart high sorrowful nd cloy'd, / A burning forehead, and a parch-ing tongue" (11.29-30). But since the lovers depicted on the urnare

figuresabove" all human

passion, theyare also above

change,so that their lives-or rather their mode of existence--cannot benarrated.

Yet part of what teases us out of thought n this poem is preciselyits narrativity. ven though Keats suppresses the narrative mpulsethat ekphrasis typically eleases, he does not simply exchange the



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language of temporality or the language of spatiality, s 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 hat s paradoxically nd 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 hose to misread thefigures n the urn. For the moment we identify hem with he livingfigures they represent, we must also imagine them completing heaction

signified bythe

pregnantmoment 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 f prediction--to ay what will happenin the absence of change. In other words, he tells a story f change-

lessness. In place of the actual moment-to-be o strongly mpliedby the pregnant moment represented, he tells us what will happento figures imultaneously uickened 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, ever anst hou kiss,Though winning ear the goal-yet, do not grieve;

She cannot fade, hough hou has not thy bliss,For ever wilt hou ove, nd she be fair (11. 7-20)

These lines are profoundly elf-contradictory. o imagine the figureson the urn as lovers caught in a state of permanently rrested desireis to expose them to the strain of time even as we profess to exemptthem from t. 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

bythe

verynature of

graphic representation,he lover is

power-less-both physically nd psychologically--to o anything ther thanwhat he is already doing. If by chance he is grieving n the eternalnow of the moment represented, he can never obey the speaker'scommand. He can never stop grieving.



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The prohibition f grief s ust one illustration f the way Keats's

languageexcites the

expectationof

changeeven 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, r at least played differently, rom the one before; ifthe lovers face the prospect of "more happy love more happy,happy love " (1. 25), they are simultaneously ffered an increase intheir happiness and reminded that changelessness means no increaseat all-simply more of what they now possess, which is forever essthan what they do not now and therefore never can possess: the

happiness"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 n words but rather by releasing ts embryonically arrativeimpulse. Keats's poem simultaneously excites and frustrates hisimpulse, 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 canst

thou kiss, / Though winning near the goal." Keats's poem thus makesexplicit what all ekphrasis implicitly eveals: the inseparability frepresentation and misrepresentation. On the one hand, the ek-phrastic conversion of graphic art into narrative seems to restorethe totality hat is just fractionally epresented--hence misrepre-sented-by graphic art; on the other hand, the Heraclitean flow ofnarrative overrides--and hence misrepresents--the eality of whatcan be experienced in a single nstant, r what might be experiencedforever f, as Kenneth Burke suggests, we could move beyond the

process of becoming into the eternal present of pure being.32ButKeats'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 etween 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 etween graphic and verbal representation ffers us

a generally neglected way of interpreting he key terms n the urn'sstatement: beauty and truth. n treating Keats's ode as a poem ofsymbolic action, Kenneth Burke equates "beauty" with "act" and"truth" with "scene," the universe n which action occurs (460). Butsince the poem repeatedly threatens o undermine the fixed beauty



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of graphic art with the language of narration, the urn's statementcan be read as a final commentary n the conflict etween the two.Up to the very moment when the urn finally peaks, 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 ne tothe other ust as the lives of the lovers must be sacrificed to thebeauty of the poses they hold forever n marble, and just as thelife of the little own must be sacrificed o a ritual from which noneof its inhabitants will ever return. Recall the final ine of the stanza:

"OAttic

shapeFair attitude with brede / Of marble men and

maidens overwrought" 11. 1-42). The brilliant puns here work ikethe 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" an signify ither a living breed of menand maidens overwrought with unbearably prolonged desire, or adecorative braid of unbreeding marble figures done in bas-relief nan urn that s thus embroidered or "overwrought" with hem. nsteadof

fusingtruth nd

beauty,he

punsask us to choose between them:

between the narratable truth of living desire, which may in timebecome overwrought, nd the timeless beauty of graphic art, whichturns human figures nto well-wrought ormal patterns.33

In equating truth and beauty, then, the urn affirms what thepoem has so far denied. By the very ct of speaking, the urn crossesthe line between graphic and verbal representation, between thefixed, silent beauty of graphic stillness nd the audible movementof speech. By the very act of speaking, the urn boldly declares that

graphicart can

speak,that

graphicand verbal

representationre

one, 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, ruth beauty." n thesecond half of this chiastic utterance, the verb drops away, so thatlanguage assumes the uxtapositional effect f graphic art. Enteringand envoicing the mute still object, anguage abandons its narrativeimpulse and gives itself up to graphic stasis.

Keats thus subsumes a radical critique of graphic representationwithin work of

iconophilic homage. Having repeatedlyshown the

conflict 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 hat aspires to representbeing rather than becoming. Yet verbal representation does notthereby issolve nto graphic representation, or the work of graphic



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art on which Keats finally models his language is itself mediated by

language.The urn is as

imaginarys the little own

emptied bythe

religious 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 o the idea of graphicrepresentation, which language alone expresses here.

For this reason, Keats's tribute to graphic representation annotfinally e 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 alutes. We have overlookedthis

potentialbecause, I think, we have too often

uncritically cceptedLessing's view of ekphrasis as the mere replication of graphic art,an act of homage demeaning to the freedom and intellectual ignityof literature.35 eats'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 t once beautiful and true.

This critical train underlying he ostensible conophilia of Keats'sode subtly onnects t with nother 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, ndermining he assumption that graphic art itself anpay lasting and unequivocal homage to what it represents. Thepoem is short enough to be quoted in full:

I met a traveller rom n antique and,Who said--"Two vast nd trunkless egsof stoneStand n the desart . . Near them, n the sand,Half sunk, shattered isage ies,whosefrown,

And wrinkled ip, and sneer of cold command,Tell that ts sculptor well those passions eadWhichyet urvive, tamped n these ifeless hings,The hand that mocked hem, nd the heart hat ed;And on the pedestal, hesewords ppear:Myname s Ozymandias, ing of Kings:Lookon my Works, eMighty, nd despairNothing eside remains. Round the decayOf that olossal Wreck, oundless nd bareThe lone and level sands stretch ar away."''36

Shelley's sonnet questions what Keats's ode takes wholly for granted:the imperishability f graphic art. While Keats confidently redictsthat 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 NEW ITERARYISTORY

dissolution, helley complicates he opposition between graphic stasisand narrative movement n an extraordinary way: he verbally per-petuates a moment n the history f a statue. Sculpted to representenduring greatness, t s gradually disintegrating, nd Shelley catchesit at a pregnant moment of transition etween erectness and pros-tration: the standing legs recall the self-assertive majesty of theoriginal monument while the shattered, half-sunk isage looks aheadto its final oblivion-its ultimate leveling-in "the lone and levelsands."

In the sestet of this sonnet, Shelley follows ekphrastic traditionby

recordingthe words on the

pedestaland thus

envoicingthe

statue, which resoundingly eclares, "Look on my works, ye Mighty,and despair." But these words simply accentuate the transitionalstatus of the monument. The single meaning they riginally onveyedhas disintegrated nto a double meaning that looks backward andforward n time. Like the statue on which they are inscribed, thewords at once recall the invincible assurance of Ozymandias andforetell he coming dissolution of his works.

The expression fixed on the shattered, half-sunk face, therefore,cannot serve as the

pregnantmoment of a narrative o be

ekphras-tically nferred or furnished about the life of Ozymandias himself.Instead, the fixity f the expression signifies he rigidity f Ozy-mandias's despotic arrogance, which has petrified is face in a "sneerof cold command" that the sculptor has at once imitated nd 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 ep-resent his personality. But the sculptor's hand mocks the passionsthat it

represents,nd time in turn mocks

any aspirationsthat the

sculptor might have had for the immortality f 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 nscription--impose pon its twisted eaturesa meaning radically different rom the one originally ntended, sothat what were once the frown and wrinkle and sneer of absoluteauthority become at last the marks and signs of desperation.

Shelleythus reveals that n

spiteof its claims to

permanence,both

the matter and the meaning of graphic art can be fundamentallychanged by time, reconstituted by successive interpretations. AsWilliam Freedman has recently hown (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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course Shelley's way of personifying r envoicing a text-his not

yet definitelydentified

iteraryource."3 The

poetdraws the voice

of the traveler from the text ust as the traveler himself draws thevoice of Ozymandias from the inscription n 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 nd thus envoicing the statue asa whole, however, the traveler reads and envoices the sculptedvisage. Its "frown, And wrinkled ip, and sneer of cold command,"he says, "Tell that the sculptor well those passions read, / Which yet

survive, stampedon these lifeless

things,The hand that mocked

them, and the heart that fed." The sculpted face graphically rep-resents the expression of the living ruler, which originally ignifiedpassions that the sculptor has inferred or "read" from t. Betweenthe sculpted face and the actual one, therefore, tands 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. et the sculpted face tells us as muchabout the sculptor's bility o read Ozymandias as about Ozymandias

himself. 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 nd the verbal self-rep-resentation s to see that each corroborates the other. Ozymandias'sstatement an 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, way of interpreting t in stone. Neitherstatue nor statement, owever, ommunicates 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 long 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. araphrasing 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 atently eveals: 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 LITERARYHISTORY

long any work of representation, whether verbal or graphic, canendure. If words cut into stone cannot last, what will

happento

words written n 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 entury B.C.?38

Shelley's sonnet eaves us with questions ust as disturbing s thoseraised by Keats's ode. Though Keats is ostensibly conophilic andShelley conoclastic, ach in his own way stages a struggle for powerbetween rival modes of representation nd makes us see that neither

gainsabsolute

victoryver the other. Neither verbal narrative nor

graphic stasis can fully epresent being; neither words nor sculpturecan make absolute claims to permanence, stability, r truth. n thesetwo ekphrastic poems, then, Keats and Shelley use the verbal rep-resentation f graphic art as a way to reveal the ultimate nadequacyof all representation.

DARTMOUTH COLLEGE

NOTES

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 heAncient ovel: The Reader nd the Roleof Descriptionn Heliodorusand Achilles atius Princeton, 1989] p. 9.) In the Greek rhetorical handbooks, statuesand paintings were treated among he objects suitable for ekphrastic description, utonly after the fifth entury did ekphrasis ome to denote the description of visualart exclusively Bartsch, p. 10).2 See Leo Spitzer, "The 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' or Content vs. Metagrammar,"Contemporary iterature, (1955), 208, and Murray Krieger, "Ekphrasis nd the StillMovement of Poetry; or, Laokodn Revisited," n The Poet as Critic, d. Frederick P.W. McDowell (Evanston, Ill., 1967), p. 8; hereafter ited in text.3 Helen Vendler, The Odesof John Keats (Cambridge, Mass., 1983), pp. 116-52;WilliamFreedman, "Postponement nd Perspectives n Shelley's Ozymandias,' Studiesin Romanticism, 5 (1986), 63-73.4 See Word nd Image, 2 (1986).5 Murray Krieger calls ekphrasis "a classic genre" ("Ekphrasis," ), but this wouldput it on a par with pic and tragedy. ince no formal r syntactic eatures distinguishthe literary epresentation f visual art from other kinds of literature, nd since itcan

appearwithin

ny recognized genrefrom

picto

yric,tmay

be moreappropriatelytermed a mode, like pastoral or elegy. But while those two can be largely defined

by their subject matter, he subject matter of ekphrasis requires us to define it interms of representation.6 See n. 2 above. In "Words on Pictures: Ekphrasis," Art nd Antiques March 1984),80-91, John Hollander surveys xamples of ekphrasis from Homer to our own timeand makes some suggestive omments on them, but he does not attempt o construct



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a theory of ekphrasis as a literary mode. In a revised version of this essay, "ThePoetics of Ekphrasis,"Word nd Image, 4 (1988), 209-19, Hollander coins the useful

phrase "notional ekphrasis" (209) to designate poetic representations f imaginaryworks of art.7 See Joseph Frank, "Spatial Form n Modern Literature," irst ublished n SewaneeReview, 3 (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, d. 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 mpulse," 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 hronological flow of experience in its unrepeatable variety"("Ekphrasis," 4). But if the "ekphrastic mpulse" is a formalizing endency that mustbe resisted, an the "ekphrastic principle" embrace both fixity nd movement? Morerecently, n Theory f Criticism: Tradition nd its System Baltimore, 1976), Kriegerhas written hat "the critic's descriptions of the object in formal and spatial terms... are his weak metaphors, which, f he takes them too seriously, will distort-byfreezing-the object" (p. 39). If ekphrasis is simply a weak metaphor for poeticintegrity nd a continuing threat to poetic vitality, ts critical value is minimal. Tomaximize its critical value, we must first dentify the distinguishing features ofekphrasis as a literary mode.9 Michael Davidson, "Ekphrasis and the Postmodern Painter Poem," Journal ofAestheticsnd Art Criticism, 2 (1983), 71; hereafter ited in text.10 In a paper on "Postmodern Ekphrasis" delivered at the Columbia Colloquium,Linda Hutcheon applied the term ekphrasis o such postmodern phenomena as theincorporation f newspaper articles n the novels of Julio Cortazar and John Fowles.Likewise, in a dissertation itled "Figures in the Carpet: The Ekphrastic Traditionin the Realistic Novel" (Rice University, 981), Mack L. Smith broadly defines kphrasisas 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 n AnnaKarenina to the debate about Hamlet n Ulysses.My own definition f ekphrasis estsupon what I believe to be a fundamental distinction etween writing bout picturesand writing bout texts.11 John M. Bender, Spenser nd Literary ictorialism, Princeton, 1972), pp. 40-80,

pp.105-48.

12 See William Marling, William arlos Williams nd the Painters, 909-1923 (Athens,Ohio, 1982), pp. 80-83.13 Iconicity as come to mean any "natural" or "motivated" imilarity etween wordsand what they signify, o that it includes not only onomatapoeia and texts withvisually ignificant hapes (concrete poetry) but also certain kinds of syntax. RomanJakobson, for nstance, ees iconicity n Caesar's "I came, I saw, I conquered" becausethe order of the clauses corresponds to the chronological order of the events theysignify. ee Roman Jakobson, Word nd Language, vol. II of SelectedWritings TheHague, 1971), pp. 345-59. For extensive discussion of iconicity n literature, ee theentire issue of Word nd Image, 2 (1986), especially the introduction y Max Nanny

(pp. 197-208).14 I am thinking particularly f Ian Hamilton Finlay's "XM poem" (1963), whichappears in An Anthology f Concrete oetry, d. 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 n Supporting Cock Robin'sRoost," in Word nd Image, 2 (1986), 74-75.16 Crane himself tried (unsuccessfully) o use one of Joseph Stella's paintings of



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314 NEW ITERARYISTORY

the Brooklyn Bridge as a frontispiece o The Bridge, nd he described the poem inexplicitly pictorial terms, peaking of its "architectural method" and comparing the

interdependence of its sections to the interdependence of the frescoes n the SistineChapel; see John T. Irwin, "Foreshadowing and Foreshortening: The PropheticVision of Origins in Hart Crane's The Bridge," Word nd 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 s 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 ocus 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 ense I have proposed.17 Richard Stamelman, "Critical Reflections: Poetry and Art Criticism n Ashbery's'Self-Portrait n a Convex Mirror,' NewLiterary istory, 5 (1984), 607-30; hereaftercited in text.18 Homer, The liad, tr. Richmond Lattimore Chicago, 1951), 18.548-49, emphasisadded; hereafter ited in text. See also Virgil's description of the shield of Aeneas:"The pictured ea flowed urging, ll of gold" (Virgil, TheAeneid, r. Robert Fitzgerald[New York, 1983], 8.671).19 Wendy Steiner, Pictures f Romance: orm gainst Context n Painting nd 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 ssentially rom texts becausetexts tell self-sufficient tories while pictures do not. Since a poem such as "Ledaand the Swan" does not tell a self-sufficient tory while a painting such as Gains-borough's Two Shepherd oys Fighting oes, I am not speaking categorically boutwhat pictures nd texts an or cannot do. I merely escribe what ekphrasis raditionallydoes with graphic art.21 Philostratus the Elder, Imagines, r. Arthur Fairbanks, Loeb Classical Library(London, 1931), 1.26.101-5. According to Philostratus, he 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

speaksonly of what is "in the

painting"ev -ui

ypaoqi).22 See Dante, Purgatorio, 0.73-93.23 See George Gordon, Lord Byron, ChildeHarold's Pilgrimage, ol. III of LordByron: The Complete oetical Works Oxford, 1980), p. 171, 4.1252-69.24 See Word nd Image, 2 (1986) and Robert Druce's "A Foreword to the Poems,"p. 46.25 I quote the first tatement from an epigram of Theocritus in vol. II of theGreekAnthology, r. W. R. Paton (New York, 1917), 145, and the second from PaulFriedlander and Herbert Hoffleit, pigrammata: reek nscriptions n Verse Berkeley,1948),p. 9. See also Spitzer 221-22n. and Jean Hagstrum, TheSister rts: TheTraditionof Literary ictorialism n English Poetry rom Dryden o Gray Chicago, 1958), pp. 22-23.

pp.49-50. (For reasons

givenin 18n.,

Hagstrumcalls 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 nquiry,11 [1984], 288.) This is particularly bvious in the case of Renaissance emblems,which are scarcely ntelligible without heir titles. Thus the legend PRUDENZA tellsus how to construe the quattrocento relief of an old man with three faces-one



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young, one middle-aged, one old-as signifying wareness of past, present, andfuture. Erwin Panofsky, Meaning n the VisualArts 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: nd Other evices 1586; rpt.New York, 1969), for instance, we read: "What creature thou? Occasion doe showe.On whirling wheele declare why dost thou stande? / Bicause, still m tossed oo, nd

froe." [The emblem is reproduced in Rosemary Freeman, English EmblemBooks(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, ndthe objection gathers force when applied to modern paintings such as Joan Miro'sHead of Woman 1938), which simply depicts a long-beaked, aw-toothed, rotesquelyfat bird. If we follow Nelson Goodman's theory f 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, ust as the quattrocento relief representsprudence as a three-headed man and Whitney's woodcut represents occasion" (i.e.,opportunity) s a lady at sea on a wheel. The relation between a picture and itstitle r legend, however, s not unidirectional ut reciprocal, o that the title epresentsthe 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 nd picture can each serve as signifier o the signified f the other. Eventhe ultimately minimalist itle Untitled," s Hazard Adams notes, "seems to presumea viewer, nd it seems to presume to teach by negation . . how it should be viewed"("Titles, Titling, and Entitlement o," Journal f Aestheticsnd Art Criticism, 6 [1987],13). In balking our desire to be told what the picture represents, uch a title goadsus to consider what the word "Untitled" represents, what kind of picture t negativelysignifies.27 Cited in Annals of the Fine Arts, d. James Elmes (London, 1817-20), III, 292.28 Michel Butor, Les Mots dans la peinture Geneva, 1967), p. 77. See also MichelFoucault, This s not a Pipe, ed. and tr. James Harkness (Berkeley, 1982).29 Michael Baxandall explicitly onnects rt criticism o ekphrasis n the introductionto his Patterns f ntention: n the Historical xplanation f Pictures New Haven, 1985),pp. 1-11. See also Svetlana Alpers, "Ekphrasis nd Aesthetic Attitudes n Vasari'sLives,"Journal of the Warburg nd Courtauld nstitute, 3 (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 ited in text by line.31 John Keats, "On a Leander which Miss Reynolds, My Kind Friend Gave Me,"in Stillinger, . 94.32 Kenneth Burke, "Symbolic Action in a Poem by Keats," in his A Grammar fMotives Berkeley, 1969), p. 449; hereafter ited 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 f modern or"romantic" culture (Uriel's Eye: Miltonic Stationing nd Statuary n Blake, Keats, and

Shelley 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 ndicates, he restless probing for specific nswers n the opening stanzasuggests the picture of a specific time and leaf-fringed lace, and the situation ofthe youth "beneath the trees" is likewise picturesque. But while these picturesquequalities of the urn provoke the speaker's curiosity nd sympathy with the mood ofan erotic moment, the sculpturesque qualities of the urn-the timeless serenity f



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316 NEW ITERARYISTORYits "cold marble"--leave the speaker himself cool, detached, and objective.34 The line about "marble men and maidens overwrought" learly tells us that theurn is sculptured marble rather than painted pottery, ut the object itself has neverbeen positively dentified. From the evidence assembled by Ian Jack I infer thatKeats composed is urn from a variety f sources: neo-Attic ases, 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 kphrasis, ut he describes the verbal representationof graphic art as nothing but copying: "Instead of representing he thing tself, thepoet] imitates an imitation nd gives us lifeless reflections f the style of anotherman's genius rather than his own." (Laocoon:An Essayon the Limits f Painting ndPoetry, r. Edward Allen McCormick [Baltimore, 1984], p. 45.)36 I quote from Shelley's oetry nd Prose, d. Donald Reiman and Sharon B. Powers(New York, 1977), p. 103.37 The text that Shelley's traveler most ikely personifies s 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 f Callimachus survives nly n the poet's ekphrasticevocation of "draperies that seemed to rise/When sea-wind swept the corner" (11.31-32), and where the figures arved in lapis already bear the signs of dissolution:dents, cracks, and discoloration. But unlike Shelley, who ekphrastically urns thebroken statue into a history f gradual annihilation, Yeats draws from the disinte-

grating apisa

narrativeof

renewal: "All thingsfall

and are built again/

And thosethat build them again are gay" (11.35-36). Thus, while every dent and crack anddiscoloration n the lapis may be read as "a water-course r an avalanche" (1. 45),and may thus signify evastation nd weeping for "Old civilisations ut to the sword"(1.27), the poet imagines the climbing figures reaching their goal: the little halfwayhouse sweetened by "plum or cherry ranch" 1.47) (the stuff f leaf-fringed egend),where "mournful melodies" (1. 53) rejuvenate with gaiety the ancient, glittering yesof the two Chinamen. (W. B. Yeats, "Lapis Lazuli," in The Poems:A NewEdition, d.Richard J. Finneran [London, 1984], pp. 294-95.)

James a. W. Heffernan. Ekphrasis and Representation

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