Poetic Speech and the Silence of Art

Shimon Sandbank
Comparative Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Summer, 1994), pp. 225-239.
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SUMMER 1994
Volume 46, Number 3

SHIMON SANDBANK

Poetic Speech and the

Silence of Art

"W

E SEE NO BIRDS in the paintings of Paolo Uccello": this

is how Italo Calvino's short text, "The Birds of Paolo
Uccello," begins ( 3 ) . "What has become of the birds that according to Vasari once studded his canvases?" asks Calvino. "MThohas
scared them away?" And the answer: "Most certainly it is the soldiers, who render the highways of the air impassable with their
spears, a n d with the clash of weaponry silence trillings a n d
chirrupings." More than one writer had depicted the aged Uccello
surrounded by his bird paintings. In his most famous surviving
works, however, "what catches the attention is the absence of
birds, an absence that lies heavy o n the air, alarming, menacing
and ominous."
These surviving paintings presuppose others which may have
been painted but have since been lost: "scenes that precede the
above-a world all trillings and peckings and beating wings, taken
by surprise and scattered to the winds by the invasion of the warriors-and other scenes that follow them: the counteroffensive of
the birds, who swoop down in serried flocks a n d perch o n helmets,
shoulder plates a n d elbow guards" (3-4). Calvino's text is now
brimming with eddies of feathers and grasping talons, a horror
not unlike Hitchcock's in The Birds. O n e cries for help; o n e casts
around for a shield to protect oneself and finds oneself grasping a
wing with feathers spread. Finally, even man, having already transformed himself into crustacean by donning armour, is metamorphosed into bird. In the final exchange between crustacean and
bird, one does not know "where-and if-man still exists" ( 4 ) .
T h e text that began with the absence of birds thus ends with
their ubiquitous presence. Obversely, the men who filled the canvas at the beginning have virtually disappeared by the end. They
have been assimilated into birds, their breastplates putting forth

COMPL4R4TIVE LITERATURE

feathers and their trumpets emitting shrill bird cries. T h e absence

that "lay heavy o n the air, menacing and ominous," has by now
swallowed u p all presence.
Calvino's essay is about the way the creative imagination responds to a painting. T h e paradoxical point he is making is that a
writer's response to a work of art begins with what the work excludes and ends with its destruction. What catches the observer's
attention a n d triggers a chain of association is n o t so m u c h
Uccello's battle scenes themselves as that which is absent from
them. Proceeding to a full-blown imagining of that absent element, the observer finally reaches a point where it has completely
superseded the actual painting.
What I would like to suggest is that poets often respond to
paintings in this way. It is a point worth making, because poets
who write ekphrastic poems (that is, poems o n works of art) are
often described as starting from what is in the painting and as trying to transpose its visual forms to their own verbal medium. The
assumption that such transposition is possible is related to the
many failed attempts to define so-called parallels or analogues between the "sister arts" of poetry and painting: either in subject
matter, where the parallelisms may throw some light o n that vague
entity called Zeitgeist, but little o n either of the two arts themselves;
or in form, where terms used literally o n o n e side of the equation
are used figuratively o n the other, and are therefore nearly useless
(linear and painterly, closed a n d open composition, etc.).' Instead, I find it much more helpful to study the relation between
poems a n d paintings in terms of absence a n d supersession.
Ekphrastic poets, I suggest, do not at all d o what some critics say
they d o , namely "ignore themselves a n d their own sphere of
t h o u g h t a n d feeling a n d o p e n u p completely to the work of
anothern(Kranz,Bildgedicht i n Europa 6 0 ; my translation). Rather,
they exploit the lacunae of the visual medium to assert the power
of their own.
Not that Calvino's point is altogether new. His characteristic way
of radicalizing his argument is so striking that o n e tends to lose
sight of its rather simple core. In fact, his response to Uccello is
basically n o different from that of Balzac to a winterscape.
Baudelaire describes the episode:
O n raconte que Balzac . . ., se trourant un jour e n face d ' u n beau tableau, un
tableau d'hiver, tout melancolique et charge de frimas, clairserne de cabanes et de

' For a detailed critique of such practices, see 1~Ierrirnan

226

SILENCE, ART, POETRY

paysans chi.tifs,-aprt.s
avoir contemple u n e nlaisonnette d'olj. rnontait u n e
n~aigrefunlee, s'ecria: "Que c'est beau! Mais que font-ils dans cette cabane? a quoi
pensent-ils, quels sont leurs chagrins? les recoltes ont-elles &ti.bonnes? ils ont sans
doute des hcheances a payer?" (579)

Balzac expresses his admiration in a brief exclamation ( "Que c'est

beau!" ) and immediately abandons the painting itself. All the rest
of what h e has to say refers to what is missing from the paintingthe unseen people inside the little cottage-and to what must be
missing from it: their thoughts and worries.
The same holds for Calvino's birds: they could not possibly appear in Uccello's surviving battle scenes. They may have appeared
in scenes that preceded o r followed the surviving paintings, but
time sequentiality is excluded from painting, and what preceded
or followed the scenes we have cannot possibly appear in them.
T h e absence of birds in these scenes is therefore as inevitable as,
o r even more inevitable than, the absence of thoughts in the
winterscape Balzac was admiring. Both birds and thoughts had to
be absent by force of the innate limitations of the visual medium.
Thus, Balzac's starting point, like Calvino's, is absence. But does
Balzac also destroy presence like Calvino? The word seems inadequate in this case. Calvino lets the absent birds oust the present
soldiers; Balzac does not let the absent thoughts oust the depicted
winter scene, nor are they incompatible with it. The lean peasants,
the small cottages, the frost, all suggest them. At the same time, he
cannot wait to leave the visual scene behind a n d turn to the
thoughts the painter could not include in it. With his prompt entrance into the sphere of t h o u g h t a n d feeling the writer has
turned his back o n the visible, which, though not destroyed, is superseded.
Thus both writers seem primarily engaged not in transposing to
language the form of a visual object, but in superseding it. Only by
being left behind could the landscape Balzac saw activate his
imagination, or Uccello's painting produce Calvino's text.
In the two ekphrastic texts we have examined, the starting point
is a n absence, a limitation of the visual art. Why should a writer use
the limitations of another art to create his own? Does ekphrastic
poetry involve a game of power? T h e "creative mind's desperate
insistence upon priority," in Harold Bloom's formulation (13),
comes naturally to mind. Bloom's concept of poetic history as
made by poets "misreading one another so as to clear imaginative
space for themselves" ( 5 ) may apply here as well, though the anxiety Bloonl stresses is far less obvious in the relation between two

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

different mediums. R e n i Girard's theory of sexual rivalry, in Deceit, Desire, a?zd the lVovel, seems equally called for, perhaps even
more so, since by presenting the Other as model for imitation as
well as rival, this theory may d o more justice to the paradoxical
relation between poet and painter.' The ekphrastic poet seems to
depend o n the pregnant lacunae of art, on its infinitely intriguing
silence, just as he or she seems determined to redeem it by means
of poetic speech.
Whatever the psychology of the case, the history of the "sister
arts" certainly testifies to a less than harmonious relation between
the two. T h e transformations of the u t pictura poesis topos show
that poetry, except for some notable cases such as Leonardo's
Treatzse on E-'aznti?zg, has usually been placed above the fine arts,
mainly d u e to its capacity for direct abstraction and hence for
more explicitly and thoroughly addressing spiritual matters; thus
it is seen as having greater religious, moral, a n d philosophical
value. T h e visual arts, o n the other hand, have been shown to suffer from a number of inherent weaknesses: their limitation to visually perceptible objects, their restriction to a single moment of
time and a single place, their inaccessibility to sound a n d other
sensory phenomena, and of course their incapacity for the logical
and abstract (Markiewicz, passim).
And yet, the visual impact of painting and its iconic immediacy
and suggestive silence have always aroused the envy of poets. Even
a Romantic like Coleridge, in a period which is supposed to have
been freeing itself from pictorialism, tries over a n d over again to
sketch what he cannot describe in words. "0 Christ, it maddens
me that I am not a painter or that painters are not I," he writes in
his vote books, attempting to describe the appearance of birch trees
(1495 f.65). In our own century, the same exemption from abstract meaning, which had been considered a fault, has elevated
painting to the rank of ultimate model, and Cizanne's "thingy"
apples to the ideal at which poetry too must aim. William Carlos
Williams writes,
. . . the progression from the sentiment, the thought ( philosophy ) or the concept
to the poem itself, that was the secret meaning inside the term "transition" during
the years xvhen the painters following Cezanne began to talk of sheer paint: a
picture a matter of pigments upon a piece of cloth stretched on a frame. . . It is the
making of that step, to come over into the tactile qualities, the words themselves
beyond the mere thought expressed that distinguishes the modern of that time
The applicability of Girard's theory to the relation between poets and painters
is suggested by EIeffernan 36,n.42.

SILENCE, ART, POETRY

from the period before the turn of the century. And it is the reason xvhy painting
and the poem became so closely allied at that tirne. It was the work of the painters
following Ckzanne and the Irnpressionists that, critically, opened up the age of
Stein, Joyce and a good many others. It is in the taking of that step over frorn
feeling to the imaginative object, o n the cloth, on the page, that defined the term,
the rnodern term-a work of art, what it rneant to thern. ( A u t ~ b i o ~ q n p380-81)
hj

What Williams here calls the "coming over into the tactile qualities," much more natural to painting than to poetry, could only
enhance the position of painting as both model and rival. No wonder a collection of essays o n painting by twentieth-century poets
reveals as o n e of its leitmotifs poets' en\y of painters:
STEPHEN
"When they paint, painters are exercising some
SPENDER
of the qualities essential to good writing. Apart from the most obvious of these-the organizing power of the visual imaginationthey observe what Blake called 'minute particulars.' They create
images and they store memories. For all these things writers may
envy them" (J.D. McClatchy 140).
HOWARD
NE~IERO
"The
Y poet walks through the museum a n d
among so many a n d so diverse conceptions and manners of treatment he sees, he hears, especially two things: silence a n d light . . .
His own art, in the comparison, begins to s e e m . t h e merest
pitifullest chatter, c o m p o u n d e d of impatience a n d opinion"
(McClatchy 1'78-79).
ROBERT
C REELEY
"There is n o 'answer' to anything. A painter
(possibly a musician) can assert this more effectually, more relevantly, than any other 'artist.' H e can be present all at o n e time,
which n o writer can quite be-because
h e has to ' g o on"'
(McClatchy 221).
CH,SRI.ES
TOSII.INSON
"'We live in the center of a physical poetry,'
says Wallace Stevens. This is surely the basic fact which would
make a poet want to paint or, if he couldn't d o that, to comprehend the painter's way of regarding the physical poetry they both
share . . . When words seem too abstract, then I find myself painting the sea with the very thing it is composed of-water . . ."
(McClatchy 266, 268).
JAMESMERRILL
" The writer will always envy the painter. Even
those who write well a b o u t painting, h e will envy for having
learned to pay close attention to appearances" (McClatchy 312).
Minute particulars, appearances, physicality, silence, lack of answer-these, then, are some features contemporary poets find
worthy of imitation a n d envy in painting. T h o u g h randomly

COMPARATIVE LITER4TURE

picked u p from WlcClatchy's collection, all have to d o with the

transition Williams talks about from the semantic to the tactile, a
transition poets feel is easier in the wordless visual medium. In
Archibald Macleish's famous "Ars Poetics," it is in terms of wordlessness a n d motionlessness that the non-semantic poem, the
poem that "is" rather than "means," is defined.
T4Tilliams,who seriously tries to turn his convictions into practice, is unexpectedly an exception among ekphrastic poets. H e
seems readier than many of his fellow ekphrastic poets to pursue
his envy to a constructive conclusion and get as close as possible to
the tactile qualities of the paintings he writes about, free from
"sentiment, thought o r concept." His much-admired "Pictures
from Brueghel" show a n astounding resistance to meanings beyond the immediate appearances of Brueghel's paintings. Even in
a poem pregnant with mythical meaning like "Landscape with the
Fall of Icarus" ( 4 ) , he insists o n juxtaposing the spring landscape
with the drowning Icarus in purely spatial and visual terms: "near
the edge of the sea" versus "off the coast."
A measure of the unbridgeable gap between the media, however, is that even Williams cannot help imposing some concepts
o n the "sheer paint" of Brueghel's canvas. An ironic
"unsignificantly" and "quite unnoticed" is added to the final reference to Icarus's fall, expressing, however minimally, outrage at the
indifference of the world to its dreamers:
Unslgnificantlv
off the coast
there mas
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning

Williams also puts "when Icarus fell" at the beginning of the poem,
thus making clear what he judges to be the philosophical (though
not visual) center of the picture; in addition, he presents the entire plot of the picture in the past tense, thus taking us back from
the purely perceptual present to the remembered myth and its
philosophical implications.
Thus, in the final analysis Williams too does what is inaccessible
to painting and open only to language. H e judges, ironizes, moves
in time. H e too fills out the absences of art, falling short of the
ideal (described by Merrill in the above-quoted passage) of that
"rare person who can look at anything for more than a few seconds
without turning to language for support."

SILENCE, ART, POETRY

T h e physical bias of much modern poetry, then, does not exempt poets from the urge to lend their visual objects the differe7ztia
specifics of the verbal. A salient case in point is Rilke. His
Dingdichtung, inspired by Ckzanne a n d Rodin, is often seen as a
heroic attempt-perhaps the heroic attempt beside Gerard Manley
Hopkins's-to subject poetic language to the physical "inscape" of
things (Hartman 95). His famous sonnet on the "Archaic Torso of
Apollo," with all its seeming glorification of a purely physical presence, insistently dismisses the physical:
W e cannot know his legendary head

with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso

is still suffused with brilliance f r o m inside,

like a l a m p , i n which his gaze, n o w turned t o low,

gleams i n all its power. Otherr\~ise

t h e curved breast could n o t dazzle you so, nor could

a smile r u n t h r o u g h t h e placid hips and thighs

to that dark center xvhere procreation flared.

Otheraise this stone would seem defaced

b e n e a t h t h e translucent cascade o f t h e shoulders

and would n o t glisten like a wild beast's fur:

would n o t , f r o m all t h e borders o f itself,

burst like a star: for here there is n o place

that does n o t see you. Y o u rnust change your l i f e . ( 6 1 )

This poem throughout focuses o n absence, o n what the torso

lacks: its lack of head, of genitals, of arms. Rilke attributes the
statue's impact to these gaps in the visual, to what is invisible and
non-physical-the mysterious interiorization of the gaze. T h e
poem's end, with its famous moral call to a change of life, is altogether beyond the physical.
Formally, this sonnet is miles apart from Calvino's "The Birds of
Uccello." Nevertheless, they share a certain deep structure. Rilke's
starting point, like Calvino's, is absence. Though the two absences
are different in kind-Calvino's absence of birds derives from an
inherent limitation of the visual medium, its inability to present
time-sequentiality, while Rilke's absence of head, arms, and genitals is contingent, a result of the ravages of time-both serve as
springboards to a destruction of the physical presence of the work
of art concerned. Both Rilke's defaced stone a n d Calvino's
painted soldiers are destroyed by the imaginative extensions of absence: the eyes that owing to the head's absence have been
interiorized into the body; the birds that, having been scattered

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

and absent, now swoop down in counteroffensive. Both writers

have deleted their visual objects so as to clear imaginative space
for themselves, as Harold Bloom would put it.
In addition, they have reaffirmed the traditional topos of the
resilience of poetry, in contrast to art. "You shall shine more
bright in these contents," Shakespeare assures the beloved, referring to his sonnets, "than unsu7ept stone besmeared with sluttish
time." Rilke shows how the statue's physical deterioration results
in an enduring spiritual resilience, like poetry; it has become a
eunuch, but, as Hopkins puts it in a letter to Bridges, "it is for the
kingdom of heaven's sake." Now as immaterial as a poem, the
statue has overcome art's inability to deal with spiritual matters
and actually become a poem.'
O n e is reminded of Gertrude Stein's frivolous but profound
"pictures," described in a lecture she delivered during her 1934
American tour. "I always . . . liked," she says, "looking out of windows in museums. It is more complete, looking out of windows in
museums, than looking out of windows anywhere else" ( 9 1 ) . But
then, during a long hot summer in Italy, she "began to sleep and
dream in front of oil paintings." She still looked o u t of the windows of the museums, but it was no longer necessary. "There were
very few people in the galleries in Italy in the summers in those
days and there were long benches and they were red and they were
comfortable at least they were to me a n d the guardians were indifferent o r amiable and I would really lie down a n d sleep in front of
the pictures. You can see that it was not necessary to look o u t of
the windows."
Is that not what Calvino a n d Rilke are doing? They look out of
windows o r sleep and dream, but they must d o it in a museum in
front of paintings. Uccello a n d the torso must be there for Calvino
and Rilke to turn their backs o n and dream. Even in a time of
"physical poetry," ekphrastic poets thus half turn their back to the
physical painting. Rather than engaging exclusively in carrying
the forms of art over to poetry, they concentrate o n the absences
of art to the advantage of poetry. An ekphrastic poem therefore
remains what M.J.K~lrrik,in a n entirely different context, calls "a
presence based o n absences." It is "from the perspective of what it
excludes" that the ekphrastic poet reads his visual object, and "the
perception of absence" is what "institutes [his] creative act"
(l,x,5).
Among the absences of art, that of sound is particularly signifi-

SILENCE, ART, POETRY

cant t o poets, whose very m e d i u m , language, is e m b o d i e d i n t h e

sounds o f speech. H o w is t h e silence o f art treated i n ekphrastic
poetry?
T h e pregnant silence o f paintings and statues o f t e n enables poets t o e n d o w t h e m w i t h a n o t h e r , largely absent, e l e m e n t : mental
p h e n o m e n a . T h o u g h t s or feelings m a y b e suggested i n painting
and sculpture t h r o u g h visual clues, b u t i n t h e final analysis only
language can r e n d e r t h e m i n all their nuances ( M e r r i m a n 1 6 2 ) .
T h e silence o f R o d i n ' s The Thi7zker enables t h e C h i l e a n poet
Gabriela Mistral t o indulge i n t h e T h i n k e r ' s t h o u g h t s , i n what she
imagines t o b e his meditation o f d e a t h :
Con el menton caido sobre la rnano ruda,
el pensador se acuerda que es carne de la huesa,
carne fatal, delante del destino desnuda,
carne que odia la muerte, y temblo de belleza.
(Kranz, Bildgrdicht 62)

Mistral reads The Thinker f r o m a d o u b l e perspective o f exclusion: t h e e x c l u s i o n o f v o i c e , w h i c h leaves o p e n t h e T h i n k e r ' s

t h o u g h t s , and t h e exclusion o f t h e t h o u g h t s themselves w h i c h ,
t h o u g h suggested b y facial expression and b o d y language, c a n n o t
possibly b e represented directly, and remain o p e n t o m a n y interpretations.
U n l i k e Rilke's torso, Rodin's statue is n o t eliminated t o b e replaced b y inwardness. Its inwardness having b e e n suggested by its
physical presence, it harmonizes with, rather t h a n supersedes, it.
Sinking c h i n , coarse h a n d , muscles, cracked skin-rather t h a n b e ing n e g a t e d , these serve as a n objective correlative t o a missing
inwardness restored by t h e p o e m . A t t h e same t i m e , t h e y are d o u bly r e d u c e d : t h r o u g h b e i n g relegated t o t h e status o f correlative
or sign, and by being c o n f i n e d , qua signs, t o a single m e a n i n g .
T h i s reduction, however, is far milder t h a n t h e total negation o f
presence t h e silence o f art can produce. A poet m a y reject t h e visual clues t h e painter o f f e r s , or choose t o follow t h e m i n a partial
o r idiosyncratic m a n n e r . I n a s o n n e t b y M a n u e l Machado o n
Manet's The Balco?zj (Kranz, Bildgedicht 3 1 6 ) what t h e painting
Interestingly, Rilke's sonnet "Friiher Xpollo," the counterpart to the
"Xrchaischer Torso" in that it opens the first part of ~ V e u eGedichte as the Torso
opens the second part, describes a different ..\pollo from the perspective of another absence, that of the future: it is Apollo in the process of preparing to produce poetry. In "Friiher hpollo," a statue is about to produce a poem; in the
"Torso," it is transformed into a poem.
" See Kranz's juxtaposition of 1~Iachado's
poem with Rilke's very different poem
on the same painting, "Darne auf einern Balkon." R.S.Thomas's "Manet: The Balcony"(31) offers another interesting comparison.

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

foregrounds and illuminates, i.e. the two ladies on the balcony, is

largely ignored by the poet, who focuses instead o n the dark background a n d the thoughts of the silent man standing there, oblivious to present goings-on, daydreaming of f ~ ~ t ujoys.
r e Similarly, in
a quatrain o n Durer's hfela?zcolia, the poet William Watson dismisses sea, earth, and heaven, which occupy half of Durer's work,
as irrelevant to the interior life of silent Melancholy, whose inner
"fantom" alone is supposed to hold h e r fixed gaze (Kranz,
Meisterwerke 339). T h e elimination of physical detail is particularly
striking in an emblematic picture like this, which naturally calls,
o n the contrary, for a thorough iconological interpretation of its
physical detail.g
Q ~ ~ i often,
te
however, as in Mistral's Rodin, the silence of art is
used in a way that follows and supports physical presence, though
at the expense of complexity. A witty mannerist device often used
in this context is the thematization of art's silence: the device by
which a painting's silence, deriving of course from a limitation inherent to the medium, is misread as belonging to the specific
theme presented. T h u s Laokoo?z's silence, o r that of Michelangelo's Slave, is interpreted as deriving from heroic stoicism;"
:Mo?za Lisa's silence is attributed to her sphinx-like nature o r her
experience of the world;' Michelangelo's Night, in the Medici
Chapel, is said to be mute by nature, not by art.' T h e silence of art
in such cases is not exploited to smuggle in absent thoughts, but is
wittily misread as a positive trait of the work's theme.
T h e same device is also applied to another absence, that of
movement. T h e reason why Michelangelo's Moses does not jump
u p from his seat, says one poet, is that he is in control of his passions (Kranz, Meisterwerke 2'75). And his Night is said in another
poem to be immobile because night is immobile (303). Similarly,
the lovers' immobility o n the verge of sailing to Cythera, in
Watteau's L'Embarquement pour Cjthdre, is thematized by the Belgian poet Albert Giraud into their wish to be ever on the way,
never to arrive:
11s n e o o n t pas plus l o i n q u e l e u r geste c h a r m a n t ,
Car p o u r l e u r t e n d r e c o e u r t o u t e la poksie

' Cf.Th6ophile Gautier's eight-page "Melancholia," discussed b y Kranz i n

'Weisterwerke 321-24.
%y Erasrnus Darwin, B y r o n , a n d C.F.Meyer ( K r a n z , 'Weisterwerke 114-15,118-19,
275).
By Edward D o w d e n a n d Iiurt T u c h o l s k y ( K r a n z , 'Weisterwerke 158, 185).
By M a r i n o ( K r a n z , ~\.Ieisterzur,fte3 03).

SILENCE. ART, POETRY

De l'amoureux volage e4tdans l'en1barquement.

(Kranz, A\4r~strriurrkr389)

T h e misreading that constitutes this device, taking an exclusion

for an intended inclusion, is double-edged.On the o n e hand it
seems to testify to a generosity on the part of the poet, who, instead of exploiting an absence in the visual medium to promote
his own, interprets it to serve the artist's purpose. O n the other
hand, this service depends on the poet's discretion, and h e knows
it. Not only is TVatteau himself unable to give us more than the
vaguest visual clue, let alone directly tell us that his lovers' immobility has to d o with a wish never to arrive; he can hardly make it
clear, as it turns out, in a Dutch poem o n the same painting,
whether they are sailing to the island o r back from it (Kranz,
hfeisterwerke 392-93).There is a dismissal of art as such in the poet's
refusal to acknowledge its limitations, its ou7n terms, when pretending to regard its exclusions as intended by the artist. In fact,
intentions remain as inaccessible to art as ever. Being ~vordless,it
can never be precise about them.
At this point, however, some ekphrastic poems perform an astounding voltp face. Precisely by being wordless, they say, art is able,
not only to express spiritual truths, but to do it better than words.
Silence comes nearer the spirit than the "merest pitifullest chatter" that is poetry. Language's superiority to art in expressing the
non-visible is reversed into an inferiority. Now the visual medium
can do it better, not by force of its physical presence, but by the
way it excludes sound and noise.
This infinitely pregnant silence of art has been our starting
point: it is that which attracts poets to art in the first place. But
rivalry is at work here too. T h e silence that poets are after is differe n t from, more than, the silence of art. In MallarmC's "Sainte," the
stained-glass image of Saint Cecilia is both evoked and eliminated
by poetic speech, but poetic speech too is eliminated in its turn to
clear space, not for the visual silence that has been left behind, but
for a n o t h e r silence, the silence into which words reach after
speech. T h e "musicienne d u silence" the poem finally achieves is
n o t the stained-glass saint, b u t that which is absent from all
stained-glass windows a n d rises musically o u t of, a n d beyond,
words.
T h e unheard melodies of Mallarmk's saint cannot but remind
us of Keats's urn. His "Ode on a Grecian Urn," perhaps the greatest ekphrastic poem, is also one of the most profound studies of

COMPARATIVE LITERATURE

the relation between art and poetry from the perspective of absence, or rather of two absences: of sound and of movement.
These two limitations of the visual medium are here reversed into
its triumph. It is, however, a double-edged triumph, deeply
marred by exclusion.
Silence dominates the first one-and-a-half stanzas. The urn is a
bride of quietness, a foster child of silence. It is "stilln-that is,
again, silent, or, if taken as adverb, still unravished by (one suspects) the poet, who will soon and inevitably "ravish" the urn's
"ditties of no tone" by his insistent voice. He would have preferred
to pipe to the spirit, not to the sensual ear, but is doomed to the
latter. His frantic questions concerning the illustrations on the
urn-what legend, what men, what maidens, what struggle, what
pipes-enact the verbal rape of art's silence. But they also bring
out art's impotence in comparison with speech. For it can answer
none of these questions. There is a silence in art which is not only
numinous ("Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought"), but
also infinitely sad, ever frustrating man's thirst for being "told,"
for the absent voice:
A n d , little town, thy streets for evermore
Will silent b e ; and not a soul to tell
W h y thou art desolate, can e'er return.

The second absence, motionlessness, dominates the second half

of stanza 2 and the entire third stanza. Here again a limitation
seems to be turned inside out and become triumph. Art's exclusion of movement and time becomes timelessness, in the sense of
eternity. Impotence becomes power."ut,
as has often been
shown, there is too much insisting ("Ah happy, happy . . . And
happy . . . More happy . . . more happy, happy"). There is also an
odd use of "cannot" where "need not" seems the better choice:
"thou canst not leave / Thy song, nor ever can those trees be
bare"; "she cannot fade"; "happy boughs! that cannot shed / Your
leaves." Since it is bad for one to leave one's song, for trees to be
bare, for a girl to fade, or for boughs to shed their leaves,
shouldn't the exemption from all these be presented as privilege
("thou need not leave thy song" etc.) rather than incapacity?
One obvious answer is that timelessness is an incapacity inasmuch as it precludes consummation. Keats, it has been often said,
T h e reversal o f art's incapacity to express movement into an expression o f
eternity is central also to M'ordsxvorth's sonnet " U p o n the Sight o f a Beautiful Picture." \Vordsxvorth praises art's "subtle power" to "stay yon cloud"; he could have
equally deplored the fact that art has n o other choice but to "stay" it.

SILENCE, ART, POETRY

wants both timelessness a n d time, both fulfillment a n d exemption

from decay. "All human passion far above" could also be read
ironically, as a backhanded compliment: love as depicted o n the
urn is deathless, but only because it is lifeless. T h e problem with
this answer is that it applies to "never canst thou kiss," which signifies an incapacity to consummate one's love, but not to "she cannot fade," where the incapacity would strangely mean an incapacity to grow old. Therefore, I think the incapacity so often repeated
here has to d o with art's incapacity to articulate change. Both the
lack of consummation a n d the exemption from aging derive from
the innate limitation of art. Its claim to eternity only hides the absence that lies behind it. Its song, youth, a n d leaves cannot choose
but to be eternal.
The frustration that counterbalances art's triumph is lent great
emotional force in the fourth stanza. A third limitation is now ascribed to art: its confinement to a single place. If the green altar
towards which the procession is heading may or may not be depicted on the urn, the town it has left is certainly not. Miould it
otherwise be described as being "by river o r sea shore, / or mountain-built"? Having been left behind, it is excluded from the scene.
Unlike silence and immobility, this limitation cannot be reversed
into achievement. T h e eternal silence echoing in those empty
streets is the negative side of art's eternity and silence, an exclusion of change a n d voice which is an exclusion of life.
In the last stanza we are back, it seems, to triumph. Art will always remain a friend to man, teaching him beauty. The negative
silence of the fourth stanza renews in "silent form" its original extra-verbal power ( o r rather extra-rational, for it teases us "out of
thought"). But the stanza is notoriously ambiguous. Life-men
a n d maidens, pastoral-becomes cold marble in art. The urn's final message is authoritative, almost patronizing, but is its beauty
the whole truth? It has left out motion and decay: can truth leave
them out a n d be truth? T h e quotation marks at the end, whether
applying to the entire last two lines o r only to a part, confine the
beauty-truth equation to art's own not necessarily absolute perspective. T h e urn may believe the overlapping of truth and beauty
to be all we need to know o n earth, but is it? T h e poem has prepared us to doubt it.
What o n the face of it is a poem that selflessly celebrates the
visual medium above its own seems now to deconstruct its message. T h e flowery tale crumbles into a desolate lack of all tellers;
silence, the mother of art, into the silence of emptiness.

COMPARITIVE LITERATURE

Keats's ode seems to have very little to d o with the Calvino text
from which I started. It neither begins with what the urn excludes
nor ends with its destruction. The content of the urn's decorations, o n the contrary, fills the poem and is enthusiastically asserted. O n another level, however, the poem does something not
dissimilar to Calvino's essay. Heaping stillness on quietness on silence in its first two lines, it makes the absence of voice its insistent
starting point. As it proceeds, another absence, motionlessness,
becomes the only perspective from which other figures on the urn
are perceived. T h e youth singing beneath the trees is evoked, not
as a youth singing, but as a youth who cannot leave his song. And
the same holds for the lover who can never kiss, etc. And then
comes the little town which is not there, imagined from the perspective of being ever empty, ever a non-town.
Like Calvino, Keats lets absence take over. What finally prevails
is the melody that is not heard, change that is left out, the town
that is left behind. Keats too, presumably singing a hymn to art,
reads his urn from the perspective of its omissions. But the urn is
also there. If Keats sleeps a n d dreams, he does so in the presence
of the urn, whether real o r fictitious. Ekphrastic poetry wants to
supersede art, but first needs the art it wants to supersede. There is
a double movement of attraction and supersession, dependence
and negation. I have dealt with the second half of the story only.
T h e status of the ekphrastic poem as a poem not quite self-sufficient, but calling for its completion by an external visual text, is
the other half. But this would call for another paper.
Hebrew University, Jerusalem

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University Press, 1966.
Halpern, Daniel, e d . Writers on Artists. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1988.
H a r t m a n , Geoffrey. The C'nmediat~d Vision. New Haven: Yale University Press,
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Poetic Speech and the Silence of Art
Shimon Sandbank
Comparative Literature, Vol. 46, No. 3. (Summer, 1994), pp. 225-239.
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[Footnotes]
1

The Parallel of the Arts: Some Misgivings and a Faint Affirmation: Part 1
James D. Merriman
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 2. (Winter, 1972), pp. 153-164.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28197224%2931%3A2%3C153%3ATPOTAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

Works Cited
Ut Pictura Poesis... A History of the Topos and the Problem
Henryk Markiewicz; Uliana Gabara
New Literary History, Vol. 18, No. 3, On Poetry. (Spring, 1987), pp. 535-558.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0028-6087%28198721%2918%3A3%3C535%3AUPPAHO%3E2.0.CO%3B2-H

The Parallel of the Arts: Some Misgivings and a Faint Affirmation: Part 1
James D. Merriman
The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 31, No. 2. (Winter, 1972), pp. 153-164.
Stable URL:
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0021-8529%28197224%2931%3A2%3C153%3ATPOTAS%3E2.0.CO%3B2-T

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