This document provides information about teaching poems, including examples of poems that reference other works of art or poems. It discusses several poems, including "Musée des Beaux Arts" by W.H. Auden, which describes how suffering can occur without being noticed, and "According to Brueghel" by William Carlos Williams, which describes the fall of Icarus as depicted in Brueghel's painting. It also examines poems by Kate Tempest, Billy Collins, and Carol Ann Duffy that reference or reimagine other classic works.

1. 101 ways of teaching a poem
Poems about paintings and
poems speaking to poems
Alan Pulverness
Norwich Institute for Language Education
(NILE)
LMCS SIG PCE,
IATEFL Manchester
April 2015

2. The sky is so perfect it looks like a painting
Kate Tempest Brand New Ancients

4. About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position:

5. About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a
window or just walking dully along;

6. Musée des Beaux Arts
W H Auden
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood
Its human position: how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking
dully along;
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, skating
On a pond at the edge of the wood:
They never forgot
That even the dreadful martyrdom must run its course
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and the torturer's horse
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure; the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water, and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
with itself
sweating in the sun
that melted
the wings' wax
unsignificantly
off the coast
there was
a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning
Landscape with the Fall of Icarus
William Carlos Williams

7. No one even noticed as he splashed
and hit the sea bed
Kate Tempest Icarus

9. As far as mental anguish goes,
the old painters were no fools.

10. Musée des Beaux Arts Revisited
Billy Collins
As far as mental anguish goes,
the old painters were no fools.
They understood how the mind,
the freakiest dungeon in the castle,
can effortlessly imagine a crab with the face of a priest
or an end table complete with genitals.
And they knew that the truly monstrous
lies not so much in the wildly shocking,
a skeleton spinning a wheel of fire, say,
but in the small prosaic touch
added to a tableau of the hellish,
the detail at the heart of the horrid.
In Bosch's The Temptation of St. Anthony,
for instance, how it is not so much
the boar-faced man in the pea-green dress
that frightens, but the white mandolin he carries,
not the hooded corpse in a basket,
but the way the basket is rigged to hang from a bare
branch;
how, what must have driven St. Anthony
to the mossy brink of despair
was not the big, angry-looking fish
in the central panel,
the one with the two mouse-like creatures
conferring on its tail,
but rather what the fish is wearing:
a kind of pale orange officer's cape
and, over that,
a metal body-helmet secured by silvery wires,
a sensible buckled chin strap,
and, yes, the ultimate test of faith --
the tiny sword that hangs from the thing,
that nightmare carp,
secure in its brown leather scabbard.

11. About suffering they told bloody lies,
The Old Masters
sweet poses, prettifying sanctity,
turn crimes to candy in the name of art.

12. Caravaggio gets it right, of course;
not for him the blithe denial of pain
and
young Isaac with his head twisted, held down
and even at the knife’s point screaming still.

13. 2 Galleria degli Uffizi
Caravaggio gets it right, of course;
not for him the blithe denial of pain;
when a boy’s told he’s going to be slain
because some god wills it he’s going to scream himself hoarse;
he’ll fight and fight against the manic force
of this crazed old man; arms and shoulders strain
to shake his grip and be free, yet in vain
till the ram appears from a thicket of gorse.
There’s an angel staying the killer’s hand
and a jolly fine church up on a hill
but what you remember is the weird frown
of the interrupted Abraham, and
young Isaac with his head twisted, held down
and even at the knife’s point screaming still.

14. Bibliography
• Peter & Michael Benton Double Vision Hodder
1990
• Paul Durcan Crazy about Women National Gallery
of Ireland 1991
• Paul Durcan Give me your hand Macmillan 1994
• Peter Porter Mars André Deutsch 1988
• Carol Ann Duffy Answering Back: Living poets reply
to the poetry of the past Picador 2008