Ekphrasis poetry uses works of visual art as inspiration for poetry. The poems in the document describe two famous paintings - Pieter Bruegel's "Landscape with the Fall of Icarus" and use them to reflect on human suffering and the indifference of others. A third poem describes the landscape of industrial ruins and uses it as a setting to pause and reflect. All three poems are examples of ekphrasis poetry, using visual artworks as a starting point for poetic exploration.

1. Ekphrasis Poetry
Poetry using Art as Inspiration

3. According to Brueghel
when Icarus fell
it was spring
a farmer was ploughing
his field
the whole pageantry
of the year was
awake tingling
near
the edge of the sea
concerned
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
Pieter Brueghel
William Carlos Williams

4. About suffering they were never wrong
The old Masters: how well they understood
In human position: how well it takes a 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
house
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 skym
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.
Pieter Brueghel
W.H. Auden

5. Is the identifying nomenclature
I received
before I embarked—
a shrewd silhouette passing over
the pink of a sky carelessly
blackening. Steel
girder foliage
crops up, angered by boot-clad
ankles trudging.
Rail fences sprawl
westward, parallel my destination;
a gnarled thorn-bush of iron,
rust, knolls of industrial bones, piled
upward as if swept together,
an incomprehensible Babel, long
since collapsed, becoming another
part of the landscape.
Perched at the summit,
surveying square miles,
debris-filled surfaces, tired
structures leaning idle,
I’m plotting a course—
catching my breath.

6. Hello, little voice—
where is your mouth? That hollow
closet that cradled your teeth—
pearls lined up on pink cushions—
Where are the lips that kissed
your mother goodnight? The eyes
that crinkled the skin around
them like gathering velvet, as rippling
stream-water bubbled from
your lungs in gales of mysterious laughter—
Little, little voice, where have you gone—
what has become of you?