WORDS AND IMAGES

The Greenburgh Arts and Culture committee has announced the return of its monthly series on ekphrastic writing, which is writing, often poetry, inspired by the visual arts. Created by Brenda Connor-Bey, Greenburgh’s first poet laureate, “Learning to See” will be held at various Greenburgh venues in February, March and April. The free workshops, which are open to beginning and established writers alike, are sponsored by Poets and Writers Inc., the Friends of the Greenburgh Library and the Theodore D. Young Community Center. For more information, go to Greenburghartsandculture.org and click on “Learning to See.”

Ekphrasis has a long history dating from the ancient Greeks. (The word is Greek for “speak out.”) Among the earliest examples is Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in “The Iliad.” But perhaps my favorite is W.H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” a meditation on Pieter Bruegel’s “Landscape With the Fall of Icarus” and the way life goes on in the face of unspeakable tragedy:

“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.”