Although Brueghel’s ‘Landscape with the Fall of Icarus’ has been given so much attention by poets, there is another painting by his hand which has evoked a similar variety of fascinating responses. Hunters in the Snow is part of Breughel’s seasonal series representing the months of the year, of which only 5 remain: Hunters in the Snow (January), The Gloomy Day (February), The Harvesters (June), The Corn Harvest (August), and Return of the Herd (November). The panels belong to a long-standing northern tradition of representing the 4 seasons, one that can be traced back to calendar illustrations in illuminated medieval manuscripts. The Hunters in the Snow is considered to be the best example of Brueghel’s technique of combining the characteristics of Nature and human activities on one canvas. The painting depicts large foregrounded figures of hunters and their dogs descending to a village which, engulfed in a stark winter landscape, appears as a miniature cosmos of humanity at work and at play, seen from the vantage point from above, or what is called the ‘balcony motif’ (an overall view of the unfolding landscape).
Poets have approached this painting (and the other seasonal panels) from a vast number of perspectives, but the most prolific of these have been by William Carlos Williams, whose final volume of poems Pictures from Brueghel engages with the paintings in unique and various ways. Although a modernist whose poetry had responded in exciting ways to the early 20th century art movements, these final poems are a reversal of the modernist strain of most of his ekphrastic poems to identify the himself as poet with this ‘early master’ of art. Although some critics have implied that Williams’ poems based on Breughel’s paintings were somehow less original than his other ekphrastic poems – the artworks serving as a ‘crutch’ to compensate for a failing imagination – these poems are far from being easy copies. Just as Williams tried to adapt the innovations of Cubism to the structures of his poems (and we will have a look at some of these in a later entry) – so did he attempt to translate what he perceived to be the essence of Brueghel’s paintings to his own medium. In fact, the nine ‘Brueghel’ poems in the volume are widely regarded as his most tangible translations from the visual to the verbal arts. His response to Hunter’s in the Snow is perhaps the most ‘ekphrastically faithful’ to a painting of any other I have encountered.
The Hunters in the Snow
William Carlos Williams
The over-all picture is winter
icy mountains
in the background the return
from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
sturdy hunters lead in
their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix
between his antlers the cold
inn yard is
deserted but for a huge bonfire
that flares wind-driven tended by
women who cluster
about it to the right beyond
the hill is a pattern of skaters
Brueghel the painter
concerned with it all has chosen
a winter-struck bush for his
foreground to
complete the picture
(Collected Poems II, 389)
In this poem, Williams describes a balanced winter landscape, with its ‘icy mountains’, ‘cold/inn yard’, ‘wind-driven fire’, and adds a ‘winter-struck’ bush at the center foreground as final touch. This landscape is populated by human beings who hunt, cluster around a bonfire, and enjoy winter activities. What is striking about Williams’ arrangement of objects in the poem is that, in various ways, it invites the reader to be a ‘viewer’ of the painting. First of all, Williams ‘frames’ his reconstruction of the painting by placing the word ‘winter’ at the top and in the final lines ‘a winter-struck bush to stress the painting’s place in the calendar series. But he also builds in a ‘verbal frame’ (as pointed out by Wendy Steiner in The Colors of Rhetoric, Chicago Press, 1982), by placing the word ‘picture’ in the first and final lines. In this way, Williams not only offers his poem as an imitation of Brueghel’s painting, but stresses its nature as an object to be viewed as an artwork. It is this insistence on the materiality of the poem-as-painting that informs the text from beginning to end. After naming the source of the poem (Hunters in the Snow) in the title, Williams goes on to painstakingly describe the details of the painting. In the final lines, he focuses on the artist himself and the very act of creation which generated the painting: Brueghel’s considered selection and placement of a ‘winter struck bush’ – a formal artistic decision imitated in the poem by Williams’ own selection of this detail.
But Williams goes beyond simple description of the painting’s details and does something very interesting: he takes on the spatial aspects of the painting and incorporates these into the poem (as he had done with cubism in his earlier, modernist poetry). First of all, he calls attention to ‘background’ and ‘foreground’, ‘left’ and ‘right’ corners of the painting (referring to conventional perspective) and to a ‘pattern of skaters’ which reminds the reader that the poem is concerned first and foremost with the material qualities of the painting. But Williams doesn’t leave it there: he engages the reader as active viewer through a structural organization of detail which play on vision: ‘saccadic movement’ (here’s your new word- for- the- day’). This is a term originating in perceptual theory and, when applied to the spatial arts, refers to the technique artists use to guide the viewer’s eye in a deliberate manner over the surface of a painting and was first described by Christopher Collins in relationship to poetry (in “The Moving Eye in Williams Earlier Poetry” in William Carlos Williams: Man and Poet, 1983). The term is used to explain the manner in which both the physical eye and the inner ‘eye’ explore visual space and seek to perceive shapes and relationships – a visual response which involves a series of ‘optical shifts’ (small movements of the eye) that have to happen before the viewer can take in the entire image. Collins applied this theory to Williams’ well-known poem ‘The Red Wheelbarrow’ and demonstrated that saccadic shifts, whose principal indicators in verbal texts are prepositions, operate either by fixing on details of objects (which are nouns) or by relating separate objects spatially in a poem. How does Williams use this technique in ‘Hunters in the Snow’?
By first introducing ‘the overall picture’, Williams creates the sensation of approaching a painting from some distance, perhaps imitating the way in which a viewer moving through a museum might first take in the painting’s entire surface. In the second line, Williams immediately shifts to a ‘close-up’ view of the painting: to the mountains in the background, implying that the reader/viewer has moved closer to the painting. The rest of the painting would lie in the peripheral field – the area not focussed on at the moment. (I would take issue with Williams here, as I think that the eye would alight first on the large image of the hunters in the foreground). In line 3, ‘the return’ directs the viewer’s gaze once more to the foreground. A shift from background to foreground is different type of optical adjustment, called a ‘vergence’ (your second new-word-for-the-day). This eye movement allows us, according to Collins, to ‘zoom in’ on objects at various distances from the eye – in effect to break the picture plane and enter a three-dimensional environment. The difference between a saccade and a vergence is that saccades involve a shift of angle to a new fixation point and a vergence is simply a readjustment for depth. Aside from the poem’s four ‘vergent’ shifts from back to front to middle-ground to front again, there are three saccadic shifts: in lines 5-6 (from the left / sturdy hunters lead in’); in line 7 (‘their pack the sign); and in lines 10-11 (‘the cold / inn yard). All of these involve lateral or vertical movements of the eye, but only one uses a prepositional marker. Williams’ idiosyncratic use of saccades and vergences invites continuous movement of the ‘inner eye’, preventing it from landing for more than a moment on any one specific element of his ‘poetic canvas’.
Note added (Nov. 8): One other structural aspect of the painting that Williams has adapted from Brueghel is the complex interplay of diagonal and horizontal lines. The foreground is dominated by horizontals (from the base of the trees and figures of the hunters and their dogs and running to the foreground); an opposite diagonal starts at the lower right corner and runs to the far left of the painting. The horizontal lines of the frozen canals predominate the background. Art historians have argued that Brueghel’s diagonals and horizontal lines serve his interest in oppositions (in this instance, between humans and landscape). Wendy Steiner (Colours of Rhetoric) has argued that the oppositions are created in the poem through the division of the poem’s ‘surface’ into thematic bands as well as shifts from background to foreground, which create an interplay between the natural element and the human element. The three diagonal bands divide the painting into the hunt and hunters, a cross-section signifying winter, and the frozen non-human landscape. Williams imitates these oppositions by structurally grouping these in the poem and drawing the reader’s attention from one to the other (note also his lack of punctuation, which serves to conflate the human and natural world).
With a few exceptions (for example, the exclusion of black and white colours and the splash of red, and the blackbirds – which seem to be an important detail of Brueghel’s paintings in general – and the Inclusion or magnifying the importance of the inn sign), Williams’ poem comes very close to a faithful reproduction of Brueghel’s painting. As is typical of Williams, he does not add meaning, use metaphor or any ‘associative’ details: he simply records what he sees. He offers us a painting to view and leaves it to us to find our way around it. This is, in my view, is in keeping with the original idea of ekphrasis: to create an image that can be seen clearly ‘before the eye’ of the listener. By so closely following the details of the painting and using very specific artistic strategies to create the effect of ‘seeing’, Williams has produced an ‘artefact’ that comes as close to the original painting as we are likely to find either in Williams’ verse or elsewhere.
The next posting, “Perspectives III” will be a final summing up of what we can look for in ekphrastic texts.