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June 29, 2012

Poetry Friday--Ekphrasis

I love ekphrastic poetry, which, simply put, is art about art. It provides a puzzle in that I have to find the original work being written about. The internet makes it easy to find the original works. Twenty years ago, though, I might never have been able to appreciate the ekphrastic poem by Eavan Boland titled "Degas's Laundresses."
Degas's Laundresses

You rise, you dawn
roll-sleeved Aphrodites,
out of a camisole brine,
a linen pit of stitches,
silking the fitted sheets
away from you like waves.

You seam dreams in the folds
of wash from which freshes
the whiff and reach of fields
where it bleached and stiffened.
Your chat’s sabbatical:
brides, wedding outfits,

a pleasure of leisured women
are sweated into the folds,
the neat heaps of linen.
Now the drag of the clasp.
Your wrists basket your waist.
You round to the square weight.

Wait. There behind you.
A man. There behind you.
Whatever you do don’t turn.
Why is he watching you?
Whatever you do don’t turn.
Whatever you do don’t turn.

See he takes his ease
staking his easel so,
slowly sharpening charcoal,
closing his eyes just so,
slowly smiling as if
so slowly he is

unbandaging his mind.
Surely a good laundress
would understand its twists,
its white turns,
its blind designs:

it’s your winding sheet.
Prior to the internet, art was mainly seen in library books. If you were lucky, your public library may have had an adequate collection, but many, if not most, art book collections are lacking in depth. Today, with internet search engines, it takes mere minutes to find a particular work of art.

Here are two I found:

Repasseuses courtesy Musée d'Orsay.


La repasseuse courtesy Musée d'Orsay.


Neither picture may be the one Boland examines since she clearly talks about the laundresses grasping their loads of folded laundry. I'm going with the top picture, though, because it shows the "roll-sleeved Aphrodites" with the one woman yawning because it is dawn and she's still half-asleep.

Surprisingly, there are several more Degas works containing laundresses to be found online. These hardworking women appear to be a favorite subject of his. Next week, I'll look at another Degas laundress picture.

Make sure you stop by Paper Tigers for the Poetry Friday Round-Up.

16 comments:

  1. You "seam dreams" -- how great is that?! I am a big fan of art and poems that take domestic scenes and reveal their beauty. Thanks so much for sharing!

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  2. I love how the artist, the poet and the laundresses all inhabit this poem! And this part is my favorite, too:

    "You seam dreams in the folds
    of wash from which freshes
    the whiff and reach of fields
    where it bleached and stiffened."

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    1. I never considered laundry to be so beautiful. It still is not when doing it, but is when talked about. Lovely.

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    2. I never considered laundry to be so beautiful. It still is not when doing it, but is when talked about. Lovely.

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  3. I love Eavan Boland's poetry - thanks for sharing! I was captured by the "seam dreams" too, and your post brought to mind Irene's wonderful book of ekphrastic poems, THE COLOR OF LOST ROOMS.

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  4. So lovely! I enjoy ekphrastic poetry too. What a treat to read Boland's work today. Thank you!

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  5. That is so interesting. I didn't know the term Ekphrasis, and take it as a lapse in my education since I still remember very clearly learning poems about Brueghel's Icarus!

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  6. Ekphrasis -- I learned something new today! I'm so glad Boland was inspired by Degas's laundresses and not his ballerinas.

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  7. Ekphrasis is not a common term. If you look it up at dictionary.com, you get this:

    ekphrasis
    - no dictionary results

    I've only been aware of the term for a few years.

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  8. Though everyone likes "seam dreams," for me the lines that follow are the ones that really paint a picture: "...the folds / of wash from which freshes / the whiff and reach of fields / where it bleached and stiffened." I can see and smell and feel that - no abstraction, just a perfect picture from words. What a wonderful poem, Diane. Thanks for posting it. And I think you're right - it's the top painting.

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  9. I love the visual of "camisole brine". What a wonderfully visual poem.

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  10. camisole brine is also what caught my attention, Katya!

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  11. I'm going to show my age and ask if anyone else remembers her mother using a coke bottle while ironing? My mother's had a metal sprinkler head that fit into the bottle top like a cork. The bottle was filled with water to dampen the clothes so that the wrinkles could be more easily ironed out. My mother had a whole routine that included sprinkling the clothes and then putting them into the refrigerator prior to ironing, perhaps simply to keep them from drying out.

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  12. Nope. No coke bottles filled with water. My mother ironed every Sunday night. If I happen upon Ed Sullivan on PBS, I phantom smell Niagara spray starch and hear steamy hissing.

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  13. Ooo, I forgot about spray starch!

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  14. Yes! Coke bottle with a cork & perforated metal head, and since ironing was one of my chores, I spent plenty of time sprinkling my clothes each week. Sounds like ancient history now, doesn't it? ((Never did the refrigerator thing....that's new to me.)

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