The relationship between literature and the visual arts is complex. How does sight transfer into sound? Stillness into movement? What is lost and what is gained? A poet with an ekphrastic impulse, Robert Browning addresses such abstract questions.
Eurydice to Orpheus: A Picture by Leighton (1864) was written to accompany Frederic Leighton’s painting Orpheus and Eurydice of the same year. Both works present the Greek legend in which, in order to retrieve his wife Eurydice, Orpheus must lead her out of the underworld without looking behind him. However, he disobeys, and his wife vanishes, remaining there forever. The painting shows the two entangled, Eurydice grasping her husband as he twists away from her. In his dramatic monologue, Browning chooses to vocalise Leighton’s desperate Eurydice, begging her husband to provide her with his gaze. His poem speaks for the painting.
As the painting itself is based on literary myth, famously accounted in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Browning returns the story to the verbal world. The subject itself defies materiality, initially transmitted orally, and now granted new life across different mediums, both visual and verbal. Eurydice’s imperatives certainly provide the poem with a clear voice: “look at me.” However, the gaze she desires is objectified: “But give them me, the mouth, the eyes, the brow!” She lists distinct, material features which can be located in the painting. Although there is a definite voice, the voice commands visual observation. Furthermore, the fact that the poem opens with this conjunction “But,” as though mid-sentence, immediately immerses the reader into its world. Much like a painting, the poem includes no introductory material, simply being. It is a single moment rather than an entire, self-contained narrative. Browning acknowledges the history of this oral myth by blurring the boundary between the visual and verbal.
By accompanying a painting, this poem about looking makes its contents more tangible. The reader is invited to exercise their own gaze as they study the visual work, re-enacting the narrative. The “immortal look” described by Browning is not only a reference to Orpheus’s deadly gaze, but also to the still, silent scene of the painting itself in which a single moment is forever frozen. The painting, although depicting the moment before Orpheus looks at his wife, thus also becomes the consequence of this incoming gaze, in which “no past is mine, no future.” By representing these two stages of the narrative, the painting transcends the fixity of visual art and adopts the more fluid nature of poetry, moving across time and space. Browning’s poem displays the way in which, when in comparison, the two art forms tend to bleed into one another.
“Orpheus and Eurydice, by Frederic Leighton, c. 1864, oil on canvas – Leighton House Museum – London – DSC01822” by Daderot is marked with CC0 1.0.