Art’s encounter elicits a multiplicity of responses, most of which are perfectly commonplace, barely penetrating superficial acknowledgment. This would be the main method of engagement for most people (including artists) most of the time, since no matter how much one loves or professes to love the arts, no one has enough time in the day to deeply engage with every work of art they come across. Indeed, many works of art don’t bother to ask such from the percipient in the first place, intentions notwithstanding.
Yet there is always the moment of real and lasting engagement. Sometimes this is due to the work’s undeniably high quality, and other times due to whim and circumstance, with works of varying quality. Sometimes, there is only the engager’s want, beneath which the art must break or bend – or transform. Let us consider Jessica Schneider’s poem “Theme de Camille”, from her 2022 collection, Ekphrasm:
Theme de Camille
Color shifts the green
Afternoon beyond parasol,
Her name instrumental—Camille
Moves as weather
Alters an assorted prayer.
Meanwhile, Landon fevers
From the furrow
And brow that pulls her
Threads as she—upheld
By the clasps in her
Petticoat, by rain—
Composes some other
Shower. Soon,
Her parasol will dissolve
An aging frost. Flesh
This garden is, her personal
Hour. Camille, there are none
To chance the quiet
Chase—lover, mother, dissolving
Other. Look to the painter.
Before inspecting the painting that inspired this poem, to what degree does it stand on its own terms? This is not always required (as some context outside the parameters of the poem will be at play at all times) but usually, if a poem’s merits can be appreciated on the page without full recourse to something exterior – even the work it considers, through ekphrasis – then it seems safe to say some special measure of success has been achieved. A poem is a poem, after all, and not mere recapitulation.
This is not to say that an ekphrastic poem is only successful if it achieves autonomy within its written demesne, for there might be ways in which “Theme de Camille” really does depend upon its referent. (This is almost necessarily true, for to do otherwise would defeat the point of the ekphrastic exercise.) That a poem depends on some exterior context in itself does not withhold an artist from branching out of that context in a compelling way, inciting unexpected points of engagement for the reader and thus refreshing one’s conception of the inspiratory object.
Artistic success, in short, is more determined by what a poet does with the opportunities laid out before them than by what those opportunities are in particular. Ekphrasis lays out a number of opportunities. It is up to the poet to decide which to deploy, and how to deploy them, in such a way that resists the most expected/overdone and rote points of engagement. If not, why even bother? The reader can always just sort themselves through the referenced art-work, if it’s mere re-phrasing one’s after. After all, there are only so many ways to re-state, in rote fashion, the same observed phenomena. The non-rote route, though, is simply best if one wishes to satisfy (provoke, even) an experienced and impassioned reader. Anyway, on to the poem, and its decisions.
Presentation of subject: Camille – a name, usually that of a woman. But not just Camille, though, it is Camille’s theme, and this means, what? Perhaps one might expect a generalization of the subject, the particulars of which will be unfurled over the course of the poem. In European classical music terms, a theme is a short (a few bars, in some cases) melody out of which the composer might either develop a larger structure, or craft variations that transform its shape, mood, or character whilst preserving key elements that somehow preserve their nature as variations, and not simply pieces unto themselves.
In any case, here is a theme – sans variation, or no? What of Camille – auguring an examination of femininity, maybe?
Color shifts the green
Afternoon beyond parasol,
Her name instrumental—Camille
Moves as weather
Alters an assorted prayer.
The “instrumental” ties this opening stanza to the previously mentioned associations with music. The verbs (“shifts”; “moves”; “alters”) introduce the notion of dynamism – change, fluidity, historically related with the feminine – that one might now expect to be the dominating character of this theme. “Camille,” here, might be an actual person, potentially the speaker’s muse, or even simply the name itself, its sound-sense utilized as an object (an instrument) for the speaker to play with/upon. Or both, simultaneously.
The phrasing is soft, lyrical. The “green afternoon” and “parasol” and “weather” seem to place the narrative outdoors, somewhere brightly lush and casual, perhaps. Note, also, the clever word-play with “alters” – its involvement with “prayer” calls to mind its homophone, “altar.” There is a religiosity, a spirituality, at work, then, as well.
And why is color shifting the green afternoon beyond parasol? Is it to say that the domination of color (in the eyes of the speaker, or Camille) moves one’s minding outside the merely material – that which can be held lightly, over one’s shoulder, in the act of shielding oneself from nature? Weather along with color seem to be the primary actors here. Again, spirituality harkens. Perspective changes.
The mysteriousness of the stanza ushers in a nice variety of interpretations – the hallmark of any worthwhile work of art. But let’s see if any gain comparative definition as the poem continues:
Meanwhile, Landon fevers
From the furrow
And brow that pulls her
Threads as she—upheld
By the clasps in her
Petticoat, by rain—
Composes some other
Shower…
Out of nowhere, the imposition of another. Landon – a name, usually that of a man. He “fevers” – sickness, ailment? Agitation, excitement? Heat? This condition arises from the “furrow / And brow that pulls her / Threads as she—upheld…” First of all, who is Landon and why is Landon here? But also ask: how important are these questions? Perhaps their importance will be determined by the poem’s own answering of them, later on. Or the reader can content themselves with the notion that we have the sudden inclusion (intrusion?) of, perhaps, a masculine other, who is himself catalyzed by…the “furrow / And brow that pulls her / Threads…?” The speaker splits the cliché “furrowed brow” – which furrow, though, and whose brow? Camille’s, his own? And how exactly do these pull her threads – whatever those are?
Interpretation might get a little tricky now. Is it time to appeal to the authority of the painting? Maybe, but there is the idea that this masculine other is energized by Camille’s motion (see my treatment of the first stanza) which seems to exist distinct and apart from her surrounds. Upheld by her garments, and rain, she nevertheless “composes some other / Shower.” Note, again, the evocation of water (i.e. fluidity, flow), and the stanza’s nigh-erotic suggestion.
Or we can just look at the Claude Monet painting that inspired this poem, and imagine that Landon is a viewer in a gallery who comes across this work and is moved by it, by the techniques (“furrow,” as in brushstrokes?; “pulls her / Threads…”) made out of the artist’s concentration (“brow”). Landon, then, acquires specificity of perspective, and enlarges the narrative scope of the poem, as a result. In the painting, though, it doesn’t seem like it’s raining, so one might be confused – until, of course, one sees how the figure (Camille Monet, the artist’s wife) is of the same color (mostly) as the clouds behind her. In this view, she is also clasped by a kind of rain, although different, and one she holds some degree of control over – hence “composes” (another musical reference) rather than “is composed of”. Landon’s fascination is two-fold, it seems, for Camille as composed by Monet and Camille as composer.
(…)
Composes some other
Shower. Soon,
Her parasol will dissolve
An aging frost. Flesh
This garden is, her personal
Hour. Camille, there are none
To chance the quiet
Chase—lover, mother, dissolving
Other. Look to the painter.
So much “dissolve.” One might intuit that the parasol dissolves “an aging frost” quite literally, as it might catch light frost in the air. Note the line break, though, that isolates “Flesh” from its sentence, which allows one to associate “Flesh” with “aging frost.” Bodily impermanence in the face of time? More likely this enjambment reinforces the idea of the natural world subsuming, or gaining precedence over, the body – for so far, all we’ve mentioned of/about the body, are two names and one lone brow.
The idea, enjambment aside, is “Flesh / This garden is, her personal / Hour.” Referring to the painting, one understands that it depicts Mrs. Monet on a windy summer’s stroll (with the son, Jean, tagging along), or, in other words, a “personal / Hour.” Why is this “garden,” the meadow’s greenery, fleshly? Is it acknowledgement of nature’s “body,” of more interest to Camille in her leisure than others? That of her son’s…or her husband’s, the painter who composes her elevated figure from below?
Then, the speaker addresses Camille directly. What is the quiet chase? Given the predominance of the feminine, and the slight incursion of the masculine, one might easily read it as the romantic chase – how woman is captured as lover, turns into mother, etc. Then dissolves as other? Well, in any case, there are none here to chance it. Camille, in her personal hour, is more than lover or mother, labels which dissolve the ungraspable “other,” and reduce her, perhaps, from whatever rapture she has encountered on the cloudy hill.
But then comes the final line’s injunction: “Look to the painter.” Clearly, in the painting, she faces towards whoever’s behind the canvas – Monet, yes, but one can include Landon, given his prior mention. Is he a painter, as well, who’s come before the painting to seek inspiration? They are “other,” too, and unavoidable, parts of the whole she composes and is composed within. Camille’s outward stare, breaking out to meet Landon’s, might also break through the fourth wall and meet the reader’s, given the power she’s been newly invested by poetic ekphrasis.
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There is vagueness here, certainly, but one shouldn’t be irked by it. A musical theme, after all, doesn’t have to be “about” anything more than its own shifting sound, color, and mood, developed and resolved in the pattern it sets out for itself. “Theme de Camille” finds resolution by offering several associations, superbly phrased; imposing a certain odd distance between those associations and the reader, yet binding them together in such a way that one can still (through close reading) discover coherent narrative.
I risk overreading, I’m willing to admit. Some ambiguities are written in as such, not to be fully resolved. And so much I’ve potentially missed or fumbled. The point is, through original tacks in ekphrasis, an entire world of creative connections might arise. If one were to read this poem at random, aware only of, maybe, its relation to Claude Monet’s Woman with a Parasol – Madame Monet and Her Son – would anything necessarily be lost? Would there be nothing worth appreciation? Read it again: any clichés? Does its lyrical felicity, wise enjambment, and pithy concision stand on its own terms? Does it not add to, or build upon, its referenced image rather than merely re-state its details? Does this freshness of approach not open up new avenues of engagement for any work of art, in any medium? No? Yes?
Look to the poet.
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More from Ezekiel Yu: Blown Back On Me: Analyzing James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room”, Dream’s Fever: On Werner Herzog’s “Of Walking In Ice” (1978) and “The Twilight World” (2022), City Wondering: On Mina Loy’s “Ephemerid”