"If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting (review)

"If Mine Had Been the Painter's Hand": The Indeterminate in Nineteenth-Century Poetry and Painting, by Lawrence J. Starzyk; pp. xii + 299. New York: Peter Lang, 1999, $54.95.

Lawrence Starzyk's new volume is a commendable effort to accomplish for Victorian poetry and painting what recent studies of ekphrasis have done for cultural studies at large. In asking how accurately and resourcefully William Wordsworth and his Victorian heirs recreate paintings in their poems, Starzyk is also inviting critics to consider how far poetry should aspire toward the condition of the visual arts and how a good poem can even surpass its visual model. In becoming one of Andrea del Sarto's incarnated canvases, for example, to what extent does Robert Browning's beautiful but soulless Lucrezia allow the appreciative but critical poet to exceed in insight the painter who inspires him? One may feel that Browning's monologues on art are not merely imitating the paintings of Andrea del Sarto and Fra Lippo Lippi; they also seem to be the kinds of poems that an entire "poetics of ekphrasis from Homer to Ashbery," in James Heffernan's phrase, exist to express.

An attractive feature of Starzyk's book is its inclusion of many black-and-white reproductions of the paintings and drawings he discusses. Especially illuminating is his analysis of Richard Wilson's painting of Carnarvon Castle, which uses two mirror images: a representation inside the picture of the actual painter and an image of the castle reflected on the surface of the pond. Starzyk convincingly associates this double mirroring with Wordsworth's habit of matching a picture from the past composed in his mind's eye with a picture he is now observing. The disparity between two such pictures of Peele Castle in "Elegiac Stanzas" (1807) leads Wordsworth to acknowledge that, before his brother drowned at sea, a serene intuition of a benevolent principle at the heart of nature deceived the poet into living in an unreal paradise.

Starzyk uses George Watts's painting of "Love and Death" (1847) not (as one anticipates) to explicate Alfred Tennyson's short lyric of the same name, but as a visual equivalent of the speaker's description of Rose in "The Gardener's Daughter" (1833-34). We are shown how "the spine-line in Watts's portrait and the speaker's picture of Rose function visually to introduce chiaroscuro and [. . .] that point or line where light and dark," like love and death, "give way to each other" (74). Tennyson told his son Hallam that the real portrait in "The Gardener's Daughter" is the one created in words rather than paint at the center of the poem. But when Rose's death and the idyll's status as a dramatic monologue are finally revealed in the closing frame, readers may prefer to demote Rose's framing at the poem's center to just another mirror-text, like Eustance's painting of Juliet in the opening frame. In either case, by leading simultaneously toward and away from the void at the center of the speaker's life and poem, Tennyson's multiple frames lend support to Starzyk's theory that the meaning of "The Gardener's Daughter" is indeterminate.

In his chapter on Browning, Starzyk ingeniously suggests that J. M. W. Turner's painting of Rome from the Vatican (1820) is a visual analogue of Browning's tribute to Elizabeth in "One Word More" (1855). Just as Raphael contemplates how his masterpieces will be viewed in a great museum of men and women, so Browning wonders how the rare confessional lyric that concludes his volume Men and Women (1855) will rest amid that volume's sequence of dramatic monologues. Starzyk also cleverly illustrates, in M. C. Escher's lithograph "Encounter" (1944), the elusive relation between the "two soul-sides" (98) of the poet...