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Genevieve
Perhaps those languid eyes are looking up
At angels hymning in the dove-grey sky,
So soft and saccharine (and fluent in
Provincial French) to give her haloed head
A tilt insouciante and pull her lips
Into a supermodel pout. It’s prayer
Perhaps that’s brought the crimson to her cheek
Or just the sudden thought she’s somehow come
To find the place where grace and beauty meet.
And then again perhaps her thoughts are on
The mystical enigma of a barn
Without a roof; or how the summered bursts
Of grass can whistle secrets to the wind;
Or how the incense offered at the Throne
Of God may well be redolent of sheep.
.
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Jeffrey Essmann is an essayist and poet living in New York. His poetry has appeared in numerous magazines and literary journals, among them Agape Review, America Magazine, Dappled Things, the St. Austin Review, U.S. Catholic, Grand Little Things, Heart of Flesh Literary Journal, and various venues of the Benedictine monastery with which he is an oblate. He is editor of the Catholic Poetry Room page on the Integrated Catholic Life website.
Or maybe those angels are directing her gaze out over the pasture, so that none will become lost. Anyway, Jeffrey, a captivating reading of Pearce’s painting, both humorous and solemn.
(I think there’s a category here for blank verse, under which your poem might also be filed.)
Jeffrey, our world needs much more indication of “where grace and beauty meet” as you suggest here. Such a lovely poem.
I loved the juxtaposition of the prosaic with the luxurious – the supermodel pout against the pastoral scenery, and the earthy smell of sheep being the smell of heaven rather than the perfumed aroma of incense.
Thanks for the reality check, Jeffrey.
Much of the beauty of this poem is due to the blank verse, which allows the poet to choose his diction freely to match the subject, the tone, and the atmosphere. Blank verse is just as much a part of the English canon of metrical verse as anything that rhymes.
This is also an amazingly effective ekphrastic poem on the Pearce painting.
An altogether lovely poem. Thank you.
I really enjoyed this. Your diction and enjambment are incredible. I love seeing more modern pastoral poetry. The only word I would change would be “supermodel”. It doesn’t seem to match with the tone of your poem. Overall a great read
What’s beautiful about this poem is its adherence to analysing what the painting’s subject is doing from beginning to end while also attributing some sort of role to every element present there (the grass, the barn, sheep, etc.); a perfect ekphrastic poem. And I fully concur with Mr. Salemi’s point: blank verse suits it. Great composition, Mr. Essmann. God bless!
Jeffrey, this portrait of a saint seems to me a difficult subject for ekphrasis–as I believe you recognize with the repetition of “perhaps.” One simply cannot define the mind or spirit of the central figure with the information supplied by the painter. You go for the face (eyes, cheek, lips), and I notice your title does not include the artist’s “saint,” though you acknowledge the halo. You have to note the grass and the barn (at which Genevieve is not looking), but give greater importance to the sheep. Perhaps the lifted nose suggests she is most aware of the smell which is where you go with “incense,” bringing in (perhaps!) the late pontiff’s idea that shepherds should smell like the sheep. It would be interesting to know how you approached the task and ended up with the incense at the throne of God.
Thank you, everyone, as always, for your very kind appreciation of my work. It means the world to me.
Maragaret, thank you especially for your comments, to which some random responses…
I can take neither credit nor blame for writing the poem as an ekphratstic. This was an entry in a contest sponsored by Catholic Literary Arts, an organization that sponsors several poetry contributions during the year, if anyone here is interested, only one of them about ekphrastics). Truth be told, I wasn’t particularly taken by this year’s selection of paintings to choose from and went with the Pearce primarily because I thought it was lovely.
In doing my initial research on the painting, since, with an ekphrastic, I try to factor in the painter’s reason for painting it as much as my reason for writing about it, I found that Pearce, while interested in working with Biblical topics from early on in his career did Sainte Genevieve during one of his later pastoral periods, and his interest in the girl may have been more as a shepherdess than a Catholic saint. (The halo is very faint.) And it is also, of course, an ex-pat Francophile’s tribute to one of the patron saints of his adopted city.
Shepherdess or saint, she was decidedly beautiful in Pearce’s telling. When I first prayed with the painting, I was first struck by how much young Genevieve reminded me of Linda Evangelista (90s supermodel), which informed the line about her pout. Far more importantly, though, I saw it as a painting about ecstasy, on three particular levels: ecstasy as an external vision; as a sudden, intense interior experience of beauty and grace; and as an existential epiphany in which one experiences the “is-ness” of things (barns, grass, sheep) and thereby their sacredness. (A Buddhist term for this I particularly like is “direct pointing”.) This last was highly informed by my Midwest childhood (Wisconsin) and my own early, minor ecstasies prompted by barns, prairies grasses and, in my case, the smell of cows.
And my use of “perhaps” was my acknowledgment of the difficulty, if not impossibility, of describing someone else’s religious experience, given the difficulty of expressing my own—which is why, I guess, I write poetry.
Thanks again, everyone.
Jeffrey