Ekphrastic poems break or challenges the painting sequence because they are not descriptions of the poem, but their own creations based in some way from the picture. Most famously Ode to Grecian Urn, but so many others as well. Anne Carson with her recent Decreation. Sharon Dolin as well with Serious Pink (with "Sad Flowers" by Howard Hodgkin as the cover art which I do not like). But I am particularly intrigued by Sylvia Plath's response to Rousseau's
The Dream.
The Dream mystified critics when it was shown at the Salon des Indépendants in 1910. For Rousseau's young admirers, this work was perhaps the pinnacle of his achievement. When it was unveiled, the poet and critic Apollinaire wrote: "The picture radiates beauty, that is indisputable. I believe nobody will laugh this year". He had been mocked in the past for his strange topics and style
The painter included a poem as the inscription to the piece.
Yadwigha, falling into sweet sleep,
heard in a lovely dream
the sounds of a musette
played by a kind enchanter.
While the moon shone
on the flowers, the verdant trees,
the wild snakes lent an ear
to the instrument's gay airs.
Critics
could not understand why the naked woman should be reclining on a velvet sofa in the middle of the jungle. One critic suggested that it was because the color red needed to be there.
For Rousseau, the answer was obvious. As he explained in a letter to a critic: "The woman sleeping on this sofa dreams that she is transported into the middle of the forest, hearing the charmer's pipe". But it also seems as if they are disturbed not by the naked woman, but wanted to know why the couch should be in the jungle, which Sylvia Plath slyly begins to address in the opening lines of her poem,
Yadwigha, on a Red Couch, Among Lillies
Yadwigha, the literalists once wondered how you
Came to be lying on this baroque couch
Upholstered in red velvet, under the eye
Of uncaged tigers and a tropical moon,
Set in intricate wilderness of green
Heart-shaped leaves, like catalpa leaves, and lilies
Of monstrous size, like no well-bred lilies
It seems the consistent critics wanted you
To choose between your world of jungle green
And the fashionable monde of the red couch
Plath addresses the critics, "But the couch/Stood stubborn in it's jungle: red against green,/Red against fifty variants of green,/The couch glared out at the prosaic eye." She almost apologizes for Rousseau: "Rousseau, to explain why the red couch/Persisted in the picture with the lilies,/Tigers, snakes, and the snakecharmer and you,/And birds of paradise, and the round moon,/Described how you fell dreaming at full of moon/On a red velvet couch within your green-/Tessellared boudoir."
She concludes: "But to a friend, in private, Rousseau confessed his eye/So possessed by the glowing red of the couch which you,/Yadwigha, pose on, that he put you on the couch/To feed his eye with red, such red! under the moon,/In the midst of all that green and those great lilies!"
Active couch, still figure. The figure becomes irrelevant as the couch grows larger and more problematic. Focusing on the couch, she mocks Rousseau, mocks the objectification of the couch, rather than the figure, but by making the figure minor, she allows her "you" to become a subject of a different kind. Plath resists the objectification of the female figure and the consequent strength of the male poetic voice, by looking at the 'pink elephant' as it were. Removal of the body as the core, displacement to the couch, allows her reader, also "you", to wonder at her use of language, much as the critics wondered at the burgundy couch.
Helene Cixous, in
The Laughing Medusa, encourages women to write, to write their way, and "burst with forms much more beautiful than those in frames and sold for a stinking fortune", a point I shall not address here but only to say that Plath's poem is better than much that is sold, but in this instance does not require such antagonistic comparison. Plath complements Rousseau, it seems to me, with a similar joy and humor at their subject matter. Plath and Rousseau make nice companions here.
On the poem itself- the sestina, that highly structured six stanza sextet with a final tercet (there are some other traditional rules that Plath does not use). Lyric poetry seems to be the preferred form for ekphrastic poems, and the sestina quite often. As a last note, I will mention the subtitle that Plath gives the poem,
A sestina for the douanier. The subtitle pokes lightly at his nickname The Douanier, the tax collector, in reference to his many years at that work. He had eventually at 49 given up working to produce the art that made him happy. He died a few months after presenting
The Dream at the Salon.
