Picture and Poem

Peele Castle, in a storm, by Sir George Beaumont

The Elegiac Stanzas were inspired by the above picture, freeing Wordsworth to write about the death of his brother John. The poem subtitled Suggested by a Picture of Peele Castle, in a Storm Painted by Sir George Beaumont includes in the fourth stanza his own wish that he might express what ,"then I saw": "The light that never was, on sea or land,/ The consecration, and the Poet's dream."

He wishes that he could paint a world "how different from this". Once, before the pain of his brother's death, he would have offered a picture different from the one he knows now, the one now that is so turbulent and anxious:

A Picture had it been of lasting ease,
Elysian quiet, without toil or strife;
No motion but the moving tide, a breeze,
Or merely silent Nature's breathing life.

Such, in the fond delusion of my heart,
Such Picture would I at that time have made:
And seen the soul of truth in every part;
A faith, a trust, that could not be betrayed.

But his brother's death brought a shadow, "The feeling of my loss will ne'er be old". And yet, as the storm will pass but not be forgotten, the poem too begins to pass to this moment no longer consumed by his brother's death, if still affected by it.

But welcome fortitude, and patient cheer,
And frequent sights of what is to be borne!
Such sights, or worse, as are before me here. -
Not without hope we suffer and we mourn.

Beaumont was a friend to both Wordsworth and Coleridge. It would be simplistic to say that his his picture allowed a certain catharsis in Wordsworth. It would also demean the more interesting element of ekphrasis to say that his poem describes the picture. Ekphrasis does not want merely to re-present what another artist has done. Instead ekphrasis is the term we use to acknowledge how one art has been the inspiration for another, different work. A work that can be interesting in its own right and maybe allow the history of art to continue to cycle through all the muses, building and shifting across forms to produce new elements for new works at new times. The death of one state of being, after all, only means the birth of another.