What is Ekphrasis? | Definition & Examples
- Melchior Antoine
- 10 hours ago
- 9 min read
Ekphrasis (pronounced as ek-fra-sis) is a good example of art within a work of art. It is a literary device that relies on a vivid description of a work of art or scene, and it’s ancient. One of the most famous examples of it is Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in Book 18 of The Iliad, an epic poem that dates back to around 800 BC.
The shield is crafted by Hephaestus, the iron smith God:
Then he first made a shield, broad and solid, adorning it skilfully everywhere, and setting round it a glittering triple rim, with a silver strap attached. Five layers it had, and he decorated it with subtle art.
On it he showed the earth, sea, sky, the tireless sun and the full moon, and all the constellations that crown the heavens, the Pleiades, Hyades, great Orion, and the Bear, that men also call the Wain, that circles round in its place, never bathing in Ocean’s stream, while gazing warily at Orion.
On it he showed two fine cities of mortal men. In one there were marriage feasts, and to the light of blazing torches, the brides were led from their rooms and through the city, to the sound of wedding songs. Young men circled in the dance, whirling round to flutes and lyres, while women stood in their doorways gazing. . . The other city was besieged by two armies clad in glittering armour.
It’s an epic poem, and the description of the scene is an attempt to show the breadth and variety of human civilization. It begins first with a mechanical description of the shield. Then, Homer moves on to describe the heavens, who rule over men and their fates, as borne out by the plot of the Iliad.
Then, it describes two cities, one celebrating a wedding and the other about to be attacked. We can think of the ekphrasis demonstrated here as an attempt to depict the grand backdrop of civilization that this epic poem was set against.
In this article, we explore more examples of ekphrasis, including from John Keats Ode on a Grecian Urn, W.H. Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts, a poem about painting by the Jamaican poet, Vivian Virtue, and one example from Chinese poetry by Li Po.
What is ekphrasis, and why do writers use it?
Ekphrasis is a literary device that involves the vivid description of a work of art within a literary work. There are various reasons why writers resort to ekphrasis. Literature is itself a work of art, and the writer may recognize in a painting or sculpture a theme that they would also like to reflect.
In the case of Homer, ekphrasis was used to depict the epic backdrop of an epic poem. We see the joy, triumph, peace, and tragedy of human civilization. All of these themes feature heavily in the Trojan War, which the Iliad depicts.
Now, let’s look at an example from W. H. Auden’s famous poem, Musée des Beaux Arts (published in 1939):
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: . . .
how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window or just walking dully along
The poem was written while Auden stayed in Brussels, Belgium, and it describe scenes from a number of paintings, such as Landscape with the Fall of Icarus by Pieter Bruegel the Elder. The thesis of the poem is stated in the beginning lines — Human civilization is indifferent to individual human suffering.
The poet makes the point clear by highlighting the aspects of the painting that support his point. For example, in describing the fall of Icarus, a tragedy of a boy falling to his death, he says “the expensive delicate ship that must have seen/ Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky, / Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on” (Lines 19–21).
Another reason why writers use ekphrasis is to show and not tell. Ekphrasis in this regard can be compared to imagery. This tradition was embraced by traditional Chinese poets, who took pride in their ability to express ideas and emotions using sparse, precise, and concise images, often of nature.
This Chinese poetic tradition was assimilated in the free verse modern poetry pioneered by Ezra Pound. These two things will be discussed later. However, for now, we can begin with an example from the Jamaican poet, Vivian Virtue.
1. Vivian Virtue, “Landscape Painter, Jamaica (for Albert Huie)”
“Landscape painter, Jamaica” (1938) is a poem by Vivian Virtue dedicated to the famous Jamaican painter Albert Huie:
I watch him set up easel,
Both straddling precariously
A corner of the twisted, climbing
Mountain track.
A tireless humming-bird, his brush
Dips, darts, hovers now here, now there,
Where puddles of pigment
Bloom in the palette’s wild small garden.
The mountains pose for him
In a family group —
Dignified, self-conscious, against the wide blue screen
Of morning; low green foot-hills
Sprawl like grandchildren about the knees
Of seated elders. And behind them, aloof,
Shouldering the sky, patriarchal in serenity
Blue Mountain Peak bulks.
And the professional gaze
Studies positions, impatiently waiting
For the perfect moment to fix
Their preparedness, to confine them
For the pleasant formality
Of the family album.
His brush a humming-bird
Meticulously poised…
The little hills fidgeting,
Changelessly changing,
Artlessly frustrating
The painter’s art.
The poem plays an interesting game of perspectives. Ekphrasis is supposed to provide a vivid description of a work of art, in this case a painting. However, here, we have a vivid description of the process of making a painting.
So, why does this poem qualify to be called an ekphrastic poem? In the successful attempt to describe the painter’s process, Virtue ends up painting his own landscape with the poem. We can see that in the following lines:
The mountains pose for him
In a family group —
Dignified, self-conscious, against the wide blue screen
Of morning
The poem itself is a sketch of the final product that the painter Albert Huie will end up with. The game of perspectives is interesting, as we have one artist (the poet) trying to capture the artistic process of another artist (the painter).
The painter is portrayed as being frustrated in his ability to capture the mountains, which are described as “Changelessly changing, / Artlessly frustrating / The painter’s art.” In the very first stanza, we learn that both him and his easel are “Both straddling precariously / A corner of the twisted, climbing / Mountain track” (Lines 2–4).
Interestingly, the painter is also depicted as being part of the very nature he is trying to capture. His paint brush is described as “a tireless humming-bird,” and his paint is “puddles of pigment” blooming “in the palette’s wild small garden.”
The poem has a subtle vein of ironic subtext running through it. While the poet himself does a good job of achieving ekphrasis in describing both the landscape and the painter’s difficult process of achieving the painting, we never see the actual final artistic product developed by Huie.
Instead, we are left with a painting in words, with the painter and the landscape as the subjects, the painter himself being reduced to little more than part of the landscape and nature that he is painting. It’s as if the poet is being mischievous. Virtue mildly mocks the painter’s frustrations in depicting the landscape, while doing so — and more — effortlessly himself by capturing the painter, the painter’s process, and the landscape itself.
2. John Keats, “Ode On a Grecian Urn”
John Keats, “Ode On A Grecian Urn” (published in 1819) is arguably the world’s most famous ekphrastic poem. It’s a poem on, well, a Grecian urn. While Vivian Virtue's poem captures the frustrations of the artistic process in capturing or fixing the artistic subject, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" describes the final result of a completed work of art, which is more or less perfected in eternity.
The poem may have been partly inspired by the famous Sosibios Vase (created around 50 BC), a sketch of which was drawn by Keats and which is shown in the introduction of this article. Here is the second stanza of the poem:
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,
For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
To understand where Keats is coming from, we need some background. He was a struggling young man who had been left orphaned, broke, and unable to marry the woman he loved due to his financial circumstances. He took refuge in poetry and art.
Keats was famous for the phrase “A thing of beauty is a joy forever.” The poem more or less personifies this concept. He saw art as a perfection of real life, which was often mean and cruel. This is what he means when he says “Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.”
Imagined music perfected in art is superior to what can be heard in real life. This description of course is inspired by images of flute players on the urn. Keats uses the images of the Grecian urn to depict art as a moment perfected and petrified in time, making it eternal. This is unlike human life, which comes with cycles of pain and sorrow followed by joy and fulfillment if one is lucky before eventual death.
This is seen in lines such as:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
In short, youth remains youthful forever. The trees remain green and in spring forever. There is no winter either for trees or mankind, where trees lose their leaves and man their youth. Life is an eternal song. This may not be an accurate theory of life or art.
Instead, it is a means of escapism from a harsh life of pain and disappointment, which is nevertheless colored by certain truths. We see a similar theory of art by W.B. Yeats in his poem “Sailing to Byzantium (published in 1926).”
It is an escapist poem, where the poet fantasizes escaping the prison of old age by being transformed into a work of mechanical art:
Once out of nature I shall never take
My bodily form from any natural thing,
But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make
Of hammered gold and gold enamelling
To keep a drowsy Emperor awake;
Or set upon a golden bough to sing
To lords and ladies of Byzantium
Of what is past, or passing, or to come
We have only two lines of text to describe Yeats’ mystical bird of gold. The ekphrasis here is not nearly as complete as in Keats’ description of the scenes on a Grecian urn. However, they both represent a similar ideal: The immortal nature of the spirit as exemplified through fine art, whose beauty is eternal and beyond nature.
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3. Ekphrasis in Chinese poetry
The modern imagist movement placed heavy emphasis on concrete images, which were concisely and accurately described. This is not something original to them. Ezra Pound, in his emphasis on concise and concrete imagery in the free verse of his imagist movement, was influenced heavily by Greek lyric poems and traditional Chinese poetry.
Chinese poetry is typically defined by an emphasis on letting images express complicated ideas and emotion. Nothing is said directly or out loud. Instead, Chinese poets allow images and their associations to do the talking. Often, the poems come across as miniature paintings in their imagery. There are even instances where poetry inspires paintings and vice versa.
For example, according to the Met Museum website, the medieval Chinese painter Guo Xi (1000–1090 AD) of the Northern Song Dynasty once wrote:
There is a saying: ‘Poetry is formless painting; painting, poetry in form.’ Wise men have often talked of this idea, and it has been my guide. Thus, on idle days, I leaf through ancient and modern poetry of the Jin and Tang, finding beautiful lines that give full expression to the feelings that pass through men’s hearts and the scenes before their eyes.
In fact, China eventually developed a style of art known as the Three perfections, which included blending painting, calligraphy, and poetry in one piece of art. This took the form of a painting, with a poem describing the scene or the feelings it invoked, written in traditional Chinese calligraphy in its white space. Here is an example, Kuncan, Landscape after Night Rain Shower:
You can see the poem scribbled in the white space above the landscape. Let’s look at another Chinese poem and how it uses ekphrasis. The poem in question is “Taking Leave of a Friend” by Li Po (701-762):
Green mountains rise to the north;
white water rolls past the eastern city.
Once it has been uprooted,
the tumbleweed travels forever.
Drifting clouds like a wanderer’s mind;
sunset, like the heart of your old friend.
We turn, pause, look back and wave.
Even our ponies look back and whine.
The poem is written by a vagabond at heart. That is, a man who is uprooted and loathes to stay in one place. He has to be constantly on the move, even if that means saying bitter farewell to beloved friends.
Li Po doesn’t tell us any of this directly. Instead, he speaks through the landscape and images of said landscape. The “green mountains” are described as rising “to the north.” We also see “white water roll past” the city.
There is also mention of tumbleweed and drifting clouds. Every aspect of the landscape is portrayed as being in constant motion, even the immovable mountains. The poem excels in depicting the sweet sorrow of parting from someone you love.
Ekphrasis is properly defined as poetry or prose that describes a specific work of art. However, in the original Greek, it simply meant the ability to describe the thing well. This is what ekphrasis in Chinese poetry relates to in addition to the subtlety of allowing images to express the poet's complex interior world of thoughts and emotions.
Cite this EminentEdit article |
Antoine, M. (2025, June 28). What is Ekphrasis? | Definition & Examples. EminentEdit. https://www.eminentediting.com/post/what-is-ekphrasis |
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