A Double Reading by Design: Breughel, Auden, and Williams

Author(s): Mary Ann Caws

Source: The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism , Spring, 1983, Vol. 41, No. 3
(Spring, 1983), pp. 323-330
Published by: Wiley on behalf of The American Society for Aesthetics

Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/430109

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 MARY ANN CAWS

A Double Reading by Design:

Breughel, Auden, and Williams

But here the speakers fell silent. Perhaps they were thinking that there is a vast distance
between any poem and any picture; and that to compare them stretches words too far. At
last, said one of them, we have reached the edge where painting breaks off and takes her
way into the silent land. We shall have to set foot there soon, and all our words will fold
their wings and sit huddled like rooks on the tops of the trees in winter . . . But since we
love words let us dally for a little on the verge, said the other. Let us hold painting by the
hand a moment longer, for though they must part in the end, painting and writing have
much to tell each other: they have much in common.

Virginia Woolf, Essay on Walter Sickert

THE ACT OF READING a poem devoted to a Several forms of refuge or attack are
painting (itself perhaps devoted to a myth open to us. We can, first of all, refer to only
or a legend, to be read in its turn) is, like historical and art-historical or literary
making the poem or the painting, an exper-criteria of moments and schools and read
iment in one of the possible forms of repre- the period and style into the works, thus
senting. There is, of course, no way to avoidsetting correctly and even exhaustively our
the twin perils of what we might call after-point of view. Or then we can refer to any
ness (after the painting, after the poem, number of works on the interdisciplinary
thus in third place or third-order experi- matters which concern us and take comfort
ence, unless there is a legend or a story to in some particular comparative mode. Or,
begin with, in which case it is in fourth place full of contemporary reading theory, we
or fourth-order) and aboutness (not in- can plunge into textual things, knowing we
volved in the drama or the story or the are armed to the gills, making our attack a
landscape of the picture, or in the making fashionable one, based on Lacan, Derrida,
of either text). The distance Virginia Woolf
Marin, Lyotard, or whomever we choose.
speaks of, between words and brush- Or then we can develop a modest theory of
strokes, is surely increased in the work of
critical and imaginative perception, in ac-
the critic reading both texts. But mightcordwe with the particular texts we are exam-
ining and the way we believe it best to
not take the opposite tack from a pessimistic
one and consider that these necessary dis- examine them. For example, a literary critic
tances we must take from what we are read- might reflect on what it is to perceive the
ing enable a re-vision of the very act of our work of art and its verbal response with an
double reading? It might be thought that eye in-structed or trained in and on matters
we can gain a greater understanding of more verbal than visual: I have tried to do
exactly what process we are following at this this in my recent Eye in the Text: Essays on
arm's-length from it. Perception, Mannerist to Modern.1
This essay will take the latter tack, and
will have as the matter of its chief concern
MARY ANN CAWS is professor of French and comparative the development of a form of reading ap-
literature at Hunter College, and the Graduate School. propriate to the specific texts it deals with.

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 324 CAWS

Coming after, being about, it tries neverthe- A Formal Design as a poem teaches us how to
less for a form of creative seeing whichlook at a tapestry and a poem, how they are
takes its direction from the twin objects ofbordered or fenced in,4 at first invisibly, by
sight themselves, following their inner their very form and formality. It teaches
cohesion and instructions as to reading and also how a design may create what is to be
being read. The subject will be celebratedbrought, by design, into existence, which is
poems about celebrated paintings of in part the lesson of the unicorn. The focus
Brueghel, about which a good deal has been falls on the smallest detail to initiate the
glance, as in the mile-uleurs pattern of the
written; but instead of referring out to the
secondary works, it will take its own direc-
garden, usually fenced in. Here the glance
tions from within the texts, without other is doubly focussed by the linguistic em-
theories or explanations, limiting itself to
phasis on the deictic pointer: This, and the
what exactly we can know from the poem visual rhyme, the border forming the front
about its own reading of the painting and, and the end of the line: This ... lis.... and
in the first examples, of the legend related
also the end of the third line: is, so that the
to it. decrescendo in length (four letters to three
This post-creation is meant to suggest, to two) works in tandem with the crescendo
quite simply, a way of reading and seeing, in semantic importance toward the verb is,
of re-viewing or re-vising2 our view of, cer- signifying the existence of the single thing
tain works, themselves alreadyjoined by the in the tapestry whose existence can be put in
painter, in the case of legend, and always by doubt: the unicorn, which here is, is not.
the poet. And the paradox is underlined, or tethered
to the text, as the verb of assertion, is, is
I. Bordering and Designing further stressed by the excessive repetition
within the weave of the text which is a tapes-
The cohesion comes in the first instance try, and repetition of the verb within the
from the accumulated references in the flower design: the fleur-de-lis, then by the
poetic text to design, to reading, and to how echoes, both visual and phonetic, in the
things are linked. William Carlos Williams's rhymes at the end and the beginning of
Pictures from Brueghel3 are about, among later lines: his . . . the beast is.
other things, the relation between form and The tapestry of poem and silk words and
seeing. His poem about the Cluny tapestries works its way deftly and delicately back
concerns designing, bordering, tethering across the page toward the left, against the
or linking, and enclosure: ordinary run of the glance, from the Us to
the is in the penultimate line, to repeat the
A Formal Design stress laid upon the fabulous existence,
This fleur-de-lis created by the poem itself, and within its
at a fence rail borders. This existence was already in-
where a unicorn is
cluded within in the pointer: This, begin-
confined it is a tapestry ning the poem which in fact confines the
deftly woven unicorn, the confine itself suggesting
a milleflor
thematically the birth of the beast from the
design the fleur-de-lis beast, in a confinement or a gestation ges-
with its yellow tured to.
petals edges
The defintion is made clear, at the outset:
a fruiting tree formally
enough in This fleur-de-lis . . .
this climate ... it is a tapestry.
a pomegranate to which
a princely And in its design, double, verbal in text and
collar round his visual in weave, the unicorn is created with
arching neck the beast the borders illustrated, exactly at the edge
is lightly of the first three stanzas, where they hinge
tethered with or edge upon the last three, "formally

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A Double Reading by Design 325

enough ... in this climate." The creation is horn in the tapestry-and the fencing
confined between the edges, and in the cir- in-as in the poem about the relation be-
cular fence, gently held by the light tether- tween fence and picture-mark themselves
ing of the poem. as essential. The gestures of enclosing and
Light, because the circle of the fence is relating in fact point to themselves, in the
apparent only in its ellipsis: we know of the poem as it winds from one stanza to the
fence and see its visual echo in the collar next, in speaking of how borders border.
around the arching neck, in what we know
to be a delicate confinement. The poem is
II. Insertion (about Icarus)
itself gently tethered and edged, taking
these terms from its body, to tie it withFor itsa further reflection on how the paint-
own substance. It is contained, shaped,ing andincludes the story, and encloses it, or
circled, so deftly woven in its pattern edges as toit, or inserts it within its own matter,
link the stanzas each to the next in the deli- Williams's poem on Icarus can teach us
cate S-curves of a no less absolute binding, something about setting. The distancing of
as part of a compound's verb split is from the the event at the outset marks the edge of the
other part and thus leads to mind to it: text, its entrance, all the more perceptible
and significant as it responds to the way in
which legend enters the text and the scene.

(confined Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

According to Brueghel
Verb is separated from object, act from that
when Icarus fell
which is acted upon: it was spring

edges a farmer was ploughing

his field

Ca
a fruiting tree ) the whole pageantry

of the year was

awake tingling
and possessive adjective from thing pos- near
sessed:
the edge of the sea
his - concerned
with itself
(arching neck sweating in the sun
that melted
The design is a graceful one for seeing the wings' wax
and reading, teaching us to observe the unsignificantly
lightest of curves and links. As Rilke de- off the coast
scribes part of this tapestry in Malte Laurids there was

Brigge, "Everything is there, Everything for a splash quite unnoticed

ever."5
Williams would not have made such a
claim for his own poem, of course, for it is
rather in the exclusions it makes from the
design which encloses it that it finds its own
light grace. To spell out even the flowers
within the fence would be to lose, necessar-
ily, the very medieval and underplayed
splendor of what is seen. This is one of the
first lessons the aesthetic critic might learn:
suggestion is and not just for Mallarme, not
always explication. Fencing or framing or
pointing is sufficient without delineating
each detail. I am concerned above all with
the way the pointing-as in the unicorn's
this was
Icarus drowning
Each poem in the series about Brueghel
paintings has this type of initial firm line:
authority is attributed elsewhere, in this
case, and the reference is not only
explanatory-by the quotation of an out-
side source-but temporal and locative: a
picture of 1555, in the Musee des Beaux
Arts, in Brussels . . . Already this initial and
border stanza is structured with the con-
trast that is a frequent characteristic of
edges: since the contrast is however only
implied, an interpretative burden is placed
upon the reader. The fall (when Icarusfell) is

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 CAWS
326

the contrary of it was spring, For in pictureand

as in poem, each element is
suggests,
on a second level, a contrary convergence presented as ultimately concerned with it-
between the motions of falling down andself: the sea is, Icarus was, we are. This a
springing up, the contract assumed and in- statement, not a sermon, and no morality
attaches
tensified, with its conceptual and visual and to the scene. There is a proper time
phonetic elements merging to make the for ploughing, as in the proverb on which
interest of the framing pattern. the scene is based, and another time for
Moreover, the legendary event, placed in adventure, whatever its motive and its end.
the past tense, is inserted in the set of pres- Intermediary in position between the
ent participles, set off by the leading one: working man and the doomed boy, the
according, placed in the stressed position.sky-gazer takes another text than ours, but
Together with the spring, this incipit is serves,
a albeit unknowingly, in joining sky to
temporal pointer, and leads to the labor of soil to sea. The painting reads like a tale of
ploughing, a spring centered even in the three gazes: the worker's at the soil, his
picture, and that in turn to the verb tingling,companion's at the sky, and our own, at
as in the light of an expected event, eagerly Icarus, blinded and submerged. Thought
anticipated: the spring serving as a border plays against sight, sight against blindness,
conveys the notion of something about toto increase our paradoxical involvement in
happen, seconded by the adverb near andthe picture, as it points to itself within the
the noun edge, those key words marking thepoem. Just as at the beginning of A Formal
pageantry not just as passive, but as an ac- Design the poem opens with a pointing
tive wait. The sharp edge pictured between finger, showing the exact moment:
sea and land is the source of the verbal
edginess, expressed by the participles, of
when Icarus fell

which the first is ploughing, including, as itinwas ...

the French for ploughing, the reference to

hard work: labourer la terre. The participle The expression prepares the presentation
system is continued by the verb sweating, of the full pageantry of the year, which also
which itself already contains the wing as a was, and the two final stress points and
metonymy of and a figure for the disaster pointers which center the gaze on the exact
of Icarus, so that the flight, however heroic middle point of the event, which we might
in its attempt, however legendary in its out- have supposed decentered in the picture:
come, will be always, is, and has been made
and seen within the human context. As the there was

human failure at transcendence is inserted a splash quite unnoticed

this was
in the natural system of human labor, the Icarus drowning
disaster is rendered understandable: un-
aided, flying simply does not work.
The bottom edge, marked by the disas- That the entire poem should end with the
ter, although the action is never to be com- drowing event already prepared by the sys-
pleted in picture or in poem, retains the tem of present participles and its initial re-
present participle and the observer within itcounting impulse: according, shows this
by a frontal gaze, directed at the pageantry,event to be deliberately set within a systema-
at the sweep of soil against sea, and at the tic, a linguistic frame, which stresses its own
event which is drastically decentered in the reading:
moment of the initial gaze: it happens both
"unsignificantly" and unnoticed, not by the according
reader perhaps-indeed, certainly not-
spring
but by the tiller of the field and the observer
of the sky, both realists engrossed in the ploughing
natural, blind to the legendary. Only the tingling
sky and the soil are readable for them, and sweating
the legend would be lost, but for the reader,
drowning
and the title which keeps up the tradition.

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A Double Reading by Design 327

The innermost point of the insetting is, in But for him it was not an important failure; the sun
shone
this re-reading, also the most significant, As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the
inserted as it is within the space and time of green
legend and of the pointed presence of sight. Water; and the expensive delicate ship that must
The Landscape, in this insighting, is to be have seen

read with and in the Fall. Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on.6
In line with this insetting and on the side,
as Breughel's Icarus is far to the side of the
canvas including him, Auden's Icarus poemAuden's 1939 poem begins with the loca-
deliberately sets the legend at a distance tive and general title: the Museum in Brus-
from the edge of the poem as the figuresels is houses this canvas, and others, being
distanced in the canvas. 6This poem delays the home of The Old Masters, who read as a
secondary title, after the announced topic:
even the mention of the painting itself until
the second stanza, and then turns away About suffering, as if it were a course to be
from it, the reader's eyes trained only on taken. When the actual title of the picture is
mentioned in the second stanza, it is already
the aesthetics of the picture: green sea and
white legs, ploughing borders and a splen- displaced from its ordinary initial position,
did ship. Brueghel's own paradoxical pic- the reference to the actual painting situated
ture takes a decentered image in full or inset far inside the frame of proper
knowledge that it will catch our eye, even names and places, at once centered and off
its normal position in the title place: it lies,
from the title: it is in fact so desperately
displaced as to fascinate the gaze. All theof course, at the heart of the text.
pointers point in fact to that figure, and the
whole paradox of decentering played Brussels
against the pointers focusses still more ac-
Musee des Beaux Arts
curately, if ironically, the mind upon the
fall. Icarus, in the Brueghel picture and in Old Masters

the two poems I am chiefly concerned with, Brueghel

is deeply inserted and inset within frames Icarus
both locative (where his picture is, where he
falls, where we should be or not be looking)
and seasonal (it is spring....) The same form of insertion and insetting
works for the specific topic of suffering in
"Musee des Beaux Arts" its relation to the boy, and to his fall:
About suffering they were never wrong,
The Old Masters: how well they understood suffering
Its human position; how it takes place
While someone else is eating or opening a window its human position
or just walking dully along;
| disaster of Icarus
How, when the aged are reverently, passionately
waiting
For the miraculous birth, there always must be
Children who did not specially want it to happen, Enframing its figure deep within the
skating outer borders, the poem raises some essen-
On a pond at the edge of the wood: tial questions as to the reading of and even
They never forgot
detection of its proper center, how do we in
That even the dreadful martydom must run its
course fact see what is central in the poem? is our
Anyhow in a corner, some untidy spot perception reliable? are there several cen-
ters?
Where the dogs go on with their doggy life and Suffering
the cannot have an answer, but
torturer's horse
the reading of it may be itself central to the
Scratches its innocent behind on a tree.
reading of a life, as of a text visual or verbal.
In Brueghel's Icarus, for instance: how everything
All the expressions in the poem which
turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman mark the edge of the world seen as a pic-
may ture, in whose corner the legend takes place
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry, in terms both of the painting and poem

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 CAWS
328

mark the edge of perception itself, mark includes him. The winter setting of white
the margins of what we see: the edge of the clarity, not unlike a page, is given from the
world, the corner of perception, the legend outset: The over-all picture is winter, and
demanding to be read in a sense at once given as pictorial. The exemplary detail of
semantic, linguistic, and poetic. All the weather focusses the gaze, upwards: icy
edges prepare the turning away of every- mountains. The vertical distance thus im-
thing from the seemingly unimportant dis- mediately inscribed in the poem, will force
aster; the turn of the poem coincides exactly the movement of the gaze as all the texts
with the turn of the sight and feeling: the considered here undertake to do, in vary-
observer's eyes are to be averted, as a boy is ing degrees of coercion.
forsaken in his cosmic plight. For the disas-
ter is not, we are told, really very important, The Hunters in the Snow

if we compare it with the aesthetic stress of The over-all picture is winter

the picture: ship and sea in their splendor, icy mountains
dwarfing the human fate. in the background the return
The cosmic frame gives the picture its from the hunt it is toward evening
from the left
place, in legend and in life, and assigns the
sturdy hunters lead in
values: the sun shone, as it had to, the ship
had somewhere to get to, and it got on. Even their pack the inn-sign
hanging from a
as the repeated sibilants (expensive, seen,
broken hinge is a stag a crucifix
something, sky, somewhere, sailed) anchor
between his antlers the cold
the final lines of the frame, thus the mean-
inn yard is
ing is forced outside the time of the poem as deserted but for a huge bonfire
event and its visual space to somewhere be-
that flares wind-driven tended by
yond, as in the poem's very last word: on. women who cluster
Both the Auden and the Williams poems about it to the right beyond
and the picture are concerned with indi- the hill is a pattern of skaters
vidual suffering, but they are also con- Brueghel the painter
cerned with continuity, with the way the concerned with it all has chosen
universal may triumph over individual fail- a winter-struck bush for his
ure, simply by continuing past each human foreground to
disaster in its legendary presentation, no complete the picture . . .

matter how real, no matter how close-up, or

far away. The poem is to be readjust as we read the
This kind of insertion of the figure in thepicture, with a glance from overall whole to
frame, then, leads the eye and the mind to a part: from winter to winter mountain, from
flexible position where the central thought the vague backdrop to the advancing fig-
can be read, even at an angle, and yet in- ures: in the background the return . . . sturdy
serted in the main glance. The opposition hunters lead in, advancing, as the poem says,
of the two points of view on Icarus and on from the left, exactly in the direction of the
his insetting and side-setting is instructive reading gaze, toward the right, where the
as to how we should direct our own glance; women cluster to balance the other group
such flexibility of perception is essential toof sturdy figures, men leading to the
the parallel reading of visual and verbal women, left to right, poem to picture. As the
texts, and can be carried over to our own text scans the visual arrangement, preposi-
reading. tion answers preposition, for proper plac-
ing: lead in leads to the between and finally to
Directing a Reading tC e beyond, through these directions, the
gaze finds at once its place and its time:
Williams's poem concerning The Hunters from the initial statement of winter, of eve-
in the Snow gives verbal instructions for di- ning, in the general sweep of vision in the
recting the gaze within the picture. Al- overall canvas, down to the final arrest by
ready, in the title the snow claims our atten-winter, circling the poem in its white
tion, as does Icarus in the Landscape which pattern.

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A Double Reading by Design 329

But the directions for seeing are still pitiful possessions a basin
to wash in a peasant
more explicit: the gaze finds a notch to
cottage is seen and a church spire
center it with perfect horizontal and vertical
the faces are raised
lines, through the antlers of the stag. The
as toward the light
cross as sighting frames, up and down, and there is no detail extraneous
across, when the picture is seen through
to the composition one
these borders: between his antlers the cold inn follows the others stick in
yard. So the picture of the poem is pre- hand triumphant to disaster
sented already patterned by the gaze of a
painter, rather than by subject matter. In The Parable of the Blind, the initial half-
Neither Brueghel nor Williams is really rhyme parable/horrible places an immediate
concerned with hunting or skating, but stress upon the very awfulness of the pic-
rather with the pattern of sight itself: ture, presented with an accent on the terri-
ble irony of painting a painting of the blind:
the hill is a pattern of skaters
Painting the parable is then to picture the
Brueghel the painter
kind of fall from which no lesson can be
concerned with it all
learned, and yet this painting is about lead-
Brueghel the painter, and Williams the ing, as the Icarus picture is about suffering. It
poet, have framed the scene so as to concen- is in fact, not without a color red, as art
trate the attention first upon the season, historians have pointed out, with some sur-
then upon the time of day, then on the prise at the awkwardness of the poem on
procession and the sign on its broken hinge. this point: since Williams probably saw the
Its imperfect juncture attracts our attention painting in Vienna over 20 years earlier,
to the frame, to focus once more upon the had he forgotten it?
reading. The answer is, I think more interesting
The line of sight, finally, begins with the than the question might suppose. What it in
near: inn yard/women, and goes toward the fact leads us to is quite simply the reframing
far: beyond the hill is a pattern of skaters, beforeof the statement, as it is read, here re-read
returning to the foregrounding as the figuratively and aurally, because in a place
proper focus of the painter concerned with it of blindness, nothing, whether or not vivid
all for the satisfying completion of the pic- in color, can be read, in any composition,
ture, both his and ours. That the completed however artistic. Art for the eyes only is
picture should end with the imperfected sure to fail in the land of the blind.
sign of suspension only leaves the broken Words occupy the center, partly in their
hinge hanging there, for future sightings. sound, and nothing can back them up by
reference to sight, so that the painting itself
Reading on the Slant
bogs down. Because no seeing man is repre-
sented, the community of non-seers rein-
The Parable of the Blind forces the sense of the pitiful, a word
This horrible but superb painting
stressed at first visually and then phoneti-
the parable of the blind cally, as it is (with its prediction) coupled,
without a red the terms sharing a typographical profile:
in the composition shows a group
of beggars leading destitute
each other diagonally downward pitiful

across the canvas

Four letters in each protrude by their
from one side
to stumble finally into a bog height, the rounded and exactly mirrored
form of the d and the p followed by the
where the picture
and the composition ends back
three upright consonants, thin and terrible
of which no seeing man forms of the destitution toward which the
roundest of forms must move in that bleak
is represented the unshaven
features of the des- land, on its way toward death.
titute with their few The figural irony is awful, for the faces

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 330 CAWS

are raised, the stick is in hand, as if in readi- accumlated myths of relations between
ness for an act of violence, whereas the vio- arts are often no more than that: what we
lence is for the sightless victims: all they can see and read is often, and now finally, the
perpetrate upon others is a sense of pity. In best clue we have as to how we should be
the downward slant of the inexorable looking and seeing and knowing.
tragedy, we are forced as readers not to As a unicorn among the flowers with its
be blind, if we would see the painting. For lady, or Icarus falling, is neither a right
the initial and terminal chiasmus, clearly representation nor a wrong one, the convic-
marked in two framing edges, enables those tion and the concern about it lie in another
two edges to fit together in a cross- realm altogether; the conviction, and the
reflection: relation, are not that of the poem or the
picture to outward reality, or to fact or
horrible but superb "truth of representation." What matters is
rather the response of the poem to the myth
triumphant to disaster and to the tapestry or the painting; we do
not care what unicorns look like here, upon
Those fitting edges frame the conceptual the flowers, or Icarus, within the water, but
chiasmus implied at the center: only as they are enclosed in the tapestry and
the painting and the page. What counts is
cottage (but) spire the relation between the unicorn and the
fence, Icarus and the ship and the water,
spire (but)g between fence and frame, between ship and
the passing of the pageantry, and our per-
Edges and images join to reinforce the ception of all this. It is my conviction that
reading of the diagonal thrust, so that the
there are, within these texts and others like
figures are read into the final bog. them, clues about both our relation with the
texts (what we might call the "reading rela-
Reading Designs tion") and theirs with each other, about how
we should read all the relations concerned
From the light tethering of the texts here here. It is to this sense of relation we should
chosen initially as a design and an indica- relate, by the design of the text and by our
tion of how to read these instructions for own.
reading, to the slant and the final fall, these
verbal images, however shuffled, however
1 Princeton University Press, 1981.
light or grave, comic or tragic, seem per-
2 Henry James, in his preface to The Golden Bowl
fectly keyed to the pictures they picture. (Harmondsworth: 1966), p. 17, makes an interesting
They can be read in terms of insertion and case for re-viewing as re-readings.
framing, of centering and decentering, of 3 William Carlos Williams, Pictures from Brueghel
edging and junctures, from left to right, (New York, 1954), pp. 2, 3, 11, 40 for these poems.
Only when this paper was in proof did I discover
background to foreground, and on a slant.
Wendy Steiner's discussion of these poems in her Col-
It should be the critic as reader of double ors of Rhetoric (University of Chicago Press, 1982).
texts, visual and verbal, to learn how to see, 4 For more discussion of edging, see my "Hedging
to design, to tether, and to interpret the and Edging," in Annals of Scholarship (1982) (special
forms and functions of such parallel read- issue on representation). See, also, J. J. Gibson and
other specialists of perception on the difference made
ings, illuminating the double images given
for the eye by the edge.
or chosen, as they shape reading itself, 5 We see how unicorns come to be, on the other
perhaps on its way to sight. hand, because they are, in Rainer Maria Rilke, Sonnets
As I began with a reflection on painting to Orpheus (New York, 1942), pp. 76-77; and in his
prose poem on the tapestry, in Malte Laurids Brigge
and myth, I might close with one, repeat-
(New York, 1949), p. 130.
ing, in the form of this essay, that of the 6 W. H. Auden, Collected Poems (New York, 1945)
circular fence we saw at the outset. All the p. 3.

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