Manet’s ‘Olympia’ (1863)

ALREADY DEAD

[inspired by Manet’s ‘Olympia’]

She lies there, full length long, upon her bed,
Upon her body not a stitch of clothing,
With eyes whose look demands of you with loathing:
‘Can you not see that I’m already dead?
Perhaps, though, you’re a necrophiliac?
Then go ahead and free the fearsome beast
That’s thrusting at your pants to be released
And, neath your pumping sacroiliac,

‘Lymphatic, clammy-skinned, with scarce a breath,
Eyes following the fissures in the ceiling,
I’ll think about my tepid blood congealing,
My weary fingers stiffening, in death.’...
You fumble for the hundred-dollar fee
And drop it on the mantelpiece, and flee.

La duquesa de Alba, by Goya

THE BLACK DUCHESS

Francisco Goya was a ladies’ man
Who’d satisfied many a chica’s crush,
But her he craved to board, on her divan,
He only caught on canvas with a brush.
When he painted Duchess Alba in jet
(Mourning her widowhood), did he prefigure
His ransack by this haughty-browed brunette
In her quest to impound his blood-gorged trigger?

Or, capturing that downward pointed finger,
Did he concede that crouching at her feet,
Between his legs, unseen, a shrivelled stinger,
Was all that he could hope for of her heat,
Her portrait, on his wall, a true depiction
Of her with whom his climax was a fiction?

 

[Goya painted The Black Duchess in 1797, not long after her husband’s death. Though commissioned to paint her several times, this portrait he kept for the rest of his life. Chica is Spanish for a young woman.]

ULYSSES AND THE SIRENS

In Herbert Draper’s painting, several sirens
Cling to the fittings of Ulysses’ galley,
Suing to escape its briny environs
While tone-deaf oarsmen strive to foil their sally.
Ulysses, mast-bound at Circe’s behest
(That he, unfree to help, should hear their need
Having bidden two seamen bind his breast
Ever tighter, should he beg to be freed)

Strains against the breath-repressing hessian
That ignites his flesh with a white-hot burning,
Begging, in vain, for Godly intercession,
Having heard the star-stricken maidens’ yearning
(Eloquent in every word of their song)
To return to the world where they belong.

 

[The original story is found in book 12 of Homer’s Odyssey. In Draper’s Victorian version, the sirens are transformed from malign partly-human creatures who lure sailors to their destruction, into damsels in distress hoping in vain to escape an ancient malediction.]

The Kiss (1969), by Picasso

ONE MORE LOVE-AFFAIR

[Inspired by Picasso’s ‘The Kiss’]

He saw them in a doorway, sprung to light
By a sudden, irruptive firebolt’s flash,
Till blackness and the bus’s headlong dash
Extinguished them; then he canvassed the sight,
This poignant afterimage of a pair
Summoned so abruptly out of the dark,
Him bent over her like a question mark
Seeming, in the inquisitional glare,

As though a puppet master, blackly veiled,
Had pressed the pair together, hips and thighs,
Fingers and legs and lips, while yet their eyes
Stared frenziedly askance, as if they quailed,
From what? the raging storm? my prying stare?
Or giving in to one more love-affair?

ROSSETTI’S LOVER

Lizzie, Rossetti’s lover, was his model
(Pallid-skinned, her hair a coppery torrent),  
Though freewheeling-he thought marriage abhorrent,
Monogamy puritanical twaddle.
Irked by serfdom, ten years later she fled
To study art; her health was on the wane
And laudanum, to mollify the pain,
Followed, like an assassin, in her tread.

Told that she was ailing, gutted by shame
At having, for a decade, loathly dallied,
He hurried to her side and, when she rallied,
Married her. With child, how blithe she became,
Till the babe was stillborn. Desolate-eyed,
She double-dosed, and fell asleep, and died.

 

[Elizabeth Siddal was 33 when she died. Dante Gabriel Rossetti was the leading light of the English art movement named The Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood]

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Peter Austin is a retired professor of English who spends his time writing plays for young people and poetry for adults. Of his second collection, X. J. Kennedy (winner of the Robert Frost Award for Lifetime Contribution to Poetry) said, "He must be one of the best living exponents of the fine old art of rhyming and scanning in English."

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MORE FROM PETER AUSTIN

FIVE SONNETS

The Montréal Review, May 2024

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