A Brevegraph: Ekphrasis and the Poetics of Looking

Section I: The Gaze Made Word

To look at art is to be changed, however slightly, by the looking. But what happens when that gaze is not held in silence, but answered—when the eye becomes voice, and the image finds itself reframed in the architecture of a poem? This is the terrain of ekphrasis, a centuries-old literary practice that has become newly vital in an image-saturated world. More than description, ekphrasis is a dialogue between the arts—a boundary-crossing impulse that calls on language to inhabit the visual, to interrogate it, to praise or challenge or mourn it. The poem, once content to observe, now speaks to the image and, in doing so, reveals as much about the viewer as the viewed.

The word ekphrasis originates from the Greek ekphrazein—“to speak out,” or “to describe vividly.” In its earliest use, the term referred not just to the depiction of artwork but to any verbal rendering of a scene so vivid it becomes present to the mind’s eye. The classical exemplar is Homer’s Shield of Achilles in The Iliad (Book 18), wherein the god Hephaestus forges a cosmic shield for the hero, and Homer devotes over a hundred lines to describing its intricate images: cities at peace and war, harvest fields, dances, stars. Crucially, these scenes do not simply ornament the narrative—they delay, deepen, and complicate it. The ekphrasis becomes a space of reflection, a pause pregnant with meaning.

As James A. W. Heffernan notes in Museum of Words, ekphrasis begins here as a form of “still movement”—a paradox wherein poetry lends temporality to the static visual. The poet gives voice to the silent object, making the inanimate pulse with time and tone. Heffernan identifies three primary stages in the evolution of ekphrasis: mimesis (pure description), reflection (the poet’s internalization of the image), and encounter (the tension or dialogue between viewer and viewed). It is this final mode—ekphrasis as encounter—that characterizes the modern and postmodern imagination.

In this dynamic space, the poet no longer acts as a passive observer. Rather, the poet becomes a kind of interlocutor, challenging the image or bearing witness to its implications. In W. J. T. Mitchell’s landmark essay “Ekphrasis and the Other,” he cautions against the tendency to romanticize ekphrasis as a harmonious union between word and image. Instead, he proposes a model of ekphrastic tension—a triad of desire, resistance, and rupture. The poet may desire to possess the image, but the image resists, remaining ultimately other, foreign, unyielding. Ekphrasis thus becomes not just an act of description, but of struggle—between seeing and saying, presence and absence.

This tension takes on new weight when we consider who gets to look, and who gets looked at. Traditional ekphrasis often centers the male gaze, the classical or romantic speaker admiring a nude or idealized subject—frequently female, often silenced. But contemporary writers, particularly women and postcolonial poets, have reclaimed ekphrasis as a space of agency. In their hands, it becomes not only a tool of aesthetic exploration but a medium of ethical and political response.

For example, feminist critics like Gisela Ecker have drawn attention to the ways ekphrasis can function as a mode of resisting visual objectification. In her essay “Feminist Ekphrasis,” she explores how female poets rewrite the traditional dynamics of viewer and viewed by re-inhabiting the image, often subverting the aesthetic conventions imposed by male artists. The poem becomes a retort, a refusal to remain voiceless within the frame.

Similarly, postcolonial ekphrasis asks: whose history is preserved in images, and whose is erased? In the work of poets such as Natasha Trethewey and Meena Alexander, ekphrasis is not merely aesthetic—it is elegiac, archival, insurgent. The image is not just looked at, but questioned. The gaze becomes not admiration, but witnessing.

This expansion of ekphrasis across geographies and genders has widened its imaginative possibilities. It now serves not just to animate images, but to interrogate their implications: the politics of display, the silence of suffering, the aesthetics of violence, the machinery of memory. Whether we encounter Brueghel’s landscapes, Vermeer’s luminous interiors, or a fragmentary colonial daguerreotype, the ekphrastic poem reactivates the image—pulling it from the museum wall into the sensory immediacy of voice.

In contemporary practice, ekphrasis often pushes against the boundaries of genre and medium. In hybrid works like Anne Carson’s Nox, visuality and textuality are layered—torn pages, smeared images, and handwritten notes interweave with translated Latin elegies. The poem becomes a palimpsest, a layered archive of grief and looking. This is ekphrasis not as still life, but as living ruin.

Ultimately, ekphrasis reveals that to look is never neutral. Every act of seeing is filtered through culture, memory, desire, and loss. The poet’s eye, like the painter’s brush, selects, frames, reveals. And the act of writing—that transformation of gaze into utterance—is not just aesthetic, but moral. To give voice to the silent work of art is to take a stance: not only what is seen, but how it is seen, and why it must be said.

Section II: Echoes of Antiquity — Homer, Keats, and the Lyric Eye

The tradition of ekphrasis begins not with art as it hangs in galleries, but with art imagined into being—etched into the text by the poet’s voice alone. In antiquity, there were no museums, no glass panes guarding paintings. Instead, there was the poet’s mind, conjuring worlds with words. The foundational moment of ekphrasis, then, belongs to Homer’s description of the Shield of Achilles in The Iliad (Book 18). There is no historical record of this shield existing. It is, like poetry itself, a crafted fiction meant to be seen through language. In this early form, ekphrasis is not a passive representation of preexisting art, but an active generative force, building image and meaning simultaneously.

Hephaestus, the divine smith, forges the shield at the behest of Thetis, Achilles’ mother. What follows is a 130-line lyric detour in which Homer pauses the narrative of war to present a cosmic artwork: stars, cities, weddings, plowmen, courts of law, dancers, and harvests swirl across its surface. Critics such as Leo Spitzer have observed that this is not a literal description of an object, but a miniature cosmos, a mirror of the world reflecting the full scope of human experience—war and peace, joy and sorrow, birth and death. The shield does not simply serve Achilles; it serves the poem itself, offering a suspended meditation amid violence.

This classical ekphrasis operates under the logic of mimesis—vivid imitation—but it already points toward something deeper. James Heffernan emphasizes how this moment in The Iliad introduces ekphrasis as delay and deepening. While the narrative halts, time within the poem stretches; the poet’s gaze lingers. The described object does not interrupt the epic; it enlarges it. Ekphrasis becomes a kind of temporal dilation, inviting the reader to step outside the fury of events and into a space of contemplation. It is in this duality—between movement and stillness, action and image—that ekphrasis first reveals its poetic power.

Two millennia later, John Keats would inherit this ancient impulse but bend it toward Romantic ends. His 1819 masterpiece, Ode on a Grecian Urn, revisits the classical mode but complicates it: the poet does not merely describe the urn’s figures—lovers beneath trees, a piper playing an eternal song, a heifer led to sacrifice—he converses with them. The urn is no longer inert; it becomes a speaking interlocutor, its silence echoing through the poet’s lines. Keats’s ekphrasis enacts what Heffernan calls “encounter,” not just reflection. The poet and the artwork confront each other, raising questions neither can fully answer.

The Romantic vision of Keats is inflected with longing, awe, and tension. The figures on the urn exist in frozen time, their desires forever unfulfilled: “Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss.” This is no simple celebration of immortality; it is a paradox. The very beauty of the scene lies in its incompletion. As Helen Vendler notes in her seminal study The Odes of John Keats, the poem is structured around contradictions: time and timelessness, motion and stasis, ecstasy and frustration. The urn preserves perfection, but it also denies fulfillment. It withholds the consummation that life (and narrative) normally promise.

In the famous concluding lines—“Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know”—Keats pushes ekphrasis to its metaphysical limit. Here, the poem moves beyond the artwork it contemplates. Whether the line is voiced by the urn or by the poet remains a matter of debate, but its meaning is clear: ekphrasis becomes a meditation on art itself, on the nature of permanence and the cost of aesthetic distance. Keats invites us to reflect not just on the image, but on the act of looking—and of making.

Yet we must also attend to what remains invisible in both Homer and Keats. These foundational works, for all their poetic brilliance, often treat the image as stable and idealized. The shield is a totalizing vision; the urn is a perfected world. Neither allows for rupture, for dissent, for the gaze that might question rather than adore. The classical and Romantic gaze is often untroubled—it observes without being observed, speaks without being challenged.

That will change. As we shall see in later sections, poets like Auden, Szymborska, Trethewey, and Carson will take the ekphrastic tradition and fracture it—bringing ethics, irony, politics, and grief into the frame. But for now, in these early canonical moments, we see the birth of the lyric eye—an eye that does more than look; it lingers, listens, and lends voice.

To revisit Homer and Keats is not to indulge nostalgia, but to recognize the origins of a form still evolving. The classical impulse gives ekphrasis its bones; the Romantic gives it breath. Together, they establish a legacy of intimate spectatorship, where looking becomes a poetic act, and the silent object, once gazed upon, begins to speak.

Section III: Witness and Indifference — Moral Ekphrasis in Auden and Szymborska

If Keats’ urn speaks of beauty and permanence, and Homer’s shield frames the cosmos in harmonious totality, modern ekphrasis breaks that serenity. In the twentieth century, poets turned their gaze toward visual art not to marvel at the aesthetic object, but to question its ethical silence. The poem no longer seeks to preserve stillness or freeze beauty—it asks what happens when the world looks away. In this shift, we find W. H. Auden and Wisława Szymborska, two poets who make ekphrasis a mode of moral inquiry, placing art under the pressure of real-world suffering and everyday indifference.

Auden’s Musée des Beaux Arts (1938) is the definitive poem of this ethical turn. Written after visiting the Royal Museums of Fine Arts in Brussels, the poem responds most directly to Pieter Brueghel the Elder’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus. In the painting, Icarus—having plummeted from the sky—sinks unnoticed into the sea. A plowman tills his field, a ship sails on, life continues. Icarus’s tragedy, mythic and monumental, is visually minor, tucked into a corner of the canvas. Auden seizes on this compositional gesture to build his meditation: the “human position” is not one of grandeur, but of quiet disregard.

“About suffering they were never wrong,

The Old Masters: how well they understood

Its human position; how it takes place

While someone else is eating or opening a window…”

This opening is deceptively calm, almost conversational. But its detachment becomes devastating. Auden’s ekphrasis does not dwell in the visual richness of the painting. Instead, he focuses on what the painting does not dramatize: the ethical distance between the event and the viewer. The poem draws attention to the unheroic, to the people not watching—those who carry on as others drown, suffer, or vanish from view. Ekphrasis here becomes a kind of moral x-ray, exposing not what is seen, but what is ignored.

John Hollander, in The Gazer’s Spirit, suggests that modern ekphrasis often reveals “a dislocation between the image’s narrative and the viewer’s response.” Auden’s poem doesn’t lament Icarus; it laments the world’s indifference to him. The act of ekphrasis thus shifts from admiration to accountability. The poet is no longer a lyrical bystander, but a witness to apathy.

While Auden’s voice is cool, ironic, male, and Western, Wisława Szymborska offers a contrasting ekphrastic ethos—one shaped by female interiority, existential humility, and lived political trauma. Born in Poland in 1923, Szymborska witnessed both the Nazi occupation and Soviet censorship. Her poems are precise, often ironic, and deeply attentive to the invisible costs of history. In poems like Vermeer and Portrait of a Woman, she engages art with a kind of gentle subversion, drawing out its silences rather than obeying its surface.

In Vermeer, Szymborska reflects on the serenity in the Dutch painter’s luminous interiors:

“So long as that woman from the Rijksmuseum

keeps pouring milk day after day,

the world hasn’t earned

the world’s end.”

Here, the act of ekphrasis is not to analyze Vermeer’s composition but to anchor hope in its constancy. The poem suggests that art’s repetitive grace might stave off apocalypse. But even in this apparent praise, there is a subtle undercurrent: art’s stillness is both a balm and a distraction, a fragile ritual holding back chaos. The poem’s moral vision lies in its ambiguity: does art save us from the world, or shield us from its horrors?

In Portrait of a Woman, Szymborska critiques the idealized female subject in classical portraiture. The voice of the woman breaks through the frame:

“As long as nothing happens, the portrait is beautiful.”

This single line inverts traditional ekphrasis. Rather than describing the image, Szymborska inhabits it, revealing its internal monologue. The woman in the portrait becomes more than object—she becomes a subject with agency, discomfort, skepticism. Here, Szymborska reclaims the gaze from the painter and poet alike. She turns the ekphrastic tradition inside out: the viewed begins to look back.

Clare Cavanagh, Szymborska’s translator and foremost interpreter, notes that her poetry frequently “calls into question the act of seeing itself.” This is a defining feature of moral ekphrasis: it destabilizes the image by interrogating the viewer’s assumptions. In Szymborska’s hands, art is never immune to irony, nor is it exempt from history. Even beauty, especially beauty, must answer for what it conceals.

Together, Auden and Szymborska reframe ekphrasis as a site of ethical reckoning. They reject the safe pedestal of art as untouchable ideal and instead use the poem to pierce its glass. In doing so, they ask: what is the cost of distance? What is the price of silence? Who suffers, unnoticed, while the gallery doors remain open?

Modern ekphrasis, then, does not merely describe art—it confronts it. It uses the poem not as a mirror but as a moral lens. In the work of these two poets, the poetic gaze becomes inseparable from responsibility. We are no longer only spectators of art—we are complicit in its framing, its omissions, and its aftermath.

Section IV: Refracted Selves — Postmodern Ekphrasis in Ashbery and Carson

If classical and Romantic ekphrasis sought to capture the image and modern ekphrasis interrogated it, then postmodern ekphrasis reflects it—warped, unstable, recursive. Here, the poem does not look at art as an object “out there,” but engages with it as a site of self-conscious construction. Meaning is not revealed but questioned, not recovered but refracted. In the work of John Ashbery and Anne Carson, ekphrasis becomes a hall of mirrors, where the act of looking at art is tangled with memory, identity, and language itself.

John Ashbery: Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror

Ashbery’s 1975 Pulitzer-winning long poem Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror takes as its subject Parmigianino’s 1524 self-portrait, painted on a convex panel. The image is already distorted—Parmigianino’s hand is exaggerated, his face eerily distant, his expression still but searching. Ashbery uses this distortion as both metaphor and method: the poem stretches and bends perception, mirroring the curved logic of its subject.

From the outset, Ashbery does not treat the painting as a static object. Instead, he unpacks it layer by layer, as if peeling back the lacquered surface of thought. He imagines Parmigianino’s own moment of creation:

“The soul has to stay where it is,

Even though it is restless, he said…”

The voice here is fluid—neither entirely the poet’s nor the painter’s. This ambiguity is central to Ashbery’s approach: ekphrasis becomes an echo chamber, where author, subject, and reader blur. Unlike Keats, Ashbery does not seek beauty in permanence. Instead, he probes the image’s fragility, its partialness. The self-portrait is not a window into the artist’s soul—it is a curved surface, reflecting more about the viewer’s expectation than the painter’s truth.

As Marjorie Perloff has written, Ashbery’s ekphrasis is “not about art as object but art as event”—an ongoing performance of consciousness. The painting becomes a pretext for meditations on mortality, failure, and the instability of perception. The poet’s voice digresses, loops, hesitates. He does not describe the painting; he thinks through it.

This shift is paradigmatic of postmodern ekphrasis. The poem is no longer a lens through which we access the image, but a scrim between the viewer and the seen—a veil of language acknowledging its own distortions. Ashbery’s gaze is not sovereign; it is self-aware and unsure, caught between fascination and futility.

Anne Carson: Nox

Where Ashbery spirals through abstraction, Anne Carson brings ekphrasis into the realm of fragment, grief, and silence. Her hybrid work Nox (2010) centers on a visual object—the photograph of her estranged brother—but opens onto a larger reflection on loss, language, and historical image. The book is structured as an accordion-fold elegy: scraps of text, translations of Catullus, smudged photographs, and notes coalesce in a collage of mourning. If Ashbery refracted perception, Carson fractures it entirely.

At the heart of Nox is the ekphrastic impulse—not toward a painting, but toward the image as memorial artifact. She writes:

“I wanted to fill my elegy with light of all kinds. But death makes us stingy.”

Carson’s ekphrasis is deeply interior. The poem does not describe an artwork but becomes one—assembled, not composed. She turns the page itself into a space of visual and textual layering. Every torn edge, every blurred image, every palimpsest of quotation functions like a brushstroke in a visual composition. The text mourns its own inability to speak clearly or fully: ekphrasis as stammering, as grief-text.

In translating Catullus’s elegy for his brother (Poem 101), Carson returns again and again to a single Latin word—“multum”—struggling to render it properly. This repetition dramatizes a key postmodern anxiety: language cannot hold grief, just as it cannot fully hold image. The result is an ekphrasis of absence: not what is seen, but what cannot be made visible again.

Susan Stewart, in Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, notes that postmodern poets often “foreground the failure of perception as the condition of insight.” Carson’s work exemplifies this: it does not resolve grief into lyric epiphany, nor the image into verbal clarity. Instead, it presents the raw materials of memory, asking the reader to assemble meaning in the gaps.

In both Ashbery and Carson, then, we find a refusal of the traditional ekphrastic goal of mastery through description. Their work resists the illusion that words can perfectly capture images—or that art can perfectly render life. Instead, they stage the act of looking as a kind of broken devotion: art is admired, interrogated, mourned—but never possessed.

The Turn to Reflexivity

Postmodern ekphrasis is also marked by its reflexivity—its awareness of the act of writing about art. Ashbery, in his digressions, constantly signals the instability of interpretation. Carson, through her visual-poetic collage, draws attention to the materiality of both text and image. Their work refuses the illusion that the image is ever pure, or that the poem is ever objective. In their hands, ekphrasis becomes a mode of poetic self-interrogation.

They shift the question from what is being looked at to how do we look—and why do we fail to see clearly?

Section V: Other Ways of Seeing — Ekphrasis Beyond the West

To fully understand ekphrasis is to understand it not as a static Western inheritance, but as a living, global, and contested practice. While Homer, Keats, and Ashbery have shaped the canonical arc of ekphrasis, voices from outside the dominant tradition have begun to transform the mode into a tool of reclamation, revision, and resistance. In the hands of poets like Rita Dove, Natasha Trethewey, Meena Alexander, and Okot p’Bitek, ekphrasis becomes more than aesthetic—it becomes political, postcolonial, and personal. It answers not only to the image but to the power structures behind it, asking: who made this image? who is being looked at? and who is allowed to speak back?

Rita Dove: Agosta the Winged Man

In Agosta the Winged Man and Other Repercussions (from the 1995 collection Mother Love), Rita Dove addresses a painting by circus artist Christian Schad depicting Agosta, a man with dwarfism and winglike shoulder deformities, posed beside a female figure. Rather than remaining at a descriptive remove, Dove inhabits Agosta’s voice, reclaiming the humanity and complexity denied him by the painter’s exoticizing gaze.

“It is my face,

but the eyes are not mine.

He wanted amazement,

so I gave him fear.”

In these lines, the poem becomes a counter-ekphrasis—a response from the painted subject himself. Dove reverses the direction of power. She does not merely observe; she writes from within the frame, destabilizing the voyeuristic stance the original portrait encouraged. Here, ekphrasis is resistance, a poetic act of rehumanization.

Natasha Trethewey: Thrall

Natasha Trethewey’s Thrall (2012) confronts the legacy of colonial portraiture, particularly those images that frame mixed-race children in hierarchical poses with white fathers and enslaved or indigenous mothers. In poems like De Espana and Taxonomy, Trethewey writes in direct dialogue with 18th-century casta paintings—genre images from colonial Mexico that codified race through art. The gaze in these paintings was scientific, categorical, dehumanizing.

Trethewey’s poetry undoes this visual logic. She positions herself as a descendant of the gaze, re-entering the paintings through personal and ancestral memory. In Taxonomy, she writes:

“Child in the foreground,

her father’s hand upon her shoulder.

Look again—she is not smiling.”

Trethewey asks us to look again—not with the uncritical eye of the colonial classifier, but with the moral urgency of witness. Her ekphrasis reclaims not only the image but the right to interpret it. Her work echoes the concern voiced by Heffernan and postcolonial scholars alike: that images are never neutral—they carry, obscure, or distort power.

Meena Alexander: Diasporic Ekphrasis

In the work of Meena Alexander, an Indian-American poet who wrote from the in-between spaces of diasporic identity, ekphrasis becomes a map of fragmented selfhood. Her poems often engage visual art not to fix identity, but to dissolve it into overlapping layers of memory, violence, and longing. In Muse and House of a Thousand Doors, Alexander responds not to a single painting, but to the very act of inscription—how bodies, borders, and histories are etched onto the skin and onto the page.

She writes:

“I want a poem

as sharp as a needle

to pull the language through.”

For Alexander, ekphrasis is not always directed at canvas or pigment, but at the visual record of displacement—photographs, scars, ruins. In this way, her work broadens the ekphrastic field to include nontraditional images, insisting that what is seen is often unstable, damaged, or withheld. Her poetry models a diasporic ekphrasis, one that searches for wholeness in the fragment.

Okot p’Bitek: Postcolonial Voice as Image

Outside of the Western poetic lineage, the Ugandan poet Okot p’Bitek offers a different kind of ekphrasis—one that uses poetic voice to subvert colonial images and restore African agency. In his seminal work Song of Lawino (1966), p’Bitek constructs a dramatic monologue from the perspective of Lawino, a traditional Acholi woman whose husband has abandoned their customs in favor of Western ways. While not strictly ekphrastic in form, Lawino’s speech is filled with references to colonial art, Western fashion, and missionary iconography, which she critiques with biting irony.

“You say the white woman is beautiful

Her lips are red-hot

Like glowing charcoal…”

Here, the visual becomes a battleground of values. Lawino ridicules the aesthetics of the colonizer, exposing the absurdity of foreign standards imposed on African bodies and lives. Ekphrasis here is not description; it is disruption—the poem becomes a verbal counter-image that asserts cultural sovereignty.

Toward a Global Ekphrasis

Together, these poets expand ekphrasis from a genre of contemplation to one of confrontation and care. They remind us that images are embedded in systems of history, trauma, and voice. Ekphrasis in their hands is no longer a window to admire; it is a mirror to reckon with.

Kasia Boddy, in The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Poetry, argues that “ekphrasis has become a crucial site of postcolonial intervention, where poets speak not only to images, but through them, against them, beyond them.” The poets in this section exemplify this movement. They do not seek to master the image, but to unframe it—to break open its silences and let the poem do what the painting could not: speak from the margins.

Their works challenge the very foundations of the ekphrastic tradition, asking us to revise not only how we see art, but who has the right to speak for and within it.

Section VI: From Vision to Flame — Conclusion

From Homer’s shield to Carson’s collage, from Vermeer’s milkmaid to Trethewey’s taxonomy, the arc of ekphrasis stretches across time, culture, and intention. What begins as vivid description evolves into moral critique, fragmented memory, and postcolonial witness. The ekphrastic poem no longer merely looks at art; it burns through it. This flame—flickering at the edge of silence and speech—is what gives ekphrasis its enduring force: a poetic response to seeing that resists containment, that questions the frame, and that transforms vision into insight.

At its classical root, ekphrasis offered a pause—a reflective mirror in the midst of narrative action. Homer’s Shield of Achilles allowed readers to behold the world in miniature, stilled within artifice. Keats’s urn offered a Romantic paradox: beauty eternally preserved, yet permanently deferred. But even in these early examples, ekphrasis already gestured toward its greater potential—not just to describe the visual world, but to challenge how we engage with it.

In the modern era, that challenge becomes urgent. For poets like Auden and Szymborska, ekphrasis exposes the ethics of attention. What is not seen? What is ignored? Their poems do not worship the image—they interrogate its silence. Likewise, Ashbery and Carson fracture the stable gaze, suggesting that art and self alike are refracted, uncertain, irrecoverable. Their works stage the very act of seeing as a problem of perception and language.

More radically, contemporary women and non-Western poets bring ekphrasis to the edge of resistance. Rita Dove and Natasha Trethewey reclaim the painted body, giving voice to figures once silenced by aesthetic convention and colonial categorization. Meena Alexander and Okot p’Bitek shatter the frame altogether, using ekphrasis as diasporic lament, postcolonial satire, or cultural reclamation. They speak not only to art, but through it, challenging the viewer to see beyond aesthetic distance.

In this expanded field, ekphrasis becomes more than a genre—it becomes a mode of reading, writing, and seeing. As Roland Barthes observes in Camera Lucida, the image is never neutral: it wounds, conceals, seduces, decays. The ekphrastic poet enters this volatile space not to master it, but to bear witness. Whether by translating a canvas into words or giving voice to an unseen subject, the poem enacts a transformation: sight becomes speech, and silence becomes story.

Mary Jo Bang, in a lecture on ekphrastic poetics, notes that the act of looking at art is always double: “We see the object, and we see ourselves seeing it.” Ekphrasis, then, is both outward and inward. It is as much about what is on the wall as what is within the watcher. This is why, even in an age of algorithmic images and visual saturation, ekphrasis persists. It slows us down. It asks us to stay with the image, not scroll past it. It requires us to translate not only what we see, but why we are moved by it.

The digital era has not diminished ekphrasis—it has recharged it. As David Kennedy observes in Ekphrasis in the Digital Age, our image-world is so dense and fleeting that poetry offers one of the few spaces for sustained, critical looking. In a feed-driven visual culture, the ekphrastic poem becomes an act of resistance, a way to restore gravity to the gaze.

And yet, ekphrasis is not merely serious—it is also intimate, playful, even devotional. To write ekphrastically is to enter into relation, to touch the surface of a painting and find it warm with presence. It is to listen to what does not speak and return an answer—not perfect, not complete, but burning with the effort to reach across silence.

If art is the frame that holds a moment still, then ekphrasis is the flame that dances within it—sometimes gentle, sometimes consuming. The poem does not always clarify the image; sometimes it obscures it, troubles it, remakes it. But in doing so, it invites us to become not just passive viewers, but active interpreters of vision.

In the end, the ekphrastic tradition is not a lineage but a chorus—one that echoes across centuries, cultures, and modes of art. It asks, again and again: what do you see? and what will you say in return?

The act of looking is never neutral. But in poetry, it can be ethical, elegiac, luminous. Ekphrasis does not preserve the image. It ignites it.