The Kiss of Death?

Love is as strong as death,
its jealousy unyielding as the grave. (Song of Sol 8:6)

The Kiss by Gustav Klimt, 1907-1908, oil and gold leaf on canvas, 71 in. X 71 in., Österreichische Galerie Belvedere, Vienna, Austria. As an Austrian Symbolist painter, Klimt turned away from naturalistic styles and instead used symbolic elements to reveal psychological states.

“Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt,” By Lawrence Ferlinghetti

They are kneeling upright on a flowered bed
++He
++++has just caught her there
++++++++++++and holds her still
++Her gown
++++++++has slipped down
++++++++++++off her shoulder
++He has an urgent hunger
++++++++His dark head
++++++++++++bends to hers
++++++++++++++++hungrily
++And the woman the woman
++++turns her tangerine lips from his
++++++one hand like the head of a dead swan
++++++++draped down over
++++++++++++++++his heavy neck
++++++++the fingers
++++++++++strangely crimped
++++++++++++tightly together
++++her other arm doubled up
++++++++against her tight breast
++++++her hand a languid claw
++++++++++++clutching his hand
++++++++which would turn her mouth
++++++++++++++++to his
++++her long dress made
++++++++of multicolored blossoms
++++++++++quilted on gold
++++her Titian hair
++++++++with blue stars in it
++And his gold
++++++++harlequin robe
++++++++++++checkered with
++++++++++++++++dark squares
++Gold garlands
++++++++stream down over
+++++++++++++her bare calves &
++++++++++++++++tensed feet

Nearby there must be
++++++++a jeweled tree
++++++++++++with glass leaves aglitter
++++++++++++++++in the gold air
It must be
++++++morning
++++++++++++in a faraway place somewhere
They
++++are silent together
++++++++++++++++as in a flowered field
++++++upon the summer couch
++++++++++++++which must be hers
++And he holds her still
++++++++++++++so passionately
++++++holds her head to his
++++++++++++++so gently so insistently
++++++to make her turn
++++++++++++++her lips to his
++her eyes are closed
++++++++++++like folded petals
++She
++++will not open
++++++++++He
++++++++++++is not the One

The literary critic Stephen Greenblatt was famous for opening his essays with amusing anecdotes before turning a keen analytical eye on the interplay between literature and its historical context. When lecturing, he tended to pull from a stock of shopworn anecdotes, and the following was one of his favorites to play on repeat, useful for introducing nearly any topic while simultaneously capturing his audience’s attention. “All his life my father was obsessed with death,” he began, recalling how “the wonder had a specific origin”:

My grandfather had died in New York [and] my father then had to bring the body back to Boston by train. The coffin was in the baggage car and my father was sitting quietly and weeping in the club car … when, in New Haven, Connecticut, the entire chorus line of the Ziegfeld Follies climbed on board. The chorus girls, leggy, buxom, bejewelled, bedecked in feather boas and wide-brimmed hats, sweetly crowded around my weeping father, kissing and hugging him and trying to cheer him up. It was perhaps my father’s purest encounter with the wonderful power of eros over thanatos. (Hamlet in Purgatory 257)

I recently recalled this peculiar anecdote while revisiting Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s ekphrastic poem, “Short Story on a Painting of Gustav Klimt,” which offers an eye-opening meditation on The Kiss, a painting so famous that it has moved from modernist masterpiece to postmodern pastiche, now better known for its appearance on mugs and shower curtains than for its overwhelming six-foot square mural, radiant with gold leaf. The painting that so shocked its initial audiences with its unabashedly erotic themes has now become the stuff of legend and kitschy merchandise, an enfilade of endless repetition, much like Greenblatt’s once innovative anecdotes, which became expected literary conventions. Yet the dialectic between eros and thanatos is worth exploring in Ferlinghetti’s poem, partly as a remix of the “Death and the Maiden” motif, revising not only Greenblatt’s anecdote but also revolutionizing a variety of ekphrastic themes in response to Klimt’s painting.

It’s always a delight to return to this poem, a poem that causes me to see the painting anew, shocking me out of my automatic perceptual biases to look more closely at a work of art that may not be as romantic as it appears at first glance. The tiered, indented format of the poem deliberately slips and slopes downward from left to right, imitating the formal structure of the painting and the natural movement of our eye from top to bottom and left to right as we follow the line of the composition from the top of the heads through the bodies and then off to the right through the woman’s feet. (Reading a painting from top to bottom and left to right is similar to reading a text, though it happens so quickly when we view images that it’s generally imperceptible.)

Whether “they are kneeling upright on a flowered bed” or suspended beyond time and space, there’s no doubt that Ferlinghetti is tapping into a well-worn trope of the ekphrastic tradition with his repeated, paronomastic use of the word “still,” which could mean “yet” or “unmoving,” and which is deliberately contrasted with the immediacy of “just”: “He has just caught her there/ and holds her still” (lines 2–4, 51). He is holding her motionless and holding her forever, which has obviously ominous overtones. This likely alludes to the opening line of John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian Urn” (“Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness”), a poem that expresses ambivalence about the timeless transcendence of art, questioning whether the figures on the urn represent a delicate balancing act in the dialectic between eros and thanatos, time and eternity: “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” (17–20). At the conclusion of the poem, the urn comes to life and speaks to us in an ambiguous epigram that mirrors the circularity of the urn itself, dismantling age-old distinctions that pit fact against value: “‘Beauty is truth, truth beauty’ — that is all/ Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know” (49–50).

In Picture Theory, W. J. T. Mitchell claims that Keats’ poem perfectly encapsulates the gendered rivalry in ekphrastic works between the male poet and the silent female image, as the male poet forces the female image to speak (170–71). This violent, paragonal rivalry has remained a surprisingly popular way to theorize about ekphrastic works of art. While such an overarching interpretive matrix may occasionally work well, limitations immediately spring to mind: female ekphrastic poets also interpret paintings, to name but one objection, among many. There are certainly gendered dynamics at play in Ferlinghetti’s poem and Klimt’s painting, but they are complicated by the woman’s revolutionary resistance at the end of the poem as well as by the poem’s concern with a different competition between the verbal and the visual arts, which addresses the imaginative potential of the one who beholds the painting and the poem. In the triangulated relationship between the poet, painter, and audience, the audience may be the most important piece of the puzzle, who must reassess the painting in light of the poet’s claims.

As the poem and gown slip down to the right, the repetition, imagery, alliteration, and internal rhyme grow increasingly heavy and sinister, emphasized by the simile of the swan, sundered from a lifelong mate (“one hand like the head of a dead swan/ draped down over/ his heavy neck”), as well as by the isometric tension at stake: “her other arm doubled up/ against her tight breast/ her hand a languid claw/ clutching his hand” (14–16, 20–23). The word “gold” is then repeated four times (“quilted on gold,” “gold harlequin robe,” “gold garlands,” and “gold air”), drawing attention to Klimt’s artistic medium of using gold leaf, a technique inspired by his love of Ravenna’s Byzantine mosaics. (For the background, Klimt painted sheets of gold leaf with a dark wash and then scattered flakes of gold across it.) The line, “her long dress made/ of multicolored blossoms/ quilted on gold” (26–28) particularly illustrates the distinction between the medium and the matter, the form and the content, the natural and the artificial. “Quilted on gold” is especially evocative, as it foregrounds the artificial medium, alluding to another ekphrastic tradition that dates back as far as Homer’s elaborate description of the “Shield of Achilles,” where the poet reminds the reader of the difference between the medium and the matter as he describes the land “looking as though it had just been ploughed, though it was made of gold” (line 674, Museum of Words 4). Homer’s epic dates to the eighth century BCE, to the time when writing originates in Greece, and James Heffernan makes the good point that Homer is inviting us to “measure the newborn powers of writing itself against those of a much older form of representation” (Museum of Words 9).  Emphasizing Keats’ contrasts between form and content in “Ode on a Grecian Urn,” between juxtapositions like “cold pastoral” and “marble men,” Helen Vendler also questions whether it is possible to see the medium and the matter of any artwork in unison or only in alternation (The Odes of John Keats 133).

Ceci n’est pas une pipe, eh? When we read Ferlinghetti’s poem about a painting, we are reading a verbal representation of a visual representation, after all, and Plato would be particularly annoyed by how far down the ladder we have removed ourselves from the perfect realm of the Forms. And yet the following lines suggest a challenge to the standard Platonic hierarchies: “Nearby there must be/ a jeweled tree/ with glass leaves aglitter/ in the gold air” (39–42). Like the Renaissance humanists, who believed that we could access the perfect Forms in our imagination, so the poet has taken us beyond the painting to imagine something completely external to it — perfected by the exquisite, glistening sound effects as well as by the brilliant imagery itself. If there is such a thing as a rivalry between the verbal and visual arts, then the poet is here claiming the power of the written word to transfigure our imaginations in a manner that the painting cannot achieve. Even the brief reference to the woman’s golden red “Titian hair” summons proliferating images in the reader’s mind of the Renaissance painter’s works. The other equally wonderful option is that the poet could be alluding to Klimt’s Tree of Life in the Stoclet Frieze, placing the couple within an expanding, inter-referential landscape of his paintings. The massive frieze also contains personified depictions of the Expectation and Fulfillment of physical and spiritual intimacy, with the same couple as the one in The Kiss, but shown from a different perspective.

Yet the possibility then emerges that this is a sinister, artificial Eden of enclosure and entrapment, with an unhealthy Midas touch — another receding enfilade, hall of mirrors, or mis en abyme of endless repetition.[1] Although the poet has dropped a variety of unsubtle hints that something is uncomfortably off-key in The Kiss (“fingers strangely crimped,” “tensed feet,” harlequin vs. celestial imagery), the concluding lines of the poem still come as shock, causing us to look more intently at the painting — beyond the elegant, ornate, and sensuous surface. If you magnify the faces and hands of the couple, you can see that he looks gaunt, skeletal, and wrinkled — older by far than the woman he is attempting to seduce. Even more than a May-December relationship, the vivid contrasts evoke the longstanding motif of “Death and the Maiden” in European narratives, which feature the seduction and death of a young woman, a motif Klimt also explored in another painting, Death and Life, created around the same time as The Kiss. With the concluding lines, “She/ will not open/ He is not the One,” the woman defies the “urgent hunger” of the capitalized devourer, forever turned away from the ravages of time and death. While an ekphrastic poem generally brings a static painting’s instantaneous “pregnant moment” to life in a narrative succession of actions, this poem is complicating that convention and defying our expectations, just as the woman defies the overtures of the man and the voyeuristic gaze of everyone involved. Keats’ line, “she cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,” accrues new and refreshing connotations in the wake of Ferlinghetti’s poem, which encourages us to expand our imaginative potential as we explore unfolding questions about words and images, time and space, love and death.

Kathryn Stelmach Artuso (Ph.D. English, UCLA) is a freelance journalist and the author of an eclectic assortment of academic articles and books, including Transatlantic Renaissances: Literature of Ireland and the American South.

[1] The couple is likely Klimt and his model Emilie Flöge, who was twelve years younger. If I seem unwilling to stake forceful claims, it’s because the very nature of ekphrastic art is one of ambivalence, raising more questions than it answers. I also realize that this has turned into more of an academic analysis than a devotional, though I thought it was important to lay the foundation for the fundamental terms, theories, and contexts surrounding ekphrastic poetry in an early installment. The experimental nature of this venture has also revealed that the devotional format sometimes works well, though not always.