First Steps: Immortalisation, Delight and Homage – From Rembrandt Van Rijn's The Polish Rider to Hokusai's Under the Wave off Kanagawa and Romare Bearden's The Obeah's Dawn

In 1984, when Walcott was asked to write a poem for the opening page of the catalogue for Bearden's exhibition Rituals of Obeah, he declared that he had never ‘written poems out of a painting’ before, a remark which might sound surprising if one considers Walcott's lifelong preoccupation with the visual arts. Nonetheless, when he wrote ‘To Romare Bearden’, if Walcott had often commented on distinctive qualities of an artist's general performance – Hollander calls this mode ekphrastic ‘capriccio’ – he had not written many poems entirely focused on one painting and had seldom engaged in a specific and sustained ekphrastic effort.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary defines ekphrasis as ‘the rhetorical description of a work of art’ but ‘description’ is a rather vague term: practically speaking, for example, when does description end and narrative or interpretation begin? Does ‘description’ refer only to the subject of the painting, or does it extend to the technique of a painting, its handling of shapes and colours, the discourses and counter-discourses that it promotes or challenges, or the reactions it might trigger in viewers? Is the subject of a painting only what we see? What if a poem is more concerned with what is left out of the picture's frame? And what shall we make of Walcott's choice of prepositions in his reference to ‘To Romare Bearden’: does ‘out of a painting’ suggest a relationship between the visual and the verbal where the emphasis is placed on continuity rather than simply on reference? At the same time, does the very effort implicit in wrestling a poem ‘out of’ a painting indicate that this continuity does not presuppose full translatability and transparency between the visual and the verbal, and demands respect for their individual differences? As we have seen, when dealing with paintings, Walcott was interested in the narratives that emerged from the relation between painting and viewers but also in those that the image might have contained, conveyed or hidden.