The Legacy of Laocoon

Abstract

These lines by Robert Browning titled ‘Rhyme for a Child Viewing a Naked Venus in the Judgement of Paris’ provide one of the most succinct and eloquent examples of the possibilities, and the sophistication of ekphrastic speech. Browning’s “Rhyme” is a poem about the power of the image, the fascination images can exert on viewers, their capacity to strike, startle, and transfix us before them. This fascination is linked, in turn, to erotic attraction, and the lines thus expose the gender relations so often inherent in the ‘drama’ between beholder and image: the female body as a kind of magnet, a source of mystery and unending wonder, but then as well, potentially, as a threatening and petrifying Medusa. The epigram also happens to be a perfect instantiation of the energetic force of metered language, its ability to delight and confound us. In its sheer repetitiveness Browning’s iambic tetrameter produces a strange kind of crescendo. (If read aloud, a remarkable array of possibilities opens up, depending especially on cadence and on the pauses one chooses to put between the words). The dénouement or relief of this tension, if I can put it like that, is only brought about once we are given the poem’s title and with it we begin to understand, that is, to see the scene the epigram has managed to create – with essentially no more than four words. These four words and the title ‘draw’ not just the scene of a young boy before the canvas, speechless and spellbound, but also, by implication, the scene on the canvas, Venus watching, whether with serene detachment, satisfaction, or pity – it’s up to us to decide, or rather, to imagine – the stunning effect of her beauty. Browning’s epigram encapsulates not just the long-standing competition between the verbal and the visual arts, it also features their mutual reinforcement and collaboration, producing what a semiotician might call an image-text, shuttling back and forth between word and image, the letters on the page and the images which gave rise to them – and to which they return us.