Hi! It's Clara.
For my project this week, I did the prompt "visually explicate a short poem." It's not actually the one assigned to this week but whatev, it's a small rebellion.
For my poem I chose Mercy Killing by Kenneth Burke. Here's the poem:
Faithfully
We had covered the nasturtiums
Keeping them beyond
Their Season
Until, farewell-minded,
Thinking of age and ailments,
And noting their lack of lustre,
I said:
"They want to die;
We should let them die."
That night
With a biting clear full moon
They lay exposed.
In the morning,
Still shaded
While the sun's line
Crawled towards them from the northwest,
Under a skin of ice
They were at peace.
Here's the image I created for this poem:
So! Just to sort of explain myself, there's a couple elements I want to talk about. The background is a tarp, the kind you use to cover plants and mulch piles and other garden-y stuff. The flowers are, obviously, nasturtiums, and that's about all there is to see. I pitched everything into a purple-y blue tone (STAY PURPLE) because this poem felt very cool and calm to me. I also wanted to find a way to keep it close to the ground, and sort of confined, because though the poem is dreamy it does feel quite grounded to me. That's why I used a tarp, since I know them in relation to mulch, plants, etc., and they've always struck me as something deeply tied into gardens and the natural world. Yet, I hoped to sort of use the blueness of the background to play off of the lines about the night sky. I don't know, tell me if you think the poem works with the image!
:-) -Clara
I love how simple this image is. I like the contrast between the flowers, something natural and fresh and beautiful, with something like a tarp, man-made, a bit industrial, not something that people normally look at just to look at.
ReplyDeleteClara you did an excellent job visually explicating this! I totally felt everything you're saying about the blue-black background like the night sky, but the color also feels earthy to me, perhaps because of the mud splotches on the tarp. The containment in the golden frame (is this a locket pendant?) is so beautiful and I love the leaves slight contrast with the tarp. Great poem! Great images! Great creation!
ReplyDeleteThis is beautiful and very cool. I like your explanation of the elements of your visual explication, which is itself another explication. The tarp makes sense, and its color works well with the nasturtiums. I like the way the flowers are both contained and have an energy that seems to be exploding out of their container at once.
ReplyDeleteThe image in your blog post is simple, yet elegant, which I love! I like how you explain all the different aspects of the image in your post, for example the background like the night sky. The contrast in the image, between the flowers and the tarp, is also very appealing!
ReplyDeleteI really like that you mentioned the calming aspect of both the poem and the image because that definitely shines through! I also like the way that you would have to look closely to recognize the significance of the tarp to the flowers. It all just works really well together. Good job!
ReplyDeleteclara you're so creative!! I love the way that the tarp is transformed by the flowers -- as I usually think of it as pretty abject, laying in my yard, a mating ground for mosquitos or a place for the plants to die beneath, but here it is almost ethereal. beautiful symbolism. wow.
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