This beautiful painting by Tarragon is neither his first, nor his last, attack on Browning's great poem Porphyria's Lover. Another one is here. More are forthcoming.
It's a good sized oil, about five feet tall.
Recurrent motifs in the work of any artist often appear for reasons that are deeply personal and frankly obscure, even to the artist him or herself. I don't think Mikhail Vroubel could have explained his own obsession with Lermontov's Demon.
As for why Porphyria and her lover keep cropping up in Tarragon's work, to read the poem is to understand one possible answer. It's famous for a reason.
Perhaps another reason is the dictum of Edgar Allen Poe, undoubtedly known to Tarragon, that "the death of a beautiful woman… is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world," especially if heard from "the lips… of a bereaved lover." Thus the impetus of The Raven, a poem even more famous than Porphyria.
Do we agree with Poe's rule?
Well, perhaps not. But certainly the pathos of loss is proportional to the value of what is lost, and without doubt, beauty is valuable.
Whether Poe read Porphyria I have no idea. He could have. It was collected in 1842, three years before The Raven. The two poems have some bombast in common, which we might charitably attribute to their near contemporaneity. The final lines of Porphyria, in which God says not a word, seem almost to invite in the Raven, through whom God says one word.
It's a pleasing conceit to imagine that Lenore and Porphyria were the same woman. One who had chosen a lover more muscular than the weepy protagonist of Poe's poem. As it turned out, she choose unwisely. Not, of course, that either poem is much concerned with women's choices. Indeed, a main subject of both poems is obsessive male possessiveness. Perhaps too of the painting above.
The quote is from Poe's Philosophy of Composition, which is certainly one of the most humorous documents in the history of artistic autobiography.
No comments:
Post a Comment