The Dark Angel

Illustrating poetry is often a bad idea. Especially if you try to do it literally. The things that make an effective poem - language, and the effect language has on our brains - are quite different from the effect of images via our eyes.

It's a complex business, so perhaps here I should only say that while pictures come to us via the straightforward processes of vision, for poems we need interpretation. We talk about someone's "poetic vision," or even "musical vision," but to combine these words is to speak metaphorically.

Nonetheless, there have been many successful pictures based on poems. But most of these don't really illustrate the poem. What they show us is an episode from the story that the poem told us. Ingres' Jupiter and Thetis, for example, succeeds wonderfully in depicting an event from the Illiad, but has very little to do with the poetry of Homer. The same might be said of thousands (for Homer alone!) of other paintings.

The things words do are not the things pictures do. But the impulse to combine the two is hard to shake off. Artists read poems, and poets look at pictures. A response is only natural. A rare successful example is the work Odilon Redon produced in response to Edgar Allen Poe's poetry. Another (perhaps) is Georges Barbier's work on Les Chansons de Bilitis.

Obviously, I'm leading up to a picture of my own. It's an illustration - or at least a response - to Lionel Johnson's The Dark Angel. It's a poem about the pain of repressed desire and, in its use of language, the elaborate machinations people undertake to reinforce and justify their own sexual repression. In many ways it's a very silly poem, but so is this picture.

The red brand, by the way, is a medieval Spanish version of the IHS Christogram.