Bridging the Gap Between Poetry and Art

When we were first given the prompt for the pairing presentation, I was daunted by the prospect of trying to draw connections between two seemingly disparate art forms, poetry and visual art. The fact that we could pair any piece of art with any poem certainly didn't make me feel any more comfortable with the project. My group sat around the kitchen table in my flat flipping through our Norton anthologies and looking through the websites of the many art galleries desperately trying to come up with a pairing. And then Joanne read the first poem by Thomas Hardy, "Hap", in the Norton and we knew that we had found our poem. It was an moment of almost instant agreement. Not long after, Joanne also found the painting Totes Meer by Paul Nash on the Tate Britain's website and we had our pairing. We assigned research roles and went back to writing blog posts, thinking that the hardest part of the project was over.

I realized very quickly that I was mistaken. Having to connect a poem written in the late 1860s when Hardy was a disenchanted young man living in London to a painting completed during WWII by a middle aged Nash who was working for the government to create propaganda paintings was an incredibly difficult task. When I had to analyze text and image side by side in previous classes, I was always analyzing two pieces that were meant to be paired with each other because I was viewing illustrations created for that text. I felt out of my depth analyzing two pieces that had not been specifically intended to be paired together.

I found that getting as close to the painting and the poem as I could helped in creating connections between the two pieces. Looking closely at minute details in the painting, such as the black trees on the horizon line or the light blue paint used on the plane wheel, and in the poem, such as the use of a dash and ellipsis or the choice to not capitalize "god", I could dig into the significances of those choices and begin to see how those significances were similar between the two pieces. Analysis of the small details moved me towards larger, overarching themes evident in both Hardy's poem and Nash's painting.

Finding these common themes reinforced the ideas asserted by Paul Fussell in his book The Great War and Modern Memory that Thomas Hardy was a "clairvoyant" who anticipated the "terrible irony" that would define British writers' treatment of the Great War. Even Hardy's early poetry contained the dark, despairing images that would appear later in both writings about and artwork of the world wars. For that reason, as we worked on the presentation I realized that even if these two pieces came from two different time periods from men at different places in their lives who had different purposes in mind for their works, the connections between them were valid and valuable. The connections served as a means to bridge the gap between these different time periods, bringing these two British artists together in an appreciation of their individual interpretations of the common experience of mortality and chance.

The Poem in the Museum