Ekphrasis: When Poems Describe Paintings

By Lucy Levine · Updated November 3, 2026

Ekphrasis is writing that describes or answers a work of visual art: a poem about a painting, an urn, a shield. The best ekphrastic poems do more than describe. They notice what the eye passes over, give the figures a voice, or argue with what the artist chose to show. Here is how the form works, from Homer to Keats to two very different poems about the same Brueghel.

What ekphrasis means

The Academy of American Poets defines ekphrasis as vivid language that describes or responds to a work of visual art, and traces the word to the Greek for “description”. Its glossary names Homer’s account of the forging of Achilles’ shield in book eighteen of the Iliad as one of the earliest examples, and adds that by the nineteenth and twentieth centuries poets had moved from elaborate description toward interpretation and interrogation.

That shift is the whole history of the form in one sentence. Early ekphrasis says: here is what it looks like. Later ekphrasis says: here is what it means, or what it leaves out.

The first great ekphrasis: Achilles’ shield

In book XVIII the smith-god makes Achilles a new shield and decorates it with the whole world: He wrought the earth, the heavens, and the sea, then two cities, a battle, a harvest, and a dancing floor like the one Daedalus made for Ariadne. The finest moment is a ploughed field. The shield is metal, but Homer insists on how real it looks:

The part that they had ploughed was dark behind them, so that the field, though it was of gold, still looked as if it were being ploughed—very curious to behold.

Homer, Iliad, book XVIII (trans. Samuel Butler)

This is ekphrasis noticing technique. Homer sees that the artist has made gold look like freshly turned earth, and he admits that this is strange. The poem describes the illusion and the material at the same time, which is something a painting cannot do about itself.

Keats and the Grecian urn

John Keats wrote “Ode on a Grecian Urn” in 1819 and published it in his 1820 volume. The notes in the Gutenberg edition of that volume point out that the poem was not apparently inspired by any one actual vase, but by many Greek sculptures, some in the British Museum and some known only from engravings. Keats’s urn is a composite, an object made of looking.

He opens by addressing it directly:

Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness,

Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, stanza 1, Lamia, Isabella, The Eve of St. Agnes, and Other Poems (1820)

“Still” means both motionless and not yet. The urn is a bride forever about to be married, and the poem’s central idea follows from that: an image is frozen just before the event, so nothing in it can end. The second stanza turns this into a paradox about sound:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, stanza 2
📨 Get Free Essays And Quote Collections Alerts
Free · No spam · Unsubscribe anytime

Then, in the fourth stanza, Keats does what only a poem can. He walks round the urn, sees a procession leading a heifer to sacrifice, and asks where these people came from. He imagines the town they left, empty forever, a town that is not on the urn at all:

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

Why thou art desolate, can e’er return.

John Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”, stanza 4

The edition’s notes say this stanza strongly recalls parts of the Parthenon frieze in the British Museum. The poem sees off the edge of the object, into the space the sculptor implied but never carved.

Shelley and the Medusa

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery” was published by Mary Shelley in his Posthumous Poems of 1824. It is ekphrasis as shock: a dead face lying on a mountain peak under the night sky, vipers for hair, a newt peering into its eyes and a bat flitting out of a cave its light has opened. Its fourth line states the paradox the whole poem explores:

Its horror and its beauty are divine.

Percy Bysshe Shelley, “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci in the Florentine Gallery”, stanza 1

One painting, two poems: Landscape with the Fall of Icarus

The painting in the Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium in Brussels is one of the most written-about pictures in modern ekphrasis. The museum’s own catalogue entry is careful: it attributes the work to Pieter I Bruegel with a question mark, and records it as oil on canvas, 73.5 by 112, inventory 4030, acquired from the Sackville Gallery in London in 1912. On its Google Arts and Culture page the museum says the execution is uncertain but the design is Bruegel’s, and that another version is in the Van Buuren collection, also in Brussels.

What is on the canvas: a wide coastal landscape seen from above, a ploughman in the foreground turning his furrow, a shepherd with his flock, a fisherman at the water’s edge, a ship under sail, and, very small in the lower right, two legs disappearing into the sea. The figures come straight out of Ovid, who lists these same bystanders as the witnesses of Daedalus and Icarus in flight:

A person while he is angling for fish with his quivering rod, or the shepherd leaning on his crook, or the ploughman on the plough tail, when he beholds them, is astonished, and believes them to be Divinities, who thus can cleave the air.

Ovid, Metamorphoses, book VIII (trans. Henry T. Riley, 1851)

In Ovid, the three watchers look up in wonder. In the painting, the ploughman keeps his eyes on the ground. That reversal is what the two poets saw.

Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”

W. H. Auden visited the Brussels museum in December 1938, as Scott Horton notes in Harper’s, and the poem was published in 1940; the Academy of American Poets records that Auden moved to the United States in 1939. The poem is still in copyright, so here it is described rather than quoted. Its argument is that the Old Masters understood where suffering happens: off to one side, while other people eat, open windows or walk along. A stanza later, as Horton points out, it turns to Brueghel’s Icarus, and the indifference of the bystanders becomes the poem’s example.

William Carlos Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”

Williams collected his poem in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems (New Directions, 1962), which the Academy of American Poets notes was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Where Auden explains, Williams simply looks. The poem opens by naming Brueghel as its authority, moves through spring, the farmer and the sea in short unpunctuated lines, and ends with a splash that nobody notices and a boy drowning. You can read it on the Academy’s website; the tiny, flat last line does what Brueghel’s tiny legs do.

Poem	Artwork	Date	What the poem adds
Homer, the shield of Achilles	Imagined metalwork	Iliad, book XVIII	Admiration of the illusion
Keats, “Ode on a Grecian Urn”	A composite of Greek sculpture	1819; published 1820	The empty town off the edge of the urn
Shelley, “On the Medusa…”	A Medusa in the Florentine gallery, named in the title as Leonardo’s	Published 1824	Horror as beauty
Auden, “Musée des Beaux Arts”	Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, Brussels	Visit 1938; published 1940	A moral argument about indifference
Williams, “Landscape with the Fall of Icarus”	The same painting	Collected 1962	Plain seeing, no argument

If you want to try writing ekphrasis, start by looking properly: our slow method for looking at a painting is a good warm-up, and Hokusai’s print in The Great Wave off Kanagawa is full of small figures waiting for a poem. For fiction that does the same thing at novel length, see novels about painters. And look again at the Brussels canvas: by the museum’s own measurements it is more than a metre wide, and the falling boy occupies a few centimetres of it.