Image & Echo

Image & Echo

by

Kieran Beville

In Image and Echo, poetry meets painting in a vivid conversation across centuries. From Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring to Van Gogh’s Starry Night, from Botticelli’s Birth of Venus to Picasso’s Weeping Woman, this collection of ekphrastic verse inhabits the worlds of iconic artworks—reimagining their stories, emotions, and mysteries. Written in sonnets and blank verse each poem is paired with a brief essay offering historical insight and artistic context. The result is a richly layered experience where the visual and verbal intertwine, inviting readers to see both art and poetry anew.

Image & Echo is a book of articles and poems that interact with iconic paintings, technically called ‘ekphrastic’ poetry. By way of introduction I should say something about ekphrasis – offer a brief explanation and thereby put this work in context. Ekphrasis is a literary practice where a poem or other work of writing responds to, describes, or reflects upon a visual artwork. More than simple description, ekphrastic poetry seeks to enter into a dialogue with the image—bringing it to life in language, exploring its emotional resonance, and sometimes imagining new stories or perspectives beyond the frame. It is a meeting place between the visual and the verbal, where art inspires art. This book is a gallery of voices: a collection of ekphrastic poems that speak to, with, and sometimes against the images that inspired them.

From the warm stillness of Monet’s Impression, Sunrise to the wrenching distortion of Picasso’s Weeping Woman. From the vivid testament of Pain and Power in Frida Kahlo’s self-portrait to the intimate quiet of Vermeer’s Girl with a Pearl Earring to the cosmic turbulence of Van Gogh’s Starry Night, these poems seek to inhabit the world each painting creates. The result is not description, but transformation—moments where language and image converge.

Many of the works in this volume—such as Botticelli’s Birth of Venus, Klimt’s The Kiss, and Caravaggio’s Conversion of Saint Paul—evoke themes of myth, love, revelation, or loss. Others, like Renoir’s Luncheon of the Boating Party or Leech’s The Sunshade, revel in light and leisure. Still others, such as Yeats’s The Liffey Swim or Rembrandt’s The Night Watch, offer dynamic glimpses of a moment in motion, a crowd in flux. These poems are acts of close looking, but also of imaginative listening—attending to what the artworks might be saying, or withholding.

Each poem is written in two principal forms – the sonnet and blank verse. The Shakespearean sonnet, built of three quatrains and a couplet (abab cdcd efef gg), offers a structure of development, contrast, and resolution. In contrast, the Petrarchan sonnet, used in response to da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, divides into an octave and a sestet (abbaabba cdecde), often turning inward, suited to quiet meditation. Blank verse, composed in unrhymed iambic pentameter (10 syllables per line in a repeated pattern – stressed/unstressed) allows for expansive reflection and dramatic tone—it is the voice of soliloquy, the cadence of thought itself.

Some paintings invited broader engagement. Millais’s Ophelia is accompanied by a triptych of Shakespearean sonnets – one from Hamlet’s point of view, one from Gertrude’s, and one from a neutral, reflective voice. A blank verse monologue completes the suite, creating a layered portrait of grief and perception.

For Van Gogh’s Starry Night, the poetic response includes not only a sonnet and blank verse poem, but also a prose poem—an imagined letter from Vincent to his brother Theo—offering a fictional but intimate entry into the artist’s mind. Elsewhere, Hockney’s Portrait of an Artist (Pool with Two Figures), Gauguin’s Tahitian Women on the Beach, and Dali’s The Persistence of Memory prompt lyrical, psychological, and surreal poetic responses.

These poems do not attempt to explain the art. Rather, they accompany it—shadowing the brushstrokes, echoing its light, questioning its silences. In that sense, this is a collection not just of poems about art, but of poems in dialogue with art: a chorus of interpretations, reinterpretations, and imagined afterlives. Read them slowly. Let the image guide the line and the line return you to the image—altered, deepened, made strange or familiar again.

In addition to the poems, this collection includes a brief article for each artwork that tells its story—providing historical context, artistic significance, and the narratives behind the image. These essays are intended to enrich your reading experience and offer deeper insight into the paintings that inspired the poetry.