Augenlieder

Berryman’s poem, ‘Keep your eyes open’, provided the initial stimulus for Augenlieder. On discovering the sonnet it immediately became linked in my mind to a short neglected lyric by Browning, a poem written to accompany Frederic Leighton’s painting Orpheus and Eurydice at its showing during the Royal Academy exhibition in 1864. Here, in the respective texts, were pairs of lovers connected by the drama of a look, a look avoided, or a look consummated. Much later I chanced upon another, equally unlikely, marriage of poems. While the virtuoso excitement of Rimbaud’s synaesthetic experiment in Voyelles balances Schiele’s quieter word-colour painting, the crux of both poems resides again in the act of seeing. The deliberate ambiguity of Rimbaud’s ‘Ses Yeux’ offsets Schiele’s more straightforward, though ultimately no less complex, picture: his is a definitively first-person experience – the experience, not surprisingly, of a great visual artist struggling to achieve a similar directness in a medium other than the one for which he is famous.