Blame Vermeer

About this poem

This poem was originally published online as part of a SPL project, supported by Creative New Zealand, which commissioned Scottish writers to introduce a NZ poem. The introduction is by the poet David Kinloch, who teaches creative writing at the University of Strathclyde.

I first came across 'Blame Vermeer' while browsing in a bookshop in Wellington. To be more accurate, my gaze was attracted by the cover of the slim volume of which it is the title poem. It shows a fragment of Vermeer's painting usually known as The Milkmaid (c.1658) and such is the pull of anything by this artist I picked it up immediately.

The sequence here enacts a pattern that has been given the rather forbidding Greek term 'ekphrasis': first the painting or work of art, then the words about it; poems about paintings. This is something I've been doing a lot of myself recently, so I was intrigued to find out how Vincent O'Sullivan would go about it.

In 1766 Gotthold Ephraim Lessing suggested that it was futile writing poetry about the visual arts because the latter have to do with the spatial aspects of a work, whereas the verbal cannot escape language's temporality. Later critics have disagreed with him and many writers, including Proust who was so famously drawn to a patch of yellow paint in Vermeer's view of Delft, have found ingenious ways round this basic difference. O'Sullivan's poem is particularly interesting, then, precisely because it raises the relationship of time to space so directly. There is a sense in which this poem is an implicit meditation on its own processes or, indeed, those involved in the creation of any art object, be it visual or verbal. This often happens with ekphrastic verse.

Formally, the poem comes close to enacting the very division or difference Lessing raised. First of all the attempt to represent in words the spatial dimensions of the scene and then, in the second stanza, a determined focus upon future and past, what will happen, might have happened after, before the artist fixed the milkmaid in this specific pose, froze her in this specific act. And then the third stanza, which –with some virtuosity – plays from one to the other, one through the other, weaving time through space and vice-versa.

Except that these categories are not watertight. No sooner has the poet begun to describe the scene than he is forced, apparently, to introduce the temporal in the reference to the children's impending sleep-over. Nothing can be frozen for long. Stillness and the peace it sometimes represents cannot be held for long before the daily round revives and ordinariness and evil and simple tragedy wash through us much as the milk pours steadily from jug into bowl. The poem touches lightly on a weighty issue: the artist's responsibility in a world where atrocities occur, and is all the more effective for being so deft. It has the merit of forcing the famously enigmatic character of Vermeer's work to confront the squalid awfulness of much that humanity has been responsible for, while preserving the painting's sense of mystery and openness to other interpretations.
This poem is in many ways typical of O'Sullivan's strengths: it has a lyric eloquence that never shies away from, often embraces, difficult sometimes philosophical subject matter and is a good introduction – as is the volume as a whole – to his work in general.