Still Life in Landscape

The title “Still Life in Landscape” asks readers to consider how a poem, which must be read in chronological time, might be “legible” as a painting, a work of art seen all at once. In some ways, the narrative portrays the chronological as also simultaneous; the speaker tries to deliver a sequential report of her witness, but the translation of experience into words cannot completely replicate the synchronous layers of sense and memory. The idea of a “still life” arranges the parts with meaning and context. The poem also invokes the Romantic idea that artistic retelling constitutes a mere copy of life: inert, a set of symbols for the real.

Much traditional still life integrates macabre imagery alongside that of beauty or abundance, heightening the viewer’s emotional response with an occasionally shocking juxtaposition. Pieter Aertsen’s The Meat Stall (1551) foregrounds butchered carcasses as a distraction from the Holy Family deep in the background—possibly a comment on gluttony. Eugene Delacroix’s Still Life with Lobsters (1826-1827) integrates still life and landscape genres, hunters in the distance with their killed game foregrounded, the lobster included for its novelty or possibly to symbolize the patron’s wealth.