The Parable of the Blind
The Parable of the Blind - context Summary
Ekphrastic Response to Bruegel
Williams wrote this poem as an ekphrastic piece responding to Pieter Bruegel the Elder’s painting "The Parable of the Blind." Included in Pictures from Brueghel and Other Poems, it compresses the painting’s visual narrative into spare lines, noting the diagonal procession, the bog, and the raised faces toward light. The poem emphasizes composition and moral irony, showing Williams’s later-career focus on translating visual arrangement and social portraiture into concise poetic observation.
Read Complete AnalysesThis horrible but superb painting the parable of the blind without a red in the composition shows a group of beggars leading each other diagonally downward across the canvas from one side to stumble finally into a bog where the picture and the composition ends back of which no seeing man is represented the unshaven features of the des– titute with their few pitiful possessions a basin to wash in a peasant cottage is seen and a church spire the faces are raised as toward the light there is no detail extraneous to the composition one follows the others stick in hand triumphant to disaster
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