“The aim of this little volume is, as far as may be, to translate into verse what the lines and colours of certain chosen pictures sing in themselves ; to express not so much what these pictures are to the poet, but rather what poetry they objectively incarnate. Such an attempt demands patient, continuous sight as pure as the gazer can refine it of theory, fancies, or his mere subjective enjoyment.”

— Sight and Song preface

What makes Sight and Song unique as a poetry collection is its relationship with historical images. The collection is created from a series of visual encounters with paintings, which at the time would have been viewed within continental galleries and private collections. These poems are “songs” emerging from “sights” – they come from the sensations produced from observing, from channelling the emotional passions and desires evoked from viewing into words. Some have remarked upon the somewhat lyrical nature of the verse, attributing a musical rhythm to the inflection associated with the structure of these poems. Perhaps Sight and Song was intended to be read as simultaneously something of a songbook. Either way, Bradley and Cooper expected their readers to already know the surrounding narrative and subject matter of each poem – each verse is dedicated to well known pieces, among them La Gioconda and Primavera – and their poem titles ‘frame’ select biographical details pertaining to these images.

Masterfully, the Fields oscillate their poems in Sight and Song from objective to subjective perspective. Incorporating these alternate perspectives accesses simultaneously a psychological point of view and a historically sublime one. It allows the Fields to “objectively incarnate” the intricacies of the historical event a painter is depicting but equally maintain a finer, more human lens, illuminating the more innate qualities of the picture we perhaps did not notice before. Upon reading their poems, one immediately will have to re-inspect the painting, for they illuminate details previously obscured – such is the beauty of ‘seeing’ through another’s poetic gaze. By these means, the Fields revisualise and reinvent the paintings through the poems.

Bernard Berenson, though conversing about other aspects of the Fields’ work, metaphorically claimed that the Fields were “putting new wine in old bottles” [1]. Sight and Song does just that; it communicates new and decadent wine thoughts through the old historical bottles of time.

This blog examines two poems from Sight and Song, La Gioconda and The Rescue.

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Footnotes

[1] Martha Vicinus, “Faun Love: Michael Field and Bernard Berenson,” in Women’s History Review 18, No. 5 (November 2009): 755.