Paul Cézanne. The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L'Estaque, 1885. Oil on canvas, 73 x 100.3 cm.

New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

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This essay analyzes Allen Ginsberg’s “Cézanne’s Ports” (1950), a twelve-line free verse poem with alternating short-long lines organized in a 4-3-3-2 structure describing Paul Cézanne’s impressionist oil painting titled The Gulf of Marseilles Seen from L’Estaque (1885), which depicts the small fishing village L’Estaque, north-west of the port city Marseille. Ginsberg’s ekphrastic poem contemplates the nature of perception by offering a description of L’Estaque through a visual analysis of Cézanne’s painting, unveiling the metaphysical layer of perception that reveals itself when a subject is viewed from different genres. In the course of doing so, Ginsberg foregrounds the perceptual differences that inform literary and visual representations of the same thing, exposing how they enhance each other when one is brought to bear upon the other. In representing abstractions using literal rather than figurative language, Ginsberg emphasises how the abstract is not found by actively looking beyond the concrete, but rather by looking at the concrete from different angles as new information reveals itself when perspectives are shifted. Ginsberg’s poem channels the concrete by using literal language to describe details that exist but which are not visually represented in the painting, thus reimagining L’Estaque, through Cézanne’s painting, from the perspective of what is visibly absent, rather than visibly present in the painting.

I contend that, taken together as comprising a singular “text” of L’Estaque, the poem and the painting synthesise to produce a third representation of the fishing village within the minds of reader-viewers. Ekphrasis is a “literary device in which a painting, sculpture, or other work of visual art is described in detail” (OED, “Ekphrasis”). However, I assert that Ginsberg’s use of epkhrasis does not merely replicate the visuals of Cézanne’s painting in written form. Rather, Ginsberg’s ekphrasis in this instance utilizes what Simon Goldhill observes of the device, that is, “the notion of enargeia—the ability to make visible” to conjure “a brilliant visualization” that “astonish[es]” and “dazzles” (3). As ekphrasis is “designed to produce a viewing subject” (2), I argue that “Cézanne’s Ports” creates a new, visibly absent space in which the aforementioned third representation manifests, one which is separate from when the poem and painting are viewed as standalone pieces. Hence, a new portrayal of L’Estaque is created within this new text—even though this text results from a merger between already extant, visually present texts—evoking the “strange shuddering impression” caused by “the ‘space gap’ in Cézanne’s paintings” that “open[ed] up into three dimension[al]
. . . enormous spaces” (Ginsberg 25-29).

Before I elaborate on how the poem moves from concrete to abstract, I will identify the concrete, in both the poem and the painting, as the lens through which the abstract is seen. The concrete is clearly defined in Cézanne’s painting as that which arises out of objects—the houses, mountains and sea—visible to the eye. While L’Estaque, in Cézanne’s painting, struggles to come into focus, it remains nevertheless concrete. Cézanne depicts the main elements in his landscape—the houses, mountains, and the sea—using simple geometric shapes without detail and in blocks of singular colours lacking shadows. For these objects lack realistic depth, they contribute to the blurriness of the painting and make it difficult to visually distinguish between land and sea. Yet despite there being a certain blurriness within the painting, these objects remain visually distinct because they are depicted using different colours—the mountains are grey, the houses orange, the sea and sky dark and light blue respectively. 

At first glance, Ginsberg’s poem attempts to capture the concreteness found within Cézanne’s painting, mimicking the dimensions of the painting by manipulating the form of his poem; the poem becomes a written replica of Cézanne’s painting. On a superficial level, Ginsberg’s poem comes off as literal in his description of Cézanne’s painting. As the poem zooms in on the parameters of Cézanne’s canvas, the poem sharpens the otherwise blurry details of Cézanne’s painting by breaking the painting into smaller but more specific parts over four neat stanzas, focalising attention to the specifics of the painting. In this reading, the poem becomes secondary to Cézanne’s painting. By using a four stanza 4-3-3-2 structure, Ginsberg imitates how Cézanne divides his canvas in The Gulf and magnifies smaller details that might have been overlooked in each of the four distinct zones within Cézanne’s painting—the houses, water, mountain, and sky—thereby encouraging a closer, second look of the painting. The arrangement of his stanzas imitates the visual segmentation of specific sections of the landscape within the painting, with the segmentation being reinforced by the directional “foreground” (l. 1), “left” (l. 3), and “other side” (l. 8) serving as systematic markers directing attention to specific portions of the landscape in the painting that visually exist, and are therefore concrete. The poem’s attempt to reconstruct Cézanne’s painting on a literal level is further reinforced by how the shape of the poem mimics the placement of certain details within the painting, with alternating long-short lines reflecting the inclines of the landscape depicted within the painting. 

Yet, it would be too simplistic to interpret Ginsberg’s poem as merely being a magnifying glass that sharpens the visuals of Cézanne’s painting. Upon closer inspection, the poem’s portrayal of the concrete is more nebulous. Although the poem replicates the placement and dimensions of the painting’s landscape in written form, the poem imbues these physical landscapes with abstracted concepts, replacing what is visually present in the painting, like the houses or the mountains, with the more metaphorical “time and life” as well as “heaven and eternity” (ll. 1, 10). Yet, the poem affirms the existence of these abstracted concepts in the phrase “we see time and life” (l. 1), which imbues a similar materiality possessed by the objects within Cézanne’s painting. The use of “see” is synaesthetic rather than visual, emphasising how these abstracted concepts remain detectable by senses other than sight. In Ginsberg’s poem, literal language becomes a written manifestation of the concrete and more importantly, the point of access from which the abstract can be accessed by abstracting, “[t]o take away, extract, or remove” (OED, “Abstract”),  the visibility present within the concrete. Ginsberg’s poem encourages a reconsideration of the abstract and concrete in relation to their visibility as his poem portrays the abstract as an extension, rather than the opposite of the concrete; this connection only reveals itself when looking at the concrete from a different perspective. As the poem’s use of literal language is imagist in nature, it has the additional benefit of forcing an engagement with the entirety of the painting, rather than looking beyond the painting by using it as a backdrop for metaphysical musings. 

By analysing how Ginsberg’s poem subtly diverges from Cézanne’s painting, I reiterate that the abstract is the concrete viewed through a different perspective. While both the poem and painting affirm the existence of the abstract and concrete, Ginsberg highlights how the abstract is invisible while the concrete is visible. Rather than existing as separate concepts, the abstract and concrete are so inextricably intertwined that search of the abstract cannot begin without grounding within the concrete.

So far, I have analysed Cézanne’s painting and Ginsberg’s poem as separate texts, asserting how Ginsberg’s poem unveils abstract concepts lurking within Cézanne’s painting by providing a different point of view from which the concrete within Cézanne’s painting can be accessed. I will now proceed to contend that by reading Ginsberg’s poem as an ekphrastic, rather than “conventional” poem, “Cézanne’s Ports” directs attention to a visibly absent space existing beyond the visual confines of the painting and poem; the shift in perspective becomes layered as Ginsberg “turns . . . out of the painting’s borders” (Portuges 438). The creation of a new, reimagined L’Estaque through the use of ekphrasis is signalled by the title of “Cézanne’s Ports” as the title directs attention to “Ports,” even though no port, much less multiple ports, are depicted within the painting or the poem. This is further substantiated by how Ginsberg’s poem directs attention to a “meeting place” that “isn’t represented” and “doesn’t occur on the canvas” (438).  Here, the familiarity of the use of “that” is discrepant with how this particular “meeting place” has only been mentioned once, contributing to the ambiguity already surrounding the anonymous “meeting place.” Given the oddity of a “meeting place” being located beyond the canvas, the poem redirects attention to the painting as a point of reference since prior to this line, every concrete object within Cézanne’s painting has been referred to by its abstract counterpart in previous stanzas. This ambiguity manifests once again when the painting cuts off where land connecting the houses and mountains meet, suggesting that the “meeting place” is imaginary, existing in a visibly absent space located beyond the spatial confines of the canvas on “the other side of the bay.” Even though the “meeting place” is visually absent from Cézanne’s painting, the visual cue of converging land forms that abruptly cut off at the top left corner of the painting encourages the mind’s eye to fill in details missing from the painting. The power of enargeia within epkhrasis “delights in ‘the astounding’” (Goldhill 7), conjuring a mystic quality that arises from the vastness of a “world spread out before [one’s] eyes . . . for pure looking” (Shapiro 62). The unbounded imaginativeness of the mind’s eye is demonstrated through escalating the singular, unspecified “meeting place” to the cosmological “Heaven and Eternity” (Ginsberg l. 9)  Ekphrasis creates gaps for L’Estaque to be reimagined and this is manifested once again in the “the immense water of L’Estaque is a go-between / for minute rowboats” (ll. 11-12) where the largeness of this new L’Estaque is emphasised through juxtaposing “immense” with the transience of “minute” on both spatial and temporal planes. Here, the space is aurally, rather than visibly, absent. The hyphen in “go-between” and the enjambment between “go-between” and “for” creates an abrupt pause, contributing to the choppiness of the rhythm in reading these lines, signalling an aural gap between the lines. 

In conclusion, I have argued that Ginsberg’s poem does more than sharpen the visuals in Cézanne’s painting as it directs attention to the oft-neglected, visibly absent spaces within the painting. To expand on the complexity of perspective shifts within Ginsberg’s poem, I have also argued that the ekphrastic form offers a shift in perspective that enables a new construction of L’Estaque using the mind’s eye by looking at visibly absent spaces existing outside of the poem and painting. Taken as a whole, Ginsberg’s poem asserts that art and literature are complementary, both seeking to give a concrete form—be it visual or written—to imagination, which otherwise remains undetectable by our senses.