Summary and analysis

Your full February 14, Summary and Analysis The poem, Two Paintings by Gustav Klimt, tells vividly about certain paintings. There is a complete description of paintings. The poetess, Jorie Graham, has described what she saw in the paintings in detail. If we go through Gustav Klimt’s artwork, we find certain paintings, of which two that may be being described by the poetess are the “ Beeches” and “ The Bride”. This is because we read the line “ crossing this yellow beech forest” in the poem, which may refer to the painting “ Beeches”. Also, the line “ rendered in graphic, pornographic, detail–something like a scream between her legs” may be referring to the painting “ The Bride”. The poem gives vivid details about a seductively pleasant scene showing the victims of Buchenwald hiding in trees and yearning to recommence life, and an incomplete painting of a bride which Klimt was going to complete but could not as he died.
The second poem, At Luca Signorelli’s Resurrection of the Body, Jorie Graham presents the idea of embodiment as portrayed in Signorelli’s painting, according to which the body is a place of never-ending appearances never coming to completion. Graham describes embodiment as the idea of entering the body never to be actually present at all. The poetess describes the bliss of presence of flesh, and the grief of the absence in actuality. The poem describes that man exists between the expectation of being present and the discovery of that presence’s un-achievability.
Both the poems raise the question: Since we see iconoclasm in her poems, is Jorie Graham an iconoclast or an icon maker?