17 pages • 34 minutes read
Sharon OldsStill Life in Landscape
Sharon OldsFiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 2004A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Themes
“Still Life” as a Genre
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. The most out-of-place element often becomes central in a still life; in the poem, the accident interrupts the harmonious “neutral” (Line 15) space of the night. However, the speaker sees in that interruption the potential violence within her own family.
Nature morte, French for “still life,” translates literally as “dead nature.” The speaker calls the body at the center of the scene the “abandoned matter” (Line 10) of the dead woman, much as the poem stands as the material remains of a vivid sensory moment. The last line of the poem, “glass, bone, metal, flesh, and the family” (Line 26) mimics the movement of an eye taking in a painting as, after an inventory of the individual elements, it takes in the relation between all the pieces. The speaker includes “the family” last, herself a part of that group, moving the boundary of subjectivity by putting herself in the tableau rather than outside it as an observer. As an observer, the speaker can evaluate and portray this experience—the accident, and the witnessing—as a metaphor for the latent violence in human interaction, familial and otherwise.
Narrative, Lyric, and the Lyric “I”
Besides stylistic qualities, issues of chronology, tone, and subjectivity distinguish narrative poetry from lyric. While the narrative address an audience and presents a non-personal, chronological plot, the lyric speaker usually speaks to themselves, moved to utterance through an inward experience in a crystalized moment. Like most of Olds’s poems, “Still Life in Landscape” reads as both narrative and lyric in its style. The poem’s formal elements and diction identify it as a lyric; though a chronological narrative sets the poem’s parameters, by the close of the poem, that narrative becomes a metaphor. The movement of story freezes into the “still life” form called up in the title, producing a tableau that illuminates not just a formative personal instance, but also larger truths about the way violence affects human beings.
The first-person narrative voice, the “I”, would be an individual speaker in a narrative poem. In a Confessional poem, the “I” might even be more intimately connected to the poet’s identity, an alter ego for the poet, drawing on the poet’s own life to tell a largely biographical story. Extrapolation of universal meaning usually plays a secondary role in these intimate poems.
The idea of a lyric “I” proposes that the first-person speaker in a lyric poem stands in for neither the poet nor the poet’s alter ego, nor even for a completely separate persona. Instead, the lyric “I” can represent a group of people with a particular set of experiences; it invites the reader to be the “I.” Use of a lyric “I” dates to classical verse and can be seen widely in experimental and traditional poetry of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.
The use of the lyric “I” maintains the speaker’s personal, intimate connection to the subject matter while allowing the narrative to transcend its biographical origin and illuminate more than the poet’s individual development. Olds’s use of first-person narrative thus functions more inclusively than exclusively. She, like many late modern American poets, builds on Walt Whitman’s ideas about the body and identity, the premise that “every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you” (Line 3, “Song of Myself,” Walt Whitman). Olds’s work has been compared in its personal intensity to the painting of Vincent Van Gogh, another artist who used art to clarify and externalize personal experience. Rather than providing a documentary-style narration, the lyric “I” moves away from self-portrait toward a broader reflection of the human.
Memento Mori and its Purpose
Translating from Latin as “remember death,” memento mori is at its heart an injunction to meditate on human mortality, both as a call to life’s urgency and as a stay against hubris. The artistic practice of memento mori dates to classical art, gaining popularity in the medieval era and again in the 16th and 17th centuries. Memento mori amends visual and literary art with imagery associated with death: skulls, dead animals, dead or dying flowers, rotting fruit. Symbols related to time—clocks, hourglasses, sundials—are also sometimes memento mori, representing the fleeting nature of life. Olds’s Calvinist upbringing would have acquainted her with this motif, as it enjoyed great popularity within Calvinism and Puritanism. From grave ornamentation to children’s rhymes, orthodox Christian sects in America found new, moralistic uses for memento mori to foster a desire for salvation.
“Still Life in Landscape” both relies and comments on the tradition of memento mori. The victim is a speculative memento mori: “maybe she was a model of the mortal” (Line 24). The body’s presence in the poem, then, resembles the skulls, urns, and decaying carcasses seen in visual art, often with a small identifying sign or banner reading Et in Arcadia Ego. The Latin phrase translates to “even in Arcadia, I am,” and appears in 17th century paintings and harks back to Virgil’s Eclogues, constituting a pastoral version of memento mori. Death speaks as the “I” in the phrase, asserting its presence even in a pastoral idyll. In “Still Life in Landscape,” Olds gestures to visual art in the title, then integrates a memento mori image as a painter would. Even in “neutral twilight” (Line 15), death can interrupt. Olds expands on the traditional idea by subverting the idealized world and suggesting that the interruption of mortality constitutes a more honest reality: “This was / the world—maybe the only one” (Lines 17-18). The speaker weaves her own family violence into the narrative: The reminder of death and violence is the real world, while the fantasy of neutrality and beauty is the interruption.
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