Sunday, August 5, 2012

In Santa Maria del Popolo The Poem

In Santa Maria del Popolo

The Poem
“In Santa Maria del Popolo” is composed of four stanzas, each containing eight lines of iambic pentameter,
with the rhyme scheme ababcdcd. The title refers to a famous church in Rome, Italy, which houses the
painting The Conversion of Saint Paul by Caravaggio (1573-1610). The painting depicts the moment in the
biblical story (Acts 9) in which Saul of Tarsus is blinded by a heavenly light and falls to the ground. Later,

Saul is cured of his blindness by Ananías and converted, eventually to become Saint Paul. The poem’s title,
however, focuses on the painting’s location and, therefore, on the poet’s experience of viewing the painting.
“In Santa Maria del Popolo” opens with the narrator waiting in the dim church for the light to strike the
painting in just the right way. His knowledge of the artist makes it clear that he has sought out the painting in
a kind of pilgrimage. The dim light is fortuitous because it shows something essential about the painting:
“how shadow in the painting brims/ With a real shadow, drowning all shapes out.” Only the horse’s backside
and the “various limbs” of the fallen rider are highlighted. These dominant physical details seem to put in
doubt “the very subject” of the painting, supposedly the conversion of Saint Paul.
The second stanza completes the description of the painting. Then the narrator begins to interpret the painting
by asking the “wily” painter what he means by “limiting the scene” to the “one convulsion” of Saul lifting
his arms “in that wide gesture” toward the horse.
The third stanza’s mention of Ananías reminds the reader that Saul’s sight has not yet been restored, nor has
he been converted. The painter sees not what is to be, but only “what was,” including “an alternate/ Candor
and secrecy inside the skin.” This enigma is somewhat clarified when the second half of the stanza mentions
Caravaggio’s models, “pudgy cheats” and “sharpers,” who may have led to the artist’s death in a brawl.
The poem concludes with the narrator turning away from the painting, “hardly enlightened.” In the “dim
interior” of the church, he sees old women praying, their arms “too tired” to make the “large gesture of the
solitary man.” Unlike Saul, or perhaps the narrator, they cannot make the heroic act of
“Resisting…nothingness” by “embracing” it.
Forms and Devices
The practice of writing poems about paintings is common, especially in the twentieth century. Examples of
the practice are W. H. Auden’s “Musée des Beaux Arts,” William Carlos Williams’s “The Dance,” and
John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.” Poets often use such poems to state their affinity with
the artist’s sensibility or aesthetic. A poet will approach a painting in a way different from that of a scholar,
yet if his poem is to be more than impressionistic description, he must know some of what the scholar knows.
Thom Gunn, who has done his homework, translates the artist’s pictorial effects into poetic devices. The
poem, for example, sets the painting within a narrative frame: The poet enters the church, waits for the good
In Santa Maria del Popolo 1
“oblique” light, views the painting, and then, upon leaving, considers how he has been “enlightened.”
This play of light and dark is echoed in other dualities, such as the identity of “Saul becoming Paul” and the
stanzas’ two-part structure. Caravaggio is known for his manipulation of light and dark, a device called
tenebrism, or the “dark manner.” He creates highly dramatic, realistic effects by highlighting physical forms
that seem to lurch out of the darkness toward the viewer, often at unusual angles. Gunn re-creates this angular
effect first by describing the light in the church with an unusual syntax: “the sun an hour or less/
Conveniently oblique makes visible/ the painting.” He then highlights the physical forms of the “dim horse’s
haunch and various limbs” of Paul.
Paul’s figure is “Foreshortened from the head, with hidden face.” Caravaggio uses this over-the-shoulder
point of view to encourage the viewer to identify with Paul, just as Gunn allows the reader to see the painting
through his eyes, never putting himself in the foreground of the poem.
Caravaggio was also known for his disregard of convention. His figures, composition, and color were pictorial
heresy to his contemporaries. His depiction of Paul beneath his horse lacks the decorum of most treatments of
scripture. His composition can be defended by pointing out that in the moment depicted, Saul has not yet
become Paul. Unconverted, Saul is still in the realm of the profane. His future conversion is unavailable to the
artist, whose subject is the visible world: “The painter saw what was.”
Gunn notices that Caravaggio’s emphasis on the horse’s backside detracts from the supposed focus on Paul,
whose “various limbs” hardly identify him as the saint of the painting’s title. It is this compositional decision
to shift the focus away from Paul that intrigues Gunn, however, and becomes the center for his own
interpretive re-creation of the painting.
Themes and Meanings
“In Santa Maria del Popolo” is a poem about blindness and revelation and the relative abilities of religion and
art to enlighten human experience. Gunn wrote in “My Life Up to Now” (1977) that he was “forever
grateful” that he was “brought up in no religion at all.” Attracted to existentialism for its philosophy that
each person makes his or her own meaning in an absurd universe, and to poetry as his chosen vehicle for
creating that meaning, Gunn confronts the relative power of religion, art, and poetry.
Gunn undoubtedly identified with Caravaggio, a violent, sensual, risk-taking individualist known for his
homoerotic renderings of traditional motifs. Gunn addresses the painter as one artist to another (“O wily
painter”), complimenting him on his daring artistry: “limiting the scene/ From a cacophony of dusty forms/
To the one convulsion.” The word “cacophony” is the poet’s word of sound, not the painter’s of sight, and
it seals their artistic fraternity. What Gunn wants to know, though, is “what is it you mean/ In that wide
gesture of the lifting arms?”
The focus of the painting for Gunn is the “Candor and secrecy inside the skin” that leads to Saul’s
conversion. But what secret? The second half of the stanza seems to suggest that Saul’s secret may have
something to do with Caravaggio’s homoerotic paintings, specifically “that firm insolent/ Young whore in
Venus’s clothes” and the “pudgy cheats” and “sharpers” of such paintings as Concert, Lute Player, and
Bacchus. Accounts of Caravaggio’s death disagree, but Gunn accepts the account of violent death at the
hands of one of these male prostitutes “picked off the streets.” The suggestion is that Saul (a famous
misogynist) harbored a sensual secret, perhaps not unlike the homoerotic tendencies of Caravaggio and Gunn
Forms and Devices 2
It is not Paul’s specific erotic preference that is important, however, but the “alternate/ Candor and secrecy”
that caused him to be an outsider. Paul is representative of the “solitary man” of existential philosophy who
resists “nothingness” by “embracing” it. Unlike the women in the church who keep their secrets “closeted”
in their heads, as in the confessional, the artist confesses the “Candor and secrecy inside his skin.” The saint,
too, admits his fallen state. Finally, the poem’s narrator, who leaves the church “hardly enlightened,” also
admits his failure to achieve revelation through religion. This may only mean, however, that he leaves with
the dark burden of what Caravaggio’s painting has shown him and that what enlightenment it has inspired in
the creation of his own poem has not been easy.