Poems Inspired by Titian - Christopher reid - Metamorphosis - Titian 2012 - The national gallery

This poem is called The Change and it’s about Titian’s great painting The Death of Actaeon. In it, I put words into the mouth of the painter himself. So, imagine that he’s in his studio, taking a visitor around, showing him this painting, which is still unfinished and leaning against the wall. The Change The goddess with her killer glare: no problem there. I’ve seen that look myself often enough, aimed straight at me, and it wasn’t hard to swivel it through ninety degrees and fix it in profile. (That dinky quiver, wrong size for the bow, I’ll adjust later.) The dogs, too, I can handle, if I can keep the brushwork fluent: less a pack of them than a flood, a torrent, of muscular flanks and backs and squabbling yelps and scent-maddened muzzles dragging your man down. Now, he’s the trouble, which is why I’ve put him in the middle distance, an arrow’s flight away. He’s turning into a stag. But how do you do that, exactly? Head first, as I’ve tried here, following Ovid? Ping! – he’s got antlers and a long neck, but the rest of his body’s slow on the uptake, so he’s left looking less like prey brought low than some tipsy idiot taking a spill at a carnival? Forget it. What I want is the change itself, when he’s neither man nor beast, or somehow both at once, and you don’t just see but feel the combined horror and justice of his fate. Some way to go. Never mind, I’ll be patient. It can wait.