December 4 -- Ellaraine Lockie

La Géante (The Giantess)

by Ellaraine Lockie

--After René Magritte's painting, "La Géante," which contains Charles Baudelaire's poem, "La Geanté”

She’s a lady liberated

from Baudelaire’s poetics

From his tomcat worship of women

For what generation of men over the expanse

of time has not knelt at the feet

of a well-formed naked female

Blown her importance out of proportion

with heavy breath of passion

Turned pubescent in her presence

with the predisposition to explore

her staggering proportions

To seduce her with flowery references to soul

steamy eyes and somber flames

And after the flush of fervor has faded

To lie in sated stupor under the cool

shadow of satisfaction

But Magritte’s woman

painted a hundred years

after Baudelaire versified her

appears as no oil-engendered giantess

She stands disrobed and secured in scale

to her domestic surroundings

Oblivious to her dwarfed husband

watching from a cat’s-eye view

in his business suit

She probably supports

the European suffragette movement

Cleans house without wearing clothes

Reads Virginia Woolf in English

And has enough certitude to do her own seducing

Growing in the husband’s grateful eyes

to the queenly size of her namesake

View "La Geante:" (Giantess) by René Magritte: http://www.abcgallery.com/M/magritte/magritte42.html

This poem was a response to the following poem:

The Giantess

When Nature in her lavish lustiness

Bred day by day new, strange monstrosities,

Would I had lived with a young giantess

Like a warm cat who at a queen's feet lies.

'Twere sweet to watch her soul and body blossom

While she disported her in terrible wise;

To guess if a fierce flame burnt in her bosom

By the wet mists that swam within her eyes.

Ah! freely o'er her mighty limbs to run,

To crawl upon the bend of her vast knees,

And when in summer, tired of the pestilent sun,

Across the plain she stretches calm and still,

Within her breasts' cool shade to sleep at ease

Like some small hamlet sheltered by a hill.

— Jack Collings Squire, Poems and Baudelaire Flowers (London: The New Age Press, Ltd, 1909)

Authors Note:

          I viewed Magrette’s “La Géante” in Cologne, Germany, at the Museum Ludwig and was transfixed by the painting.  Part of my fascination was the existence of Baudelair’s poem with the same title positioned in the right hand margin of the painting.  The poem was, of course, in French which I couldn’t understand.

          When the painting was still haunting me after I arrived in London, which was my next stop on the trip, I knew I needed to know more about it and the poem contained in it.  I was already familiar with The Poetry Library in London in the Royal Festival Hall, so I headed there at my first opportunity.  I researched for the entire afternoon.

          I was sure that the painting was an ekphrastic response to the poem that had been written nearly a hundred years before, but I wanted to understand Baudelair’s poem in order to see how the poem had been interpreted.  I found seventeen translations of Baudelair’s

“La Géante,” all quite similar in content.  Then I began thinking about how the painting might be interpreted today . . . thus my own poem,  “La Géante.”

           That was ten years ago.  I didn’t want the poem published without a reader’s quick access to the painting and the translation of Baudelair’s poem.  The copyright for reproduction of the painting was quite high and required annual renewal, so having the poem published wasn’t possible.  However, the painting can now be seen at the website that is mentioned with the poem.  Many thanks to John Brantingham and California Ekphrastic for including all three components in this presentation.   

Ellaraine Lockie is a widely published and awarded author of poetry, nonfiction books and essays.  Her chapbook, Where the Meadowlark Sings, won the 2014 Encircle Publication’s Chapbook Contest.  Her twelfth collection has been released as an internal chapbook, Love Me Tender in Midlife, in IDES from Silver Birch Press.  Other recent work has received the Women’s National Book Association’s Poetry Prize, Best Individual Collection from Purple Patch magazine in England for Stroking David's Leg, winner of the San Gabriel Poetry Festival Chapbook Contest for Red for the Funeral and The Aurorean's Chapbook Spring Pick for Wild as in Familiar. Ellaraine teaches poetry workshops and serves as Poetry Editor for the lifestyles magazine, Lilipoh. She is currently judging the Tom Howard/Margaret Reid Poetry Contests for Winning Writers.