A Handpicked Poem presented by Michael Steffen

 

A Handpicked Poem

presented by Michael Steffen

by Lloyd Schwartz, from the book Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection (April 4, 1948) and Other Poems, published by Arrowsmith, 2026

Titian’s Marsyas

The 16th-century Venetian master’s very last painting—as

big as life—is the story of the pan-piping satyr who dared to

challenge a god.

Titian painted his crucifixion.

He hangs by has ankles from the branches of a tree, his goat-

legs askew, as Apollo, kneeling, tenderly skins him alive.

Upside down, his tormented expression reads like a smile.

A thirsty pup is lapping up his blood.

Seated close—rapt—old King Midas, with his golden

coronet, contemplates the horrific scene.

It’s the 90-year-old artist’s self-portrait.

Someone who’s learned the cost of making art, the cost of

challenging the gods.

And has accepted it.

Except for the glittering crown, most of the surface is rougher,

murkier than the master’s earlier dazzle.

Close inspection reveals paint smeared by his own fingers.

He put his whole body into this painting.

It was found in his studio after his death.

After how many years could anything still have been left for

him to do?

A work is complete, Rembrandt said, if in it the master’s

intentions have been realized.

The Augustan poet of odes and epistles, Horace, tells us that a poem is like a picture, it should place, or make, in its medium of language, a picture before us, in our mind’s eye. Poets have taken Horace to the letter of wit by basing poems on famous paintings. John Ashbury wrote his landmark “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror” after the early 16th-century masterpiece of the same title by the Italian mannerist Parmigianino. Browning famously meditated on Andrea del Sarto, Auden on Breughel. It’s very likely you will find at least one poem by your favorite poet(s) based on a celebrated painting. So in “Titian’s Marsyas” Lloyd Schwartz is well within an established inspiration, what Seamus Heaney would call a “set piece.” Though Schwartz has not chosen such a famous or familiar work by the great master. It is a posthumously discovered life sized painting and, for Titian, a dark and rough work, which makes the poem’s final statement from Rembrandt so relevant.

We know something is very out of character anytime divinity is depicted kneeling, especially when it is Apollo. We keep in mind Titian is a painter of the Renaissance, an age when neoclassicism in philosophy and art confused classical and Christian sources, Mary and Venus (Botticelli), Apollo and Christ (who appears at different moments throughout the gospels exemplifying humility and servitude, kneeling to wash his disciples’ feet, exhorting those made to carry a master’s cloak one mile to carry it another…) The Greek myth of the satyr Marsyas, however, has little to do with the good news concept of grace, of the pains and indulgence of divinity, and rather takes us back to the Greek tragic sense of the gods’ ultimate vengeance upon the hubris which dares to affront their power.

Here is one poignant, insightful employ of poetry: to voice the visual, and Schwartz’s choice of the word “kneeling” for Apollo’s posture is so mindful. We might characterize this posture, in its act of violent labor, as “crouching” or “stooping.” The yoking of divinity with the humble bodily position, for leverage, strikes a subtle but sharp minor note in a major arpeggio, for the softest hearing and attention, to the subtle powers at work in our lives. The word in the line of poetry has the same effect on me as a sudden soft breeze combing a wind chime on my neighbor’s porch. It reminds me of one of Franz Wright’s book titles, God’s Silence.

Titian’s satyr is a musician, a piper, his instrument a reeded double flute. Venus had cast the pipe away because somebody told her she looked funny with her cheeks puffed out playing it. Marsyas grew accomplished at his instrument and came to challenge the muses’ master and his harp, and consequently Apollo skinned the satyr alive. The myth parallels that of Arachne the

maiden weaver, and her challenge to Athena in a weaving contest, and Arachne’s subsequent metamorphosis into a spider dangling on her own thread.

We bear in mind also, the satyr, like a centaur, is a half-beast half-human, with emphasis on passion and sensuality over reason, and the painting and the poem have the creature upside down. The image invokes art’s signature embodiment of the human experience, with its suffering, compassion and beauty, over the principles of our mind’s better-knowing, getting artists into such dilemmas. Thus the insight of the poem, commenting, this is “the ninety-year-old artist’s self-portrait” and its subject “the cost of making art, the cost of challenging the gods.”

And were it not for Lloyd’s poem, we might easily miss how the satyr’s grimace, because he is hung from his feet upside down, appears to the right-side-up viewer as a smile. The artist even in his defeat and undoing has accomplished something worthy enough in his music to betray some hint of joy, in spite of this anguish. Again, the subtlety.

“It’s like finding a needle in the eye of the beholder,” Schwartz wryly announced in his well-known poem “Proverbs from Purgatory” from his 2000 collection Cairo Traffic. Like that poem, “Marsyas” displays Schwartz’s characteristic preference for the line. He’s a master at irony, juxtaposition, contrast and comparison, with the torsion of these figures’ highlighted best in the balance of the single line, along with the poet’s deft use of resonance, as with the author’s name and the religious term for a public execution: “Titian painted his crucifixion.”

Lloyd Schwartz is Somerville’s third poet laureate. Among his awards are a Pulitzer Prize and three Deems Taylor Awards for his music reviews and fellowships in poetry from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Guggenheim Foundation. Lloyd’s poems have appeared in nearly every major literary magazine and in The Best American Poetry anthologies. His most recent book Artur Schnabel and Joseph Szigeti Play Mozart at the Frick Collection was published by Arrowsmith in April 2026.

Lloyd will be reading with Daniel Tobin for The Hastings Room Readings November segment, on Thursday November 19 at 7pm, at First Church Cambridge, 11 Garden Street, at the back of Cambridge Common. The reading is free and open to the public. Please join us