The Federation of British International Schools in Asia (FOBISIA) organises academic and cultural competitions across its member schools throughout East and Southeast Asia. Its poetry competition draws participants from some of the most academically rigorous British-curriculum schools in the region — schools whose students are accustomed to writing in English at a high level and for whom literary competition is a familiar exercise. To place first among them requires not only technical command of the form but something that technique alone cannot produce: a subject genuinely worth writing about, handled with genuine feeling and genuine thought.
Victoria Park chose to write about the Dionysus Kylix — a black-figure drinking cup painted by the Athenian potter Exekias around 530 BC and now held at the Antikensammlungen in Munich. The cup depicts Dionysus at sail, surrounded by dolphins and overarching grapevines, in a scene that condenses an entire myth into the interior of a single vessel. It is one of the most celebrated works of Archaic Greek pottery in existence, studied in art history classrooms and museum catalogues the world over. Victoria wrote a poem about it.
What she wrote is an ekphrasis — a poem that takes a work of visual art as its subject and attempts, through language, to do what the image does through form and line and colour. The tradition runs from Homer’s description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad through Keats’s Ode on a Grecian Urn and beyond. It is among the oldest and most demanding exercises in the poet’s repertoire, because it asks the writer to be answerable to something that already exists and already works — to find in language an equivalent for what paint and clay have already achieved. Victoria did not merely describe the kylix. She inhabited it: the stillness of Dionysus, the frozen dolphins, the empty cup waiting for wine, the question of what Exekias intended and whether any maker of images can fully answer it. The judges gave her first prize. We think they were right.
Sailing but not moving, rowing still in small place, The great Dionysus in a kylix marooned for thousands of eras and aeons, Yet its essential character endures — its grace; He holds his head up high, Proud of himself, of his power, Sailing through the lonely kylix. Oh, what a long time it had been! When the last time water or wine poured? An empty kylix it is now, and forever it will be, Waiting and waiting to be! When will the dolphins swim again, When will Dionysus row again? And what is the mighty Dionysus doing? Has he just defeated the Etruscan pirates, Having turned them into jovial dolphins, Smiling in victory? What was Exekias’s grand design? The dolphins silent wait for water, While Dionysus, unmoved, sits in peace Would that the apricot cup should change, Change into a bright orange sea of water! Then the dolphins will start swimming; Swimming, swimming, swimming. The god of feast and wine, For once, does not prance and shout But remain enclosed, silent, Although silence and feast are never met, This time silence, the holy feast — Silence paints the beauty. Gentle curves complete the kylix’s beauty, Curves on the stretching grape vines, Curves on the sail, Curves on the boat, Curves on the dolphins, These create a gentle and soft beauty. Can beauty itself emanate from a small kylix? How can one portray the way A god’s eyes make fire ablaze, How water makes illusory dolphins swim, How a god’s hands make grape vines grow? All in vain potters and artists tried, Tried to portray the tranquil beauty of the panther-god in small space, But Exekias succeeded: The Dionysus Kylix
Two things in the poem are worth naming. The first is the structural choice: the title appears at the beginning and again at the end, so that the poem is enclosed within the name of its subject — as the kylix itself encloses everything it contains. Whether this was deliberate or arrived at instinctively, it is exactly right. The second is the quality of attention throughout. Victoria does not tell the reader that the kylix is beautiful; she turns it in the light, asking what Exekias intended, what the dolphins wait for, what silence means in the hands of the god of wine. The question that closes the poem — how can one portray these things? — is answered by the poem itself having just done it. That is how ekphrasis works when it works. We are very proud of her.