Self-portrait with the Spanish FluThe scream evokes the dream I dread.“I want to sit up,” you had said,regarding the chair.I carried you therefrom the bed.Tears were shedbut not by you. You drew cold airand shut your eyes, ever the fairsister I adore.The halos of yourbacklit hairled my starefrom their gilt sheaves to the cracked scoreof the window-panes’ ferny hoarfrost. Your soul, wrestedfrom its maidenhead,found the door.Metaphor.This phthisis has disquietedthe Muses and dispirited,yea, Apollinaire,his devil-may-careand hurt head,shepherdedto futter the fields of trouvère.Endless black weddings fill the airwith song and implorethe dispatch of war-like despair;everywhere,we fall sick with fevers that pourgloom into us and dull the coreof bright hues that fedon what painters bledfrom a doorheretofore.Mark Olival-Bartley
About the Poem and the Poet
Comprising six syllabic sestets of a Welsh form called clogyrnach, this ekphrastic poem is a dramatic monologue that imagines the mindset of Edvard Munch in his Self-Portrait with the Spanish Flu, which was painted in 1919 when the artist was fifty-six years old. The first three stanzas allude to a lifelong trauma caused by witnessing the tubercular death of Sophie, his favorite sibling; the chair depicted is the same wherein she died, which, incidentally, is on view at Oslo’s Munch Museum. Having survived injuries sustained in the First World War, surrealist poet Guillaume Apollinaire contracted the influenza A virus, subtype H1N1, and died in November 1918 at the age of thirty-eight. A black wedding—often referred to by its Yiddish term, shvartze khasene—was an ancient Jewish rite to ward off an infectious epidemic through a community-funded marriage ceremony between two indigent strangers that took place in a cemetery.
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Mark Olival-Bartley is the poet in residence at EcoHealth Alliance. He tutors composition, creative writing, and American literature at LMU Munich, where he is presently writing his dissertation on E. A. Robinson’s metasonnet.
About the Art and the Artist
Edvard Munch contracted the Spanish flu at the end of 1918 and documented the illness in a series of sketches and paintings. With a sallow complexion and thinning hair, Munch is sitting in a wicker chair in front of his unmade bed, illustrating his frail condition. The figure is depicted using simple lines and minimal colors applied with rough sweeps of the brush. The small room evokes a feeling of confinement, and the dominant use of yellow intensifies the restlessness of the composition.
Edvard Munch was born in 1863, in Löten, Norway, and was a key artist of the Expressionism movement. Closely associated with Symbolism, he is best known for his images of isolation, anxiety, sensuality, rejection and death, many of which reflected his neurotic and tragic life.
Acknowledgements
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