The Poem and the Journey

Since the creation of the Hiroshige’s “53 Stations of the Tokaido” Hoeido-ban in 1833, the Tokaido Road has fascinated people around the world. In 1890, a major exhibit of Japanese prints was held in Paris, and many Parisian artists attended. Degas, Cassatt, Monet and Van Gogh in particular were influenced by the Japanese woodblock print. Even today, British painters have followed the footsteps of Hiroshige to create their own artistic interpretation of the 53 stations. Hiroshige is, as Charles Holmes has said, “a master of the romantic landscape”. In this talk, I will consider the concept of ekphrasis (literary description or commentary on a visual work of art) in order to explore why contemporary poets have found a productive and creative synergy between the poem and the picture. Literary ekphrasis is a matter of double representation: it is the verbal representation of an image, which itself is a representation. Using Hiroshige’s pictures as “points of departure,” the poems of Tokaido Road aim to enter the “psychological space” of the picture, focusing on the inner landscape and its associations with the outer landscape. One reading of these poems derives from our implicit knowledge of the metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY, which envisages life as a journey with a point of embarkation and a final destination. Although the linguistic expression related to it varies, this conceptual metaphor appears to be universal.