ABSTRACT
The reader/viewer is one and the same person, seeing double in the role of ekphrastic spectator. D. W. Harding’s original, if undeveloped, suggestion of the reader as ‘spectator–participant’ was seen as a construct to encompass both, its portmanteau formulation describing a corresponding doubleness in a role that alternately ‘inhabits’ and ‘observes’ the fiction. Literary studies speak of the reader in the spectator–participant role, art studies speak of the spectator as a reader of images. The poem sharpens the focus of the image, exploring the details of its fiction, making them personal, constructing them into a poetic confrontation to complement that of the visual work. It is through the operation of this narrative impulse to generate in words a virtual space in which the story of the spectator-poet’s reading can be told that ekphrasis makes its dyadic aesthetic appeal. Pupils can learn much from experiencing the sheer diversity of poems reading paintings.
