The formatting of W. D. Snodgrass’ poem “Manet: ‘The Execution of the Emperor Maximilian’” creates an interplay between two voices.  One  voice speaks In brief, short-lined verse paragraphs that open and close the poem as well as being interspersed between the longer stanzas of the main voice.  This framing voice provides a mix of deadpan reporting and wry speculation about the life, execution, and context of the man who ruled as emperor of Mexico from 1864 1to 1867.  The voice suggests we have an accurate record of the highlights of Maximillian’s life and death.  The other, more predominant voice examines and responds to Edouard Manet’s painting of the execution.   Like the aim of the executioners, Manet’s depiction of the scene seems “not quite right.”  And much of the pleasure of the poem is in the informed uncertainty of the main voice trying to come to terms with a work that depicts the event but leaves a viewer wondering  about Manet’s technique.  This voice gives a thoughtful, well-informed response to a painting that, though compelling, seems unassured.

The main speaker helps the reader see portions of the painting while expressing his doubts about what “we” see.  He expresses himself so conversationally that readers might not at first notice that the opening stanzas (as do most of the ones that follow) is constructed on 4 quatrains of often heavily assonated iambic pentameter.   “Dear good God” are this speaker’s first words, these words of invocation actually words of good-humored confusion.  The speaker suggests that coming upon the painting is like blundering “into some musical / Comedy,” the executioners looking dressed up like a ballet troop.   The speaker gets distracted in speculation about what the role and “purpose” of a seemingly late arrival whose uniform differs slightly from that of the other soldiers.  The skillfully rendered verse gives us a voice that asks “Who knows[?]” and responds “no one knows.”

The speaker turns attention to the people—the “peons”—looking over the wall the men being executed stand against.  Again his focus leads him to uncertainty:  “we can’t say / What they [the peons] are doing here.  This late, who will ever know?”  But puzzled as he is by what he sees, he knows a lot about what he is seeing—or at least he recognizes certain gestures in the painting as having been borrowed from earlier paintings.  The peons “look like angels bored with one more martyrdom.”  One in particular looks like “an old friend from Daumier’s study / of a mob rioting.”  A woman looks like a “high class lady straight out of Goya.”  The speaker will avoid pointing out the obvious—that Manet’s work derives not just from the historical event but from Goya’s Third of May.  But, as the poem goes on, the speaker keeps showing that he has an eye for noting influences, often with a jocular effect.    The  man the speaker takes to be Maximillian  wears a “sombrero” that resembles a “halo.”  To the extent that the painting suggests a crucifixion it is “some child’s two-penny crucifixion.”

The speaker responds to Manet’s technique—the execution of the painting—as if the artists has been so seemingly negligent as to seem careless and impertinent.  The peons heads are “scrumbly, half-formed.”  The expected focus of the painting—the Emperor—is “Stuck in a corner,” there being “no perspective or convention / To lead us in a way that we ought to turn our sight.”   This painting, based on a significant event—the prefiguration of the general downfall of the Hapsburgs—and informed by a knowing reliance on previous masterpieces” seems a “tasteless parody” of the “passion,” a parody that leads to speaker to the flip irreverence that “Even gods must keep their heads and think of fashion.”

In his final stanza, the speaker worries that  “Maximillian might well have yielded up the center” and that Manet might be depicting the deposed emperor as one of the other two victims—the one “back of the others” or “him, / in front, with legs spread, who hand flaps up like a doll.” Attentive to the painting, the speaker leads us, as the poem closes, to wonder about what Manet saw as the aim of his painting.  The speaker’s voice—learned, mystified, a bit mischievous—leads me to wonder if Manet intended that his handling of the execution of Macmillan to suggest something like the savvy, playful tone that surfaces in the speaker’s voice.  Manet certainly brought a master’s sense of his predecessors to the painting.   And he certainly had a command of how to compose a painting, of how to vary brushwork, of how to work with color and drawing.  But in painting The Execution of the Emperor Maximillian Manet perhaps wanted to question whether mastery was applicable to what his painting depicts?  Maximillian’s face—even if is the face of the man between the other two—does not “command / The central spot of its own execution. / Or the surest brush work.”   Our eye, the speaker suggests, wanders from the emperor’s face because we do not find in it “the firm conviction / That we demand.”  The main speaker of Snodgrass’s poem asks us to ponder if Manet was exploring how one paints when part of the impetus behind the painting is one’s own lack of conviction.

–Jack