Poets have been inspired by works of art for centuries, if not millennia. The art of writing poetry about paintings is known as ekphrasis – which basically just means a verbal description of a visual work of art, whether it's real or imaginary.

Here we collect together 7 beautiful and moving poetry quotes, alongside the famous artworks that they take as their subject or inspiration.

“In Breughel's Icarus, for instance: how everything turns away
Quite leisurely from the disaster; the ploughman may
Have heard the splash, the forsaken cry,
But for him it was not an important failure"

"...and the sun shone
As it had to on the white legs disappearing into the green
Water"

"...and the expensive delicate ship that must have seen
Something amazing, a boy falling out of the sky,
Had somewhere to get to and sailed calmly on."

- 'Musée des Beaux Arts', W.H. Auden

"The town does not exist
except where one black-haired tree slips
up like a drowned woman into the hot sky."

"The town is silent, the night boils with eleven stars.
Oh starry starry night! This is how I want to die."

- 'The Starry Night', Anne Sexton

"They send me to eat in the Kitchen
When company comes,
But I laugh,
And eat well,
And grow strong.
Tomorrow, 
I'll be at the table."

– 'I am the darker brother,' Langston Hughes. 

"In the foreground we see time and life
swept in a race
toward the left hand side of the picture
where shore meets shore.
But that meeting place
isn't represented;
it doesn't occur on the canvas."

"...For the other side of the bay
is Heaven and Eternity,
with a bleak white haze over its mountains.
And the immense water of L'Estaque is a go-between
for minute rowboats."

- 'Cezanne's Ports', Allen Ginsberg

"It is because the sea is blue,
Because Fuji is blue, because the bent blue
Men have white faces, like the snow
On Fuji, like the crest of the wave in the sky the color of their
Boats."

..It is because the air
Is full of writing, because the wave is still: that nothing
Will harm these frail strangers,
That high over Fuji in an earth
colored sky the fingers
Will not fall; and the blue men
Lean on the sea like snow, and the wave like a mountain leans
Against the sky."

– 'The Great Wave: Hokusai', Donald Finkel

"It was hardly a high-tech operation, stealing The Scream.
That we know for certain, and what was left behind-
a store-bought ladder, a broken window,
and fifty-one seconds of videotape, abstract as an overture.

And the rest? We don’t know. But we can envision
moonlight coming in through the broken window,
casting a bright shape over everything - the paintings,
the floor tiles, the velvet ropes: a single, sharp-edged pattern;

the figure’s fixed hysteria rendered suddenly ironic
by the fact of something happening; houses
clapping a thousand shingle hands to shocked cheeks
along the road from Oslo to Asgardstrand;"

"...the guards rushing in -too late!- greeted only
by the gap-toothed smirk of the museum walls;
and dangling from the picture wire like a baited hook,
a postcard: “Thanks for the poor security.”

"The policemen, lost as tourists, stand whispering
in the galleries: ". . .but what does it all mean?”
Someone has the answers, someone who, grasping the frame,
saw his sun-red face reflected in that familiar boiling sky."

- 'Stealing the Scream', Monica Youn

Shakespeare's sonnets, written when plague closed the London theatres, putting his plays on hold, have come to be seen as the quintessential English poems of love, lust, yearning, and wit.

Dedicated to a mysterious 'faire youth' (certainly a man, perhaps Henry Wriothesley) they explore the same terrain as traditional sonnets dating back to Petrarch - namely, sexual desire - but also make radical changes to this tradition.

Shakespeare also drew on traditional forms, but the particular structure of his poems is now so associated with him that it's referred to as a Shakespearean Sonnet. If you've ever wanted to write like Shakespeare, here are some handy tips and tools of the trade...

Lots of the structural conventions of sonnets started with a poet called Petrarch (1304-1374), and still have Italian names. 'Stanza' is Italian for 'room', and refers to a single verse within a longer poem.

Shakespearean sonnets have 14 lines, and they are divided into three 'stanzas' of four lines each, then a 'couplet' - two lines which bring the poem to a close.

The lines and stanzas can be used to break up different images and thoughts in the poem to give it a sense of moving along, almost like advancing from one room to another.

With very few exceptions, all 154 of Shakespeare's sonnets have the same rhyme scheme. It goes: ABAB CDCD EFEF GG.

So if the first two lines go, "Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? / Thou art more lovely and more temperate", then the next two lines should rhyme with 'day' and 'temperate':

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of may
And summer's lease hath all too short a date

That's your ABAB stanza sorted. The next two should follow the same rhyme scheme but with new sounds. Then the last two lines should rhyme to bring the poem to an end with a 'couplet':

So long as men can breathe or eyes can see
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.

This point's a little tricky, but it's important. One thing that makes poems different from normal writing ('prose'), is that they have a sense of rhythm, almost like the lyrics or the beat in a song. Shakespearean sonnets have a rhythm called 'Iambic Pentameter'.

It sounds technical, but really it's just a question of syllables. 'Penta' means 'ten', so each line should have ten syllables. Its the 'iambic' part which is more difficult, but that's where the beat comes in...

Imagine a drum going "di-DUM, di-DUM, di-DUM". The 'beat' is heavier on the 'DUM', right? In poems, that's called a 'stress'. An iamb is a unit of poetic language where an unstressed syllable ("di") is joined to a stressed one ("DUM"). Put together, they give the lines a rhythm.

Though they're usually about sex and love, you can write sonnets about whatever moves you to passionate feeling! One thing to remember about the poem's content, however, is that it should include something called a Volta, which comes from the Italian word for 'turn'.

The 'Volta' of a Shakespearean sonnet is a turn of thought, usually about two-thirds of the way through the poem, where the speaker breaks from the original impulse of the poem and expresses a shift of mood or an advancement of a mini story.

Now you know the basics, let's look at a complete sonnet and see if you can spot all the features we've learned. Are you ready? Keep clicking to read Sonnet 18 by William Shakespeare, stanza-by-stanza...

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:

Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimmed:

But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:


So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.