The colors in Gustav’s Klimt The Kiss spin around the two figures in the painting, catching the eye and drawing the reader in with their wild necessity. Two lovers’ robes shape the couple into a single body, pushed together and pulled upward by the empty space that surrounds them, held up by the bed of colorful flowers they rest upon. The dark colors in the man’s robe emerge almost invisibly into the brighter, clearer colors of the woman’s. The figures are overwhelmed by the richness of their clothing. Therefore, Ferlinghetti touches briefly upon the couple’s garments – he describes the man’s “..gold/harlequin robe/checkered with /dark squares,”

and the woman’s “long dress made/of multicolored blossoms/quilted on gold.” Both of these descriptions support the poet’s argument for the man’s locomotive power and the woman’s passivity. The harlequin robe denotes the hero and his flashy movements in the painting. The woman, on the other hand, is weighed down by her multi-colored dress, which is made of “ …blossoms quilted on gold.” Using words like dark, and heavy to describe the man; describing the position and action of his hands and arms with phrases like caught her, holds her still, and make her turn implies force. Thus, Ferlinghetti establishes the man as an active threat. He is imposing himself on the woman, so gently so insistently and yet his urgent hunger seems wild and animal like. By contrast, Ferlinghetti assigns a defensive and somehow helpless quality to the woman – she drapes, she clutches, she will not open. The adjectives he chooses to describe her – tense, bare, doubled up, folded, - painted her as shielding herself from the man, weighed down by her own vulnerability. The position of the woman’s arm can

Some topics in this essay:
Klimt Kiss, Klimt’s Kiss, Lawrence Frelinghetti, , bare skin, man’s robe, lawrence frelinghetti,