In Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest, Henri Rousseau takes a woman, better suited for promenading in Parisian parks, and places her tropically, and absurdly, out of her element.
“Gazing at the viewer with a look of vague surprise, the woman recalls the startled animals peering out from the artist’s jungle pictures.” โ The Barnes Foundation.
And we are left to wonder, why the juxtaposition of the jungle and the genteel?
More of my ekphrastic poetry here. More on free verse here. I have a prose poem in response to Rousseau’s The Pink Candle here.
Woman Walking in an Exotic Forest
If I were a harvest-moon orange
and you were a moonlight-purple aster
we would grow in a lunar-landscape forest
of ferns and dripping-blue sausage fruits
pink frangipani under a blue-line canopy
watered by people from the past in corsets
and lounge suits, who sweat in our tropical heat
who talk of nothing but phantasmagorias
jungles, tigers, monkeys, reptiles
who could not imagine walking on the moon
and we, the aster and orange in the forest,
would talk of survival.
ยฉelsp 2026
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