 If you have ever read a novel in which the narrator described a painting or a statue, you have experienced the narrative mode ecfrosis. The definition of ecfrosis has changed over time, but today we use it to mean the verbal representation of visual representation. Basically, an ecfrosis is a literary description of art. Like other kinds of imagery, ecfrasis paints a picture with words. What makes it different from something like pictorialism is that the picture it paints is itself a picture. Ecfrosis stages an encounter between representations in two mediums, one visual and one verbal. One of the oldest examples is Homer's long description of a keely shield in the Iliad. Throughout that ecfrosis, the poet emphasizes the fact that the images described are images on a shield and even calls attention to the God who faced his act of making that shield. Modern poets often base their ecfrosis on real works apart, works that you can see in life or look up on the internet. A good example is Victoria Chang's Edward Hopper study hotel room. The title alerts us to the fact that the poem attends to a work by the painter Edward Hopper. Many of the details in the poem, such as in her hands a yellow letter creased and her dress limp on a green chair, seem to match up with the painting. We know the poem is ecfrastic when we get to this passage. That is all the artist left us with. That makes it clear that the poet is engaging with an artistic representation. But the poem does not just catalog the features of the painting. It also interprets the image as we see from the very start while the man is away telling his wife about the red corseted woman. Etymologically ecfrosis means to speak out and hear the poet tells us what the painter leaves unsaid. In poems like this one, the ecfrosis is the entire poem. Other times as in the Iliad, ecfrosis is part of a longer work. In those cases, it's important to remember that ecfrosis does not pause the story. It may halt the forward movement of the plot, giving the reader and or characters a chance to process emotions or consider a different point of view, but that itself is an important part of the story.