The moment I raised my head and looked into his eyes, there was a blanket of relief that shielded me from all of my worries. My first thought was how my parents would react. The thought of him leaving swiftly followed, after all we weren’t yet to be married for another three months. The uncertainty of it all was tying my insides into knots. Nothing mattered when I looked into his rich brown eyes. My furrowed brows and teary eyes gave the slightest hint to how I felt inside; as if I were to shatter into a million pieces of glass. His soft grin and firm grasp were reassuring me that all would be well. This innocent treasure that we now share was growing inside of me, completely unaware of how much its mother and father fiercely love each other. This moment seemed to be frozen in time, and almost as if with a natural instinct, his warm lips touched mine. “I shall give thee as many as thou shalt want”, he said with a subtle tone. From that moment on, nothing else mattered, as long as we were together.
This photo, taken by Joan Marcus, is featured in our textbook on the first page of Chapter 8: Theater. This photo stood out to me because of the expression on the woman’s face and how beautifully the shades of blue coordinated in both of the character’s outfits (the spectacle).The essential details I initially noticed were how they held each other’s hand, looked into each other’s eyes and how close they were sitting next to each other. This indicated to me that they were intimate partners or at least were fond of each other. My “translation” preserves the original situation because after extensive research, I found that this photo was taken of the Hamilton’s America musical starring Lin-Manuel Miranda as Alexander Hamilton and Phillipa Soo as his wife, Eliza. My prose piece attempts to capture the mood and feeling of the image because of the descriptive details used to show what the woman thought and how she felt. For this reason, I chose to write in first-person instead of in dialogue, as most prose pieces. The woman was reading the man’s actions more than his words, interpreting his reassurance amidst her uncertainty. I was able to replicate the original visual details in my words by mentioning how the man firmly held onto the woman’s hand. I tried to mimic the style of how people used to speak English during the 18th century, in the time of Alexander Hamilton. The new interpretation of this image my ekphrasis brings to this piece is that the woman is carrying the man’s child out of wedlock. This detail is not originally added in Hamilton’s America but is a fun way to interpret the way her hand gently rests on her belly and the worried look on her face.
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