What do we look for in portraits? Some semblances of ourselves—a mood, an attitude, a stance we recognize? There’s the arrogance of Richard Avedon’s George Wallace, the unspeakable complexity of his Chet Baker. Do we want to see the complexity of our own humanity projected onto others so we can observe? In real life perhaps only the lover or parent can gaze long at the other. In most circumstances we can’t stare too long without violating someone’s privacy or threatening their vulnerability. Where we can stare is in art. The portrait maker, in paint or clay or photography, also gets to look, to gaze long into the subject. Interesting to think there is still always a device between the artist and the subject—a canvas, a hunk of clay or stone, a camera.

It seems a visual portrait exists in space more than time. It is time stopped in the moment of our gaze. However long we gaze, the object doesn’t change, just our relationship to it. The portrait can only imply movement—as William Claxton’s portrait of John Coltrane on the stairs at Newport. It can suggest station in life, duties, power, by the visual context, while the subject’s interior life, attitude can be implied by the chosen gesture, expression, stance.

While writing has its own spatial identity, its main element is time. Three seconds to read a line of iambic pentameter. A sentence is sequential. At its most basic, first we get the subject, then the verb, then the object. If the writer changes the sequence she changes the relationships, nuance by nuance. The poem can’t show us the subject’s face—in fact many portraits in poetry rarely mention the subject’s physical appearance at all—but the poem can show us what the subject is looking at. The poem can give voice to thoughts, memories, reactions. More than in visual portraits, poetry can shift between modes, between exterior and interior, present and past, it can draw on sound and voice, play with motion and pacing. Poetry can sustain leaps and gaps, which is where the emotion and energy live.

Most of the poems we are going to look at come from the writer’s long study of the subject, deep acquaintance with the life and work, perhaps a kind of benign obsession. The writer has been moved, challenged, broadened by the subject, or has felt drawn to and perhaps unable to explain why that simpatico exists. Or I suppose it could be a negative attraction as well. One might want to make a study of Hitler or Goering to understand the nature of evil, how it thinks, acts. There are C. S. Lewis’s Screwtape Letters and Milton’s Satan.

Another reason poets might be drawn to portraiture is because it draws us out of ourselves. The lyric “I” is important, the individual self drawn out of the collective mass and taking time to explore the nature of its own humanity. In times of oppressive collective consciousness, the lyric “I” is particularly important. But in the age of selfies and obsession with personal identity, maybe it’s important to balance that tendency with a look outside. Of course, whatever we look at it tells us about ourselves. As Rilke says, when we gaze at something attentively, it looks back at us. And, of course, we become the observer who affects what is observed.

Indeed, in the poems we’re going to look at, the relation of artist to subject is often interesting. The engagement with the other raises questions for the speaker, leads the speaker into larger thoughts. Indeed, because there is a speaker, there is always a relationship. The poet may not be in full dialogue with the subject, but is often present and reacting to her subject, perhaps as directly as the painter. We are, after all, in the mind of the poem’s speaker, but it is a mind turned outward, a mind engaged with something beyond the self.

Johannes Vermeer, The Music Lesson, oil on canvas, 29.4 x 25.2 in., 1662–65, Picture Gallery, Buckingham Palace, London (photo: Wikimedia Commons).

Tomas Transtromer’s “Vermeer” clearly develops a tension between the historical and the subjective. The reference to things outside and inside the studio walls suggests the outer and inner life of the painter. Transtromer provides a kind of verbal split screen, showing first the world beyond the studio and, by implication, the pressures it exerts. Despite Vermeer’s domestic interiors, the poet says:

No sheltered world . . . Right behind the wall the noise begins
the tavern begins
with laughter and complaint, rows of teeth, tears, clanging bells
and the deranged brother-in-law, the murderer that everyone trembles before.

The great explosion and the delayed trampling of rescuers,
boats swaggering at anchor, money creeping down into the pocket of the wrong man
demands heaped on demands
gaping red blossom-cups sweating premonitions of war.

This is the outer world within which the painter works. The details are taken from Vermeer’s life and time. Through them we see what impinges on his awareness—the social and political world around him, Vermeer set in time, and how that time swaggered, crept, demanded, wronged him, and exploded—literally into war.

And from there straight through the wall into the bright studio,
into the second that goes on living for centuries.
Paintings that call themselves “The Music lesson”
or “Woman in Blue Reading a Letter”—
she’s eight months along, two hearts kicking inside her.
On the wall behind her hangs a wrinkled map of Terra Incognita.

It’s as if Transtromer in the first two stanzas gives us the wrinkled map that hangs on the wall. And now we have the domestic world set against that terra incognita. The poem contains both history and private fate, the external world and individual subjectivity. Transtromer gives us a one-line definition of art, or portraiture: “the second that goes on living for centuries.” The Music Lesson, Woman in Blue Reading a Letter—art outlasting the vicissitudes of history, power, and corruption. It’s as if the private moment is both in and out of time, a place where the self can reside—if not sheltered, exactly, at least as a self. The attentiveness of art is a kind of stay against confusion.

Breathe calmly . . . An unfamiliar blue material is nailed to the chairs.
The gold rivets flew in with extraordinary speed
and stopped dead
as if they had never been anything but stillness.

The ears ring from either depth or height.
It’s the pressure from the other side of the wall.
It sets every fact afloat
and steadies the brush.

“Breathe calmly”—seems to move us deeper into the subjective, an interior intimacy. We’re looking at the painting through the poet’s gaze, suggesting perhaps Vermeer’s experience as he works. Against the pressures of history and society, the painter holds the brush; he also experiences the velocity of creation. Those gold rivets both fly into place and suggest the need for stillness in contrast to everything behind the wall.

Of course, walls. Interiors are full of walls. Walls create the tension between in and out, private and public, subjective and commercial. They protect and they block; they’re both necessary and a hindrance.

It hurts to go through walls, and makes you sick
but it’s necessary.
The world is one. But walls . . .
And the wall is part of you—
whether you know it or not, it’s the same for everyone,
except small children. For them, no wall.

The clear sky has leaned against the wall.
It’s like a prayer to the emptiness.
And the emptiness turns its face to us
and whispers,
“I am not empty, I am open.”

This ending is perhaps less a resolution, than a recognition. “The world is one. But walls . . . ” Passing through makes you sick, but it’s necessary. Contradictions coexist. And the wall is part of you—whether you know it or not . . . It’s as if what Transtromer sees in Vermeer is the paradoxical nature of experience: no interior without the resonating pressures of the outer world; no value or meaning in the violence of history without the response coming from the inner life.

While this portrait creates an historical context, it is very supple in giving us a sense of Vermeer’s inner life, his subjectivity and his pressures. If the clear sky leans against the wall like a prayer to the emptiness on the other side, it is perhaps in the invoking of the emptiness that a response occurs. Only through invoking that emptiness do we get to see it as an opening. Language can give us both worlds, can imagine what is behind the painted wall, and what is inside the walls of the painter’s mind. It can offer material details in words, and suggest what is nonmaterial. It comes close to the surreal in its leaps, in its ability to suggest the painter’s mind—as well as what the poet studying him comes to understand.

Emily Dickinson, daguerreotype taken at Mount Holyoke, December 1846 or early 1847, Archives and Special Collections, Amherst College (photo: Wikimedia Commons).

Lee Upton takes a different approach to her portrait in “Dickinson’s Day Lilies.” She focuses on a very particular moment during Thomas Higginson’s visit to Emily Dickinson. The epigraph sets up the external view, Higginson’s commentary to his wife: “She came to me with two day lilies which she put in a sort of childlike way into my hand, . . . [B]ut she talked soon & thenceforward continuously.”

The poem creates a subjective view. If this were a painting the day lilies would take center stage, perhaps obscuring the poet and visitor altogether. It might look like a Rousseau jungle scene with the poet half hidden. Upton’s approach is almost—not quite—entirely through metaphor, as if to create the fluidity and suppleness of Dickinson’s mind. Telling it slant for sure.

Humility wasn’t enough, littleness was not low enough;
the lilies she brought might be firebrands,
globes of incense, torches clapping the air.
She listened to the god of miniatures inside her
and grasped two branding irons,
two distillates of loons.

Such a series of contradictions: humility and littleness, lowliness in the discursive lines, but then in the lilies—firebrands, torches, branding irons, and then the beautifully strange, “two distillates of loons.” Whose world are we in? Clearly, it’s one of a genius as opposed to the civil, literary man.

She could not let herself tilt
the room in any direction today, and so
she had considered holding two antlers, two thistles,
two mantles of thorns,
she had considered dangling at her neck
a whalebone
or a diagram of the macula like a family
crest to remind herself:
Breathe in,
do not roar.

Such intensity. Against the exterior presented in the epigraph, Upton’s portrait is all interior, the shifting of metaphors a way of capturing Dickinson’s originality and the contradictions in her sensibility. She knows her own power, knows she could capsize the room. For all her deference, she contains her own inner antlers, thistles, thorns, whalebones.

The lion in the parlor is playing the lily bearer
with her two jars of bloody milk,
her two bladders of sun soot—
which she can hardly wait to pour
into Higginson’s ear.

The poem tries to conceive Dickinson’s own rich agility, her ability to transform objects and encounters.

Only later must she wonder:
Who saw in me a specimen?
But what had she given away
but her two broken, golden-necked swans,
hissing, fragrance-less.
They weren’t notched into her own white paper quite yet.
They weren’t what would make her.

If I understand these last lines, after her dramatic entrance and animated meeting, there are after thoughts, a replay with questions. Was she a specimen to him? (Someone who could be viewed as cut and dried, someone to dissect, dismiss?) The images become more wounded. The two broken, golden-necked swans, hissing, fragrance-less, perhaps suggest second thoughts: what damage had been done, what had she given away? Something that should have remained private, interior and therefore powerful? Something of her own that he would want to change? Does entering this dialogue break the necks of her swans? Then there’s the page. Perhaps she hadn’t quite found her sureness there yet, but she will. It’s the page where she lives and can have control. It’s not through the critic’s eye, or even the flowers she brings. Her page is something much more fierce than the critic is able to imagine. There the swans are whole.

What is art, if not attention? Portraiture is a dialogue between self and other, a kind of I-Thou relationship, to use Martin Buber’s term. We shape and are shaped in return. Or: we are shaped and shape in return, using the medium we work in. In a true dialogue we aren’t waiting for the other to shut up so we can speak our piece. We’re attending patiently to the other’s gestures and voice. It’s like going through walls. We listen with a kind of emptiness that is also open—as if the walls inside us could become less rigid. Then we pick up the brush. Or the pen.

Note: this text is excerpted from a larger talk given at the Vermont College of Fine Arts in  2016.

Note from one of the editors: Betsy Sholl’s statement that “[i]t seems a visual portrait exists in space more than time” and that, “[w]hile writing has its own spatial identity, its main element is time,” is remarkably close to what Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote in the 18th century in Laocoon: or, The Limits of Poetry and Painting, a foundational text if there ever was one for what became known—several centuries later—as word and image studies. In this essay, which borrows its title from the famous ancient Greek sculpture, Lessing attempted to grasp the difference between the visual arts and literature and argued that painting uses “forms and colors in space” while poetry articulates “sounds in time” (XVI).

Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim. Laokoon: Oder, Über die Grenzen der Malerei und Poesie. 1766. Laocoon: An Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. 1766. Trans. Ellen Frothingham. Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1890. Digitized version from the Project Gutenberg accessible here.

—Véronique Plesch

Image at top: Johannes Vermeer, Woman Reading a Letter, oil on canvas, 18.3 x 15.4 in., 1663, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam (photo: Wikimedia Commons).