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With Particular Dignity
In Quiet Light: Poems on Vermeer’s Women
by Marilyn Chandler McEntyre
William B. Eerdmans Publishing Co., 2000. 72 pages.
Reviewed by Michael Wilt
Recent literary seasons have produced two noteworthy novels that draw on the painting of Johannes Vermeer. Girl With a Pearl Earring by Tracy Chevalier is a finely-fashioned tale in which the model for the painting of the same name tells her story in measured, unforgettable prose. Around the same time, Susan Vreeland offered Girl in Hyacinth Blue, a novel that traces the history, from the present day back to its origin, of a painting that just might be a lost Vermeer. For those of us who easily find ourselves engrossed in Vermeer’s paintings, these novels, with their speculation on the man about whom we know so little, and their musing, both implicit and explicit, on the nature of a masterpiece, were deeply gratifying and thought-provoking.
Now Marilyn Chandler McEntyre, a professor of literature whose previous published work has been in the field of literary criticism, has turned a poetic eye on this great painter and, in particular, the women he painted. In her introduction to In Quiet Light, McEntyre says “the term ‘the ring of truth’ comes to mind each time I gaze at Vermeer’s women and sense again how they communicate something deep and not wholly nameable about interior life, and about what it is to see with a clear, compassionate gaze, as the painter did.” Vermeer’s women are “the objects of honorable and honoring attention that endows them, their work, and the circumstances of their lives with particular dignity.” From that point of departure, McEntyre’s poems are “experiments in contemplation,” shared in the hope that the poems, and the paintings that inspired them, will invite “moments of repose and reflection” into the lives of those who perceive them.
It is a gracious invitation, and the poems fulfill its promise. With a detail from Vermeer’s Allegory of Painting as her starting point, McEntyre comments on the “artless” days of an artist’s life: the days on which the maker of rose windows must eschew color so as to boil lead in which to make “perfect space for light”; the days on which Wren, designing St. Paul’s Cathedral, had to cope with columns of figures and other technicalities, but “all / to the greater glory of God”; the days when Vermeer, with his house full of children, couldn’t paint or mix powders,
but hauled in firewood, cleaned out
a flue, repaired a broken cradle, remembering,
as he bent to his task, how light shone gold
on a woman’s flesh, and gathered
in drops on her pearls.
Exploring Vermeer’s women directly, as she does in most of the poems, McEntyre comments on what they are doing and who they might have been. The Woman Holding a Balance, for example, pauses “between this world and the next, / between maidenhood and motherhood”; and then McEntyre goes on to see deeply into the simple act in which the woman is engaged:
Trained on the object, undistracted,
patient while the instrument swings
to its center and is still, she turns
this little task to prayer -- if mindfulness is
prayer -- to an exercise of love -- if it is love
to be attentive to the thing at hand.
One of Vermeer’s most famous women, the Girl with the Red Hat, speaks her own words in the poem devoted to her. McEntyre gives that voice to the model, who does not seem to be especially enjoying her turn in front of the painter and imagines throwing the red hat into the canal and “startling the ducks” when the sitting is over. The poem inspired by Girl with a Pearl Earring, on the other hand, attempts not to create a story behind this painting (Chevalier has done that most impressively in her novel), but responds to the character behind this incomparable face at just the instant captured by Vermeer, and with a one-word Shakespearean allusion adds volumes to whatever we may have previously imagined about this young woman.
Poised to take what comes, she receives
with grace, gives back what befits
her modesty and station.
Cordelia would have done no more.
With the poems and paintings presented on facing pages, reading In Quiet Light is like walking through an art gallery in the company of a fine-tuned, well-spoken, and unpretentious observer -- a companion whose encouragement deepens and clarifies one’s perception and appreciation. McEntyre honors the women in the paintings and the artist who painted them, while also pondering art and the making of art. The real gift of her book, though, is its ability to touch and enliven the reader’s creative spirit. Don’t let this exhibit pass you by.
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