Pride and prejudice and portraiture

First Impressions was the title Jane Austen originally gave to her best-loved novel, in which the thread of impressions, reflections, and portraiture runs through the narrative in interesting ways. In one of their early encounters at Netherfield, Elizabeth tells Darcy she’s trying to “take his likeness.” He replies gravely, “I could wish, Miss Bennet, that you were not to sketch my character at the present moment, as there is reason to fear that the performance would reflect no credit on either." 

Disliking Darcy, and falling for Wickham, “whose very countenance may vouch for his being amiable,” Elizabeth is led astray by appearances. When she learns the truth about Wickham, she tells Jane: “One has all the goodness, the other all the appearance of it.” 

Months later, she contemplates the miniatures of Darcy and Wickham at Pemberly. How differently she sees both images, now that her eyes have been opened to the true characters of both men. Seeing them thus side by side she no longer deceives herself about the appearance of either, admitting to the housekeeper that Darcy is indeed very handsome, and nudging her aunt towards the possibility of Wickham's waywardness. When she stands before Darcy’s large portrait in the gallery upstairs, his image and his character come together for the first time. 

“She stood several minutes before the picture, in earnest contemplation, and returned to it again before they quitted the gallery...There was certainly at this moment, in Elizabeth's mind, a more gentle sensation towards the original than she had ever felt at the height of their acquaintance."

This is a turning point, and when Darcy appears in the flesh soon afterwards, she beholds him changed; both from within and in her own perception of him. From this moment she begins to think she could be happy with him, but within another day or two, Wickham has intervened to separate them - in part because she has never unfolded his true character to anyone but Jane. 

This game of hide and seek is the engine of the novel. His pride and her prejudice are the masks they both wear, that must fall away before they can come together. Their first impressions must be replaced by the portraiture of genuine understanding, and patient skill. 

All sweetness to your Lenten lips

Here's Hopkins, breaking Lent and breathing Easter with a sonnet. The poem's about churchfolk coming to their chilly service, taking wine and wafer for a feast; but Christ is in it and them, putting aside pain and shame to drink of joy and ease, his brimming reward. 

Pure fasted faces draw unto this feast: 
God comes all sweetness to your Lenten lips.
You striped in secret with breath-taking whips, 
Those crooked rough-scored chequers may be pieced
To crosses meant for Jesu's; you whom the East 
With draught of thin and pursuant cold so nips
Breathe Easter now; you serged fellowships, 
You vigil-keepers with low flames decreased, 
God shall o'er-brim the measures you have spent
With oil of gladness, for sackcloth and frieze
And the ever-fretting shirt of punishment
Give myrrhy-threaded golden folds of ease.
Your scarce-sheathed bones are weary of being bent: 
Lo, God shall strengthen all the feeble knees.

A garden full of silence

This is Christina Rossetti, a poet acquainted with silence as with wonder. Here she found a way to make the sad silence of an Easter Saturday wonderful. 

The tempest over and gone, the calm begun,
  Lo, “it is finished,” and the Strong Man sleeps:
All stars keep vigil watching for the sun,
  The moon her vigil keeps.

A garden full of silence and of dew,     
  Beside a virgin cave and entrance stone:
Surely a garden full of Angels too,
  Wondering, on watch, alone. 

They who cry “Holy, Holy, Holy,” still
  Veiling their faces round God’s throne above,
May well keep vigil on this heavenly hill
  And cry their cry of love. 

Adoring God in His new mystery
  Of Love more deep than hell, more strong than death;
Until the day break and the shadows flee,
  The Shaking and the Breath.

Like some great god

The silver trumpets rang across the Dome:
The people knelt upon the ground with awe:
And borne upon the necks of men I saw,
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome.
Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam,
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red,
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head:
In splendour and in light the Pope passed home.
My heart stole back across wide wastes of years
To One who wandered by a lonely sea,
And sought in vain for any place of rest:
'Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest.
I, only I, must wander wearily,
And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears.'

This is ‘Easter Day,’ which Oscar Wilde wrote while on a visit to Rome in the last year of his life. Wilde had every reason to find himself at odds with splendid authority borne on the necks of men, and I like to be reminded that this puts him in company with Christ.

In the last week of Jesus’ short life, his conflict with the religious authorities - a conflict that began with his first acts of miraculous healing - escalates to the point where they have him lynched; their own glory so threatened by this footsore preacher that they render him up to the theatrical vengeance of Imperial Rome. 

Easter, as Wilde standing in St Peter’s Square suddenly saw, was a clash between homeless divinity and gilded authority. Between light and splendour. 

In those unwardened provinces

Adrienne Rich died this past week. She was a poet who seemed to start out conventional and end up up-ending just that. As the New Yorker put it, she and many other women trod the trimmed path in the 40s and 50s, only to find in the 60s and 70s that they wanted to tear up the grass. She was born in 1929, so in her 83 years she must have witnessed epochal change in the way women see and are seen, many times over. Her most famous poem, probably, is “Diving into the Wreck,” which became a kind of manifesto for a certain kind of feminism: “the wreck and not the story of the wreck; the thing itself and not the myth.” The underwater search for unaccommodated woman is a dark exercise; she comes, after all, to see “the damage.” There's little light here, if there's truth. I prefer the dazzling joy of this earlier, sweeter poem, “Holiday,” with its intentional forgetfulness of dark.  

Summer was another country, where the birds
Woke us at dawn among the dripping leaves
And lent to all our fetes their sweet approval.
The touch of air on flesh was lighter, keener,
The senses flourished like a laden tree
Whose every gesture finishes in a flower.
In those unwardened provinces we dined
From wicker baskets by a green canal,
Staining our lips with peach and nectarine,
Slapping at golden wasps. And when we kissed,
Tasting that sunlit juice, the landscape folded
Into our clasp, and not a breath recalled
The long walk back to winter, leagues away.