Close Read

Michael Donaghy’s “Upon a Claude Glass”

UPON A CLAUDE GLASS

A lady might pretend to fix her face,
but scan the room inside her compact mirror—

so gentlemen would scrutinize this glass
to gaze on Windermere or Rydal Water

and pick their way along the clifftop tracks
intent upon the romance in the box,

keeping unframed nature at their backs,
and some would come to grief upon the rocks.

Don’t look so smug. Don’t think you’re any safer
as you blunder forward through your years

squinting to recall some fading pleasure,
or blinded by some private scrim of tears.

I know. My world’s encircled by this prop,
though all my life I’ve tried to force it shut


—Michael Donaghy (1954-2004)

Of all the conveniences that the Internet confers on poets, perhaps none is as liberating as freedom of subject matter. Had Michael Donaghy written “Upon a Claude Glass” in 1992, before the advent of online search engines, rather than in 2002, he could hardly have expected a general readership to know what he was talking about. But thanks to mighty Wikipedia, even a seemingly obscure poem like this one discloses its secrets with mere minutes of background reading. Opaque references to “gentlemen” who keep “unframed nature at their backs” become clear once one learns what a Claude glass is and how it works.

These darkly tinted mirrors, small enough to palm and often carried in cases (or “boxes”), were used by landscape artists in nineteenth-century England to help them imitate the style of Claude Lorraine, whose subtly graded, often muted colors can recall, for viewers accustomed to photography, sepia tones. So, an erstwhile landscapist might undertake an invigorating hike to a suitably picturesque spot (like Windermere or Rydal Water in England’s Lake District) and, having found his subject, turn his back on it, holding up a Claude glass and painting the mirror’s dark reflection rather than the scene itself. The Claude glass, then, was an artist’s prop. Reliance on such a prop might be thought to relegate one’s painting to the second tier, one too many removes away from the authentic to be considered real art—a mirror held up to a mirror held up to nature. In any event, the idea of painters working with their backs turned struck many as comical on its face, and the Claude glass became identified with dabbling.

Donaghy exploits these and other facets of the history of his subject to fashion a sonnet which at once embraces and resists its own form. The white space breaking the sonnet’s customary quatrains into couplets might lead some readers to overlook the telltale rhyme scheme and line count. But “Upon a Claude Glass” is, in fact, a good example of Donaghy’s signature version of this form, a straightforward, modern interpretation of the English sonnet: straightforward because its rhymes and ideas have been organized in three abab quatrains and a concluding couplet, and because it makes the sonnet’s traditional turns or voltas; modern because its rhymes are often “slant” or “off,” and the white space conceals the poem’s form in the first place.

These modernizations make the straightforward oblique, but this poem still moves as a sonnet moves. And as Donaghy himself wrote in a very different poem, “The how they move is the what they are.” This poem moves by turning in the sonnet’s traditional manner, with voltas coming after line 8 and after line 12.

Donaghy spends most of the first eight lines imagining the situation of those painters who used Claude glasses, and in doing so rephrases criticisms leveled at them by their contemporaries. Notice the comic mismatch in scale between the grandeur of “romance” and the teensy-tiny “box” in which it’s viewed. The joke is on the painters: Their lack of attention to the biggest of big pictures, “unframed nature,” results in their death, or as it’s described in faux-Victorian euphemism, their “com[ing] to grief upon the rocks.” Donaghy invites us to have a cynical chuckle at their expense.

And then immediately reproaches us for having done so. In the first of the poem’s major turns, at line 9 Donaghy’s narrator chides “Don’t be so smug” or “think you’re any safer.” The mocking gaze that the poem directs at a third party throughout its first eight lines turns in the ninth toward the reader. The poem shifts from third to second person: Now it is “you,” the reader, who “blunders forward,” distracted in a manner similar to that which doomed the amateur artist. This time, though, the romantic image is held not by a mirror, externally, but within, by memory itself: the recollection of a “fading pleasure” or of a pain barely visible through a “scrim of tears.” The minor farce that had been safely set in distant Victoriana is turned into a present condition, asserted as the reader’s own condition.

Talk about smug. How could Donaghy—excuse me, the poem’s narrator—have the nerve to presume so much about me—you—I mean, about the reader? He or she doesn’t even know him or her! And yet the narrator does claim to “know,” if not the reader then the reader’s situation, and to know it from personal experience. The first word of line 13, “I,” signals another turn with another shift in voice, from second to first person, and with it a shift in the narrator’s attention from the plight of the reader to his own. We have seen similar turns already, in line 9. But we have not seen what happens next.

The English sonnet’s rhyme scheme of abab cdcd efef gg can be thought of as six elegantly interleaved chiming pairs and, at the end, one big gong. That final couplet offers the effect of closure, as rhyme pairs previously kept apart from each other finally clasp together. Sonneteers have frequently exploited that potential, but this sonnet exploits the expectation of such closure, and achieves its effect by thwarting that expectation. In line 13, the narrator assures the reader that he knows what it’s like to “blunder forward” as the reader does and as the amateur artist did, and he further claims that his entire world is “encircled by this prop”—the prop of the poem itself, the very one being read. We have turned from the literal prop of the Claude glass, to the immaterial prop of memory, to something stranger than both, because it partakes of the nature of both. The prop of the poem is material, but only insofar as it pulses in the synapses of a brain, first the poet’s, then a reader’s. And this prop holds an image of the poet just as surely as the Claude glass framed an image of nature and just as our memories frame our pasts.

This is a very different idea of what a poem is than, say, that of Yeats, who wrote that a poem “comes right with a click like a closing box.” Donaghy’s poem (whose subject is a box) pointedly does not. The final line enacts what it describes, as Donaghy refuses the sonnet’s requirement of rhyming the final couplet (“prop/shut”) and therefore reneges on the sonnet’s promise of closure. This poem will not be forced shut, will not be made into an aestheticized, romanticized reflection of the real, but will instead partake of the messy imperfection of boundless nature and of individual lives. Perhaps I don’t put too fine a point on it by noting that Donaghy doesn’t put a final point on it, withholding in the last sentence even the closing punctuation of a period.

Only with the sonnet’s last word, “shut,” can the reader know that this sonnet never shuts. So, for all its deepening seriousness, this poem ultimately works much as a joke does, in that the first thirteen lines set up the final punch line—punch word, really. And this time the joke is on us. This sonnet’s simultaneous fulfillment and refusal of its own form amount to a comment on its subject, even as its subject is, in one sense, a comment on form itself, on the frames in which we try to confine the unconfinable.