In the title poem of her first collection, Standing Female Nude (1998), Carol Ann Duffy explicitly reverses the male gaze. But where Duffy’s feminist female model sees – and sees through – the male artist and the way he objectifies and misrepresents her, the poetry of Helen Farish, while just as alive to the challenges of writing as a woman, is prepared to recognize not only the compromises but also the freedoms and possibilities inherent in more traditional female roles.
“In Bed with Vermeer”, for example, published in the TLS in 2021, is finely balanced between the speaker’s admiration for her husband’s genius and an acceptance of its cost, the sexual feelings for his subjects on which it draws: she knows that his picture of their maid – “Girl with a Pearl Earring” – contains an erotic charge he would be embarrassed to talk about. The beauty of the poem lies in the speaker’s subtlety in sublimating this powerful physical attraction. In this skill she almost matches her husband. She understands as well as he does both how his picture works and how it has come to be painted (“He plants something in your heart, say his sitters / till your gaze grows round it like an oyster”); she knows he has painted his own desire for her into the picture (“curtains falling just as the master enters / the room of the painting”) and that he cannot sleep for emotional and artistic excitement (“sleep is like a feather / eluding the maid’s brush”). She too is a “geographer / of secrets” – the ones he imagines he has kept to himself; but she celebrates his art in a secret art all of her own.
In Bed with Vermeer
Lover of all that is interior –
letters, virginals, an earthen pitcher
placed between a lady and a cavalier,
curtains falling just as the master enters
the room of the painting – Vermeer,
my husband, for whom sleep is like a feather
eluding the maid’s brush. I’m a geographer
of secrets, he says, yet he colours
even in the dark if asked about the picture
now on his easel – our maid wearing
her high cheekbones, the fine furnishings
of her face which he has framed
with a turban the blue-green of earthenware.
He plants something in your heart, say his sitters,
till your gaze grows around it like an oyster
a pearl. It is winter. The walls are tones of ochre,
my bed jacket is trimmed with the purest white fur,
and outside, folded in shadow, the tapestry of Delft.
HELEN FARISH (2021)
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