ENTRANCE TO A WORLD: HELEN PINKERTON'S "BRIGHT FICTIONS", THE

One woman lingers while Cupid tugs her gown.

Bending her head to hear her lover's speech,

She lets her fingers on her fan disclose

Gentle complaisance as she seems to say,

"When I look up, my eyes will hold my heart

With all its claims, more than your love can reach,

Perhaps, but not Eve's guile for you to blame,

Nor Venus's innocent, amoral gift,

Only a woman caught by what caught you.

In this case the imagined address is from one figure in the painting to another, and again as with the Vermeer poem, this poem is anxious to dissociate itself from exaggerated biblical or mythological analogies, to locate itself in the ordinary and the human.

The woman confesses her readiness to yield to the erotic enchantment, but the slight delay in the meeting of the eyes is the pause of reason before the enchantment is complete. She is already caught - and by the same desires that hold her lover - but she wishes to understand, so far as possible, the nature of the enchantment. This is not to say that reason dominates erotic enchantment, only that it would understand something of its implication and its mystery.

"What we may say is free. So I from you

Ask more than a lover's plea - a man's response,

Self-conscious, meditated, open as mine.

The simplest of my sex finds your sex simple,

While I, amazed by love's power to subdue,

Wonder by what illusion you are moved,

"Whether you want to love or to be loved,

Whether you need to know or to be known.

As I all these and more. Although for you

The asking seems enough (your eyes say this),

When mine meet yours, what happens alters my being

Irrevocably. Part of my story ends.

"When mine meet yours": as this remark, now from the fourth stanza, reminds us, the poem is still poised (as the painting is) in the instant before the meeting of the lovers' eyes. Only now that instant conveys not only a meditative pause but a momentous sense of choice. The stakes are high. They may be higher for the woman than for the man, though it's clear that she desires a kind of equality, a mate equally capable of combining reason and feeling - even when the exercise of reason runs up against more questions than answers. She is not the simplest of her sex. She knows that the power of love is based at least partly on illusion. She knows that the balance between wanting to love and to be loved is ever shifting and uncertain and that it is difficult even to understand her own feelings let alone his on such matters.

The final stanza registers her decision and ends with more questions.

"For me my going will be like a charm,

Chosen deliberately, although I know

Warm hands grow cold, arms drop idly away.

The sky seems vague with promise, melancholy,

The freedom of the island evanescent.

Some pilgrims have seen saints, carried their torch

Homeward again to seal love's errant will.

If, when I close my options, you do not,

Nor wish to leave the game, where will we be?

And if I love you always, what can I say?"

The central idea of the poem, "reasonable enchantment," is here restated in personal terms, a choice the woman makes for herself: such love is "like a charm / Chosen deliberately." The choice is reasonable but risky. The sky, "vague with promise," offers no supernatural guarantees. Erotic charms of their nature grow cold. Lovers are not always faithful. The closing questions with their suspicions that the lover may not himself be contemplating so weighty and unalterable a commitment may seem more fraught with melancholy and skepticism than with hope. But the questions register the depth of both her enchantment and her reason. This poem ends on a note reminiscent of a poem by Sir Thomas Wyatt, also focused on the risks of erotic love and commitment: 'Trust therefore first and after prove, / As men wed ladies by licence and leave / All is possible." The freedoms and "options" of the game of love may seem more open-ended, but in the last analysis "trust" or commitment opens up greater possibility, even if it necessarily comes first and the proof comes after. What becomes possible in such a choice is a fully human love, a glimpse of the eternal amidst the risks of time.