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Young Shepherdess / Captivity of the Jews in Babylon

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Middleton, David

after the pictures (ca. 1870-1873 11848) by J.-F. Millet (1814-1875)

for Deborah Cibelli, art historian

She sits alone upon a hillock-throne,

Wholly composed of her own history-

The colors of her sculpted woolen skirt

Marbled in knee-splotch greens and blotchy grays,

Her distaff like a queen's rod on her lap

Or lyre wound tight, plucked by the thorny comb,

Her cloud-brimmed hat crowned bright in aureole-

A peasant girl attended by the myths.

And there where rows stream brown away behind

To burst on the horizon white and blue,

Two sheep pause, one haunched up and gazing down

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Toward pastureland, the other a blunt head

Rising in dream between the fields and hill,

Almost aware of who this woman is,

The Virgin, Eve, and Ceres of the plain,

Her antique face impassive as a mask.

ii.

And underneath that mask x-rays reveal

To scholars of its art an older tale:

Bearded Assyrian guards whose proffered harps

Make Judah's highborn maidens turn away

In anguish, hiding naked tears that fill

The Tigris and Euphrates with their streams.

No psalms will echo back from garden walls

Where kings hang foreign blooms for foreign wives

Nor would Millet submit to the Salon

Another many-figured Bible scene,

Only Chailly or his own Normandy

To which the Prussian war exiled him home.

And there, short on supplies, and near the end,

He painted out those maidens for a girl

Whose scepter is the distaff in her palm;

Behind her, Eve, beneath her, Babylon.

DAVID MIDDLETON*

* David Middleton is Poet-in-Residence at Nicholls State University in Thibodaux, Louisiana, and Poetry Editor of the ATR. His next book of verse, The Habitual Peacefulness of Gruchy: Poems after Pictures by Jean-Francois Millet, is forthcoming from LSU Press (Fall 2005).

Young Shepherdess / Captivity of the Jews in Babylon

Anglican Theological Review, Fall 2005 by Middleton, David

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