She Walks in Beauty_ A Woman's Journey Through Poems - Caroline Kennedy [31]
In “The Catch” by Richard Wilbur and “Delight in Disorder” by Robert Herrick, male poets writing three hundred years apart describe the impact of what women wear. Richard Wilbur describes how mystified he feels watching a woman try on a new dress in the mirror. And in “Patterns,” Amy Lowell explores the ways in which women rely on clothes to distract us from events we cannot control.
The last word belongs to Marianne Moore, whose complicated poem “Roses Only” ends with the memorable line, “your thorns are the best part of you.”
Antony and Cleopatra, II, ii, 191–232
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
Enobarbus:
. . . The barge she sat in, like a burnish’d throne
Burn’d on the water: the poop was beaten gold;
Purple the sails, and so perfumed that
The winds were love-sick with them; the oars were silver,
Which to the tune of flutes kept stroke, and made
The water which they beat to follow faster,
As amorous of their strokes. For her own person,
It beggar’d all description: she did lie
In her pavilion—cloth of gold, of tissue—
O’er-picturing that Venus where we see
The fancy outwork nature. On each side her,
Stood pretty dimpled boys, like smiling Cupids,
With divers-colour’d fans, whose wind did seem
To glow the delicate cheeks which they did cool,
And what they undid did.
Agrippa: O, rare for Antony!
Enobarbus:
Her gentlewomen, like the Nereides,
So many mermaids, tended her i’ the eyes,
And made their bends adornings. At the helm
A seeming mermaid steers: the silken tackle
Swell with the touches of those flower-soft hands,
That yarely frame the office. From the barge
A strange invisible perfume hits the sense
Of the adjacent wharfs. The city cast
Her people out upon her; and Antony,
Enthron’d i’ the market-place, did sit alone,
Whistling to the air; which, but for vacancy,
Had gone to gaze on Cleopatra too,
And made a gap in nature.
Agrippa: Rare Egyptian!
Enobarbus:
Upon her landing, Antony sent to her,
Invited her to supper: she replied,
It should be better he became her guest,
Which she entreated: our courteous Antony,
Whom ne’er the word of ‘No’ woman heard speak,
Being barber’d ten times o’er, goes to the feast;
And for his ordinary, pays his heart,
For what his eyes eat only.
Agrippa: Royal wench!
She made great Cæsar lay his sword to bed;
He plough’d her, and she cropp’d.
Enobarbus: I saw her once
Hop forty paces through the public street,
And having lost her breath, she spoke, and panted,
That she did make defect perfection,
And, breathless, power breathe forth.
What Do Women Want?
KIM ADDONIZIO
I want a red dress.
I want it flimsy and cheap,
I want it too tight, I want to wear it
until someone tears it off me.
I want it sleeveless and backless,
this dress, so no one has to guess
what’s underneath. I want to walk down
the street past Thrifty’s and the hardware store
with all those keys glittering in the window,
past Mr. and Mrs. Wong selling day-old
donuts in their café, past the Guerra brothers
slinging pigs from the truck and onto the dolly,
hoisting the slick snouts over their shoulders.
I want to walk like I’m the only
woman on earth and I can have my pick.
I want that red dress bad.
I want it to confirm
your worst fears about me,
to show you how little I care about you
or anything except what
I want. When I find it, I’ll pull that garment
from its hanger like I’m choosing a body
to carry me into this world, through
the birth-cries and the love-cries too,
and I’ll wear it like bones, like skin,
it’ll be the goddamned
dress they bury me in.
The Catch
RICHARD WILBUR
From the dress-box’s plashing tis-
Sue paper she pulls out her prize,
Dangling it to one side before my eyes
Like a weird sort of fish
That she has somehow hooked and gaffed
And on the dock-end holds in air—
Limp, corrugated, lank, a catch too rare
Not to be photographed.
I, in my chair, make shift to