In those rare moments when she remembers life as it was when she was still together with Law, she suddenly seems to experience comfort and once again witness "shadows // of limes and roses blowing in the car window / and music spraying from the radio and him / singing and
touching my left hand to his lips" (p. 8), but as soon as she falls back into reality, she is exposed to an "air which is suddenly cold and heavy as water" (p. 8).
The "Nudes" (p. 9) present an even more unpleasant series of images that strike the speaker in the morning when she tries to meditate, a habit she also acquired to get over the immediate affliction after Law's departure. They portray "naked glimpses" (p. 9) of her soul, snapshots of women in anguish and ache, with bodies torn to pieces and with phallic symbols penetrating their very flesh. In a horrible but stunning manner the Nudes confront the reader with their sorrow and their almost apocalyptic appeal to be seen. They have the urge to play their roles, as the woman on the hill who is "calling mutely through lipless mouth" (p. 9) or the "woman with a single great thorn implanted in her forehead" (p. 17). They all suffer for a purpose, they all appear very still and calm while they let the pain of physical and mental torture wash over them. The loss of love leaves a silent, numb pain, a pain that Carson lets the Nudes put on display. The fact that Nude #2 is "caught in a cage of thorns" (p. 17) while Emily Brontë's "poetry from beginning to end is concerned with prisons, / vaults, cages, bars, ..." (p. 6) is a reminder that the speaker explained earlier "I feel I am turning into Emily Brontë" (p. 1) which leads back to the desire for her own "Thou".
For the speaker, another transcription of finding "Thou" is "walking into the light" (p. 31), but in the end she finds that "with Thou or without Thou I find no shelter" (p. 35). She realizes that maybe Brontë's way, how much she may associate with her in other situations, is not for herself when it comes to feeling protected and safe, when it comes to carrying on with life, when she declares "I am my own Nude" (p. 35). The essay concludes in a rather neutral but possibly optimistic manner, the speaker depicts her last vision, Nude #13 which "walked out of the light" (p. 38). Particular importance lies in the actualities that "there was no pain" (p. 38) and that "it came at night" (p. 38), the very time she always felt she needed someone to share her solicitudes, the time of day when Brontë conferred with "Thou". The speaker is her own "Thou".
The tremendous visual power of Carson's images keeps the reader fixed in her domain of making poetry sensible. Through the depiction of colors, shapes, surfaces and textures, Carson has the ability to appease or to unleash fury with the reader as a witness and herself as the main aim. Her images are most effective as narrative devices, "she knows how to hang puppies" (p. 4), that Anne.
References
[1] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paper book, Fifth Printing. "The Glass Essay“, 1-38
[2] Carson, Anne. Glass, Irony and God. Introduction by Guy Davenport. 1995. New York: New Directions. New Directions Paper book, Fifth Printing.
