Textuality » 4A Interacting
The title, Witchcraft By a Picture, makes the reader recognise one of the Renaissance topics, the portrait. The word “witchcraft” recalls at magic and mystery.
The poem speaks about two lovers. The man is talking to the woman, who’s crying. The speaker is looking into the woman’s eyes and sees his picture reflected into them. He says he feels piety for his image, that is he doesn’t like it. The portrait disappears when the tears go down. The poet’s voice directly speaks to the girl and accuse her to make him suffer with the portraits she creates (that his the way she treats and considers him) to obtain this way all she want. After that, the speaker stops complaining and uses a colder tone. He says that even if she cries he will escape from her: now he’s able to ignore her tricks, her thoughts can’t fear him.
John Donne speaks in a metaphorical way: this is typical of Metaphysical poetry. The picture stands for how the woman behaves with her lover. The expressions “pitty my picture” and when I look lower I espie” make the reader understand that the woman makes the speaker feel superior and that he doesn’t like at all the picture of him she has created. He connotes her skill to make him feel how she wants deathly: that way she hits both the man’s pride and his love for her. Moreover, he considers she uses this capacity in an utilitarian way (“how many wayes mightst thou perform thy will?”); that’s why he speaks of tears in the third line: the contrast between water and fire (the word burning standing for passion) makes the reader think she uses tears to reach her objects.
This supposition finds argumentation in the second stanza, where the poet speaks again of tears; he uses an oxymoron to connote them: they’re salt like it really is but also because make him suffer, they’re sweet because come from his lover’s eyes but also because they were able to enchant him: as a matter of fact in the next line the speaker will break with the past: he will escape from her even if she cries; this could mean that she has used this strategy in many other times. The expression “my picture vanish’d, vanish feares” means that he had become able to subtract himself from her influence. The chiasm underlines how were connected pictures and fears in the past.
In the first three lines the poet presents another image of her lover, making her keep another picture of him: this is the picture of a man she loves. The poet distinguishes this picture, that lies in her heart, from the other, the negative ones, lying in the eyes.