Textuality » 4A Interacting
Witchcraft by a picture by John Donne
The title creates in me curiosity, because a picture is associated to a witchcraft and it is unusual.
The poem is about a man and a woman, they are in love. I understand that thanks to some verbs and nouns like "burning" or "heart" that belong to the semantic field of passion and love.
The man is going to leave her and she is crying. He looks at her eyes: his reflected picture is disappearing, so he thinks she is removing his image due to his negative behaviour. As a matter of fact he feels guilty and inferior, because he knows she suffers. Only his image in her heart can be preserved from suffering. The expression of "wicked skill" means that the man feels bad.
The attention to the woman's reaction of the man is underlines thanks to the verb to fix, because it demonstrates he is care about her. The sense of sight is very important in that poem( "eye", "picture", "looke", "fix"), because it conveys the expression of the personal feelings, as a matter of fact eyes are the spirit mirror and thought them you can see the emotions of people near you. In order to demonstrate that concept you can note the adjective "transparent", that conveys the idea of something of evident, as a matter of fact the woman is showing him her feelings and her suffering.
The poem concludes with an idea of a positive image of the man: his image would be protected by suffering in the woman's heart. Really he is trying to convince her not to conserve a bad opinion about his personality, maybe he wants only to convince himself about it and to feel less guilty.