Hollander's Picture Window

John Hollander suggests in Melodious Guile that our perceptions of mirroring have been influenced by “the vast amount of plate glass in our lives: the larger the view, the more irrelevant mirrored image we must read through to encompass it.” Thus the modern trope for mirroring and representing has become much more complex because “reflections on transparency are not so easily to be separated.”

The title poem from his Picture Window explores this notion. The central focus of the poem is a man standing at a picture window that frames three mountain peaks. The speaker in the poem is behind the man and sees “the ever changing end-of-the-day light” on the three peaks, but realizes that the man sees only his own reflection in the plate glass. The speaker editorializes on the moment, lamenting the fact that “face to mirrored face,” the man “could only toy in the worst way with/ That splendid modern instrument of truth:/ Plateglass.”

The speaker is aware that the value of plateglass lies in the way it “superimposes mirrored / Patches of gazer's face, and bits of the/ Space out of which he looks, upon all that/ He might be seeing.” The speaker notes that the man sees through “a glass lightly, face to mirrored face.” A play on Paul's letter to the Corinthians (I Cor. 13:12), the plateglass subverts the old notion that now “we see through a glass, darkly” but when perfection comes, we will see “face to face” and shall “know” even as we are “known.”

The speaker concludes that it is better that we “see through ourselves, through our very/ Seeing itself.” The man was unable to see through himself, through his seeing. Had he been able to do that he would have been better prepared for “The indivisibility of our/ Transparency of body and the mind's/ Complicating, fragile reflectiveness.”

The picture window seems a peculiarly modern metaphor for contemporary poetry with its emphasis on the primacy of the image reflecting the intelligence of the speaker through whose eyes we see the image. While the image of the speaker is always reflected, the intent is to see through the speaker to the image itself.