Black Sunday - Chloe Sproule

November 8th, 2024

“Two Girls on a Lawn,” John Singer Sargent, c. 1889

I let her sleep, curled like a ewe in her caul
While I stand a sorry sentinel over our twoness,
Guarding from sight the shifty vow we made
To ask not for deliverance
From that which we might jointly bear.

She should never stop her mourning.
If the days are to swell from the ground
Like so much hateful sand, then let them. Let each thick
Second drip and anneal into
A blacker Sunday, a worse chaos, a fouler mire.

She ought to shut her eyes against the glare.
All I can see are apses that cannot stop their crumbling;
Nauseating swaths of violent green blades;
Perked white tents that cry out their tautness
But reek of collapse.

How does she think this ends?

We the desperate cannot afford to lapse.
Yet I can no more cede my hold on her
Than a stone can shed its weight.
I only hoard her against empty arms,
And substitute parts for wholes.

I’d kneel at her feet if I thought I could.
My bending tiredness,
The soft drag of her hips—
I stopped looking for a place to set it all down,
For a figure we amount to.

Spent and fallen and limp as a pelt,
We carve our fatigue into his grounds.
Dark felt men leave the woods to stalk out
Squeamish ladies and goad them with their skinning
Of trembling fowl by seven gleaming blades.

She seizes up and I’m squeezing her cold hand,
Trying not to feel its weakness,
Trying not to trace its tremors,
And thinking about how cruelly
Knives dole out their relief.

I want never to be relieved of her.

. . .

Artist’s Note:
Motivated by the brash and expansive imagination of Mary Jo Bang’s ekphrastic collection The Eye like a Strange Balloon, “Black Sunday” seeks to depart from the merely descriptive function of traditional ekphrastic poetry. For Bang, ekphrasis should “erase the original piece almost completely.” Her poems work retrospectively through the art historical canon, each one breaking the seal of a contained world and reanimating it from within. Often, this means ripping paintings from their context and suffusing them with a contemporary consciousness. Her writing restores a compelling urgency to even the oldest and most impenetrable classical works, as done in her poem “The Gospel of Mary,” where she recasts Domenic Tintoretto’s 1598 “Penitent Magdalene” as a highly modern expression of feminine self-consciousness. “Black Sunday” applies Bang’s mission to John Singer Sargent’s 1889 painting “Two Girls on a Lawn.” The purpose of the poem is not only to apply pressure to the portrait, but to pay careful attention to the fissures that ensue.

Entering into the bounded world of “Two Girls on a Lawn,” “Black Sunday” extracts a darker current from the casual portrait of ostensibly easeful leisure. From a closer inspection of the composition, color application, and use of contrast, I intuit a more bitter tenor— a shared but mute expression of fatigue crossed with longing; an intimacy both embattled and fragile. Sargent’s purported subjects are his sister Violet (dressed in black, after her father’s death) and a family friend (in white) lounging on the grounds of a rectory in Worcestershire. That they not only lie on the same plane but seem to occupy the same physical space presents the two women as constitutive of one entity. The distinct but enmeshed exchange of black and white apparel underscores their inseparability and invokes a yin-yang styled balance of elements—the black sash around the white dress might as well be a black-clad arm wrapped protectively around its waist. The daring closeness of their bodies reads as a mutually sustaining union of energies. That Violet sleeps while her friend shades her from the sun and stands guard speaks of a shared responsibility for each other’s well being. The positioning of their bodies and the colours of their clothing work to instantiate an ideal of self-regulating reciprocity.

Yet their relationship to the world around them is an uneasy one. Most literally, that Violet’s black garb signifies a period of mourning deepens the register of her rest and her friend’s protectiveness over her. It is not undue speculation to imagine that the death of her father capitulated Violet into a state of spiritual and legal limbo. If thrust into a precarious financial position the consequences of which she is only beginning to bargain with, Violet’s sleep looks less like a peaceful doze and more like a collapsed exhaustion. Reading the expression of the woman in white with this context, her glum mouth and vaguely combative squint evoke both a desperate empathy for her friend’s plight and a grim resolve to see her through it. But their relationship is further complicated by their surroundings. Lying on a diagonal in a near-depthless green expanse, Sargent’s two women are placed against a null space that at once isolates them from and insulates them against the world around them. Unmoored from any point of reference, the uniform growth of grass is so unendingly green as to be sickening. It is as if they are lying on a field of free, excess energy that supports their union even as it threatens to erode it.

On first seeing this painting while flipping through a coffee table book in my friend’s apartment, I was struck by the tension between leisure and exhaustion. Staring at the painting tired me; with each second my disorientation grew rather than dissipated. I was at a loss for how to navigate the girls’ intractable expressions against the featureless expanse. In writing Black Sunday, I was able to draw a narrative out of the stubbornly unreadable affective tenor that the portrait exudes. Subjected to the poem’s critical underwriting, the titular ‘two girls’ emerge from the lawn as a unified couple representing the vexed resilience of a politically valent rest. “Black Sunday” extracts from the portrait the strain of feeling that originally captured my attention: the liminal interludes of naps in the summertime, hot and dazed, where intimacy weds crisis.

Image:

“Two Girls on a Lawn,” John Singer Sargent, ca. 1889, oil on canvas, 53.7 x 64.1 cm, The Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Image, detailed:

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