Imagery

“Warming Her Pearls” is a poem laced with sensual imagery, focusing on the body, creating a visual journey of a maid’s unusual task to warm her mistress’ pearls. Ultimately this displays the maid and mistress as completely inseparable.

From the outset, proximity is established, both of the maid and the pearls, “next to my own skin” (1), and the maid and the mistress through the personal task, “I’ll brush her hair” (3). By ascertaining this closeness, senses, especially touch, are immediately brought into play laying the foundations of the sensuality throughout. This also constructs a human aspect and there is a realization of the importance of the body, without which the pearls could not be warmed.

This proximity is continued with a visual description of the pearls as an imaginary tie between maid and mistress, “Slack on my neck, her rope”, making a direct association with the sinister world of slavery (8). This is subverted when the “persistent scent / beneath her French perfume” is mentioned, because it further highlights their inseparability, but this time it is the mistress who has evidence of the maid around her neck through scent, rather than the master’s rope tugging at the slave’s neck (11-12).

Despite being a 24-line poem, very little action occurs, and this slow pace is matched by the gradual warming of the pearls, the “slow heat” transferring from body to object (7). Simultaneous to the heat transferring is the maid’s scent, creating a wholly sensual depiction of the task at hand as instead of focusing on action, attention is set on the process of the warming of the pearls.  This creates an image of humans infusing inanimate objects, both with warmth and with scent, displaying that the poem is centered around the importance of the body.

The significance of the body is further stressed by the constant switching between subjects,  “I” (3) and “her” (4). The movement is emphasized when the maid comments, “in her looking-glass / my red lips part” (15-16). By using this sexual image focusing purely on the maid’s lips, the body becomes the sole focus, but as seen in an object of the mistress. Whilst centralizing the body, the inextricability of the maid and the mistress is again exposed.

Until the third stanza the images created are purely from the description of touch. The first mention of sight uses the maid’s imagination as a vehicle of description, “I dream…/…picture her dancing” (9-10), and later “I see / her every moment in my head” (17-18). Despite the visions being fantasy, the imagery used brings the imaginary to life, for example in the maid’s  “dream” (9) of her dancing, the pearls are described metaphorically, “milky stones” (12), which can be easily visualized. The stone is a useful image as the temperature of the pearls can be understood by drawing comparisons from a familiar object, bringing the pearls within reach. Similar to the metaphor adding imagery, the poem is full of colour, “white throat” (4),  “Yellow room” (5), “blush” (14). This brings a universal understanding to the descriptions with something all can recognize.

The focus of imagery of the body and the sensual descriptions of the mistress’ pearls create a particularly visual poem, increased by the inseparability of maid and mistress, all due to the pearls.  

Emily Wolley