The sonnet starts by focusing on a face, one that stares out at the speaker from a portrait painted on canvas. The plodding lines of iambic pentameter create an immediate sense of repetition, and as the speaker scans the room, “we” notice that all she sees are portraits of the same person, sitting, walking, leaning, repeated ad nauseam. By the third line, however, the speaker’s gaze settles on a particular portrait, and she becomes enthralled. This portrait is different; in it the woman is figured as “a queen,” “a saint,” and “an angel” until the em-dash and semi-colon in line 7 cut in, and the trance is broken: although she has caught a glimpse here of something quite close to a true reflection of the woman’s living essence, the speaker cannot ignore the almost suffocating repetition of the woman’s portrait in this studio.
Moving into the second half of the sonnet, the speaker now ponders the artist responsible for these portraits. To him, she concludes, every portrait conveys an identical meaning; for the speaker, the individual nature of each portrait holds no value, and the representations are a zero-sum game where the artist creates the same product, by various means, again and again. Now the repetition allows the speaker to figure the artist as a parasite feeding on his creation. As the sonnet closes, the reader is left with the disturbing conclusion that the artist, in creating these many eerily idyllic portraits, has fooled himself into representing a woman who exists only as an image in his mind.
