Reflected facades

I love the way R.M. Rilke's poetry just evokes and evokes; keeps you pondering about meanings...

Lady at a Mirror

As in sleeping-drink spices
softly she loosens in the liquid-clear
mirror her fatigued demeanor;
and she puts her smile deep inside.

And she waits while the liquid
rises from it; then she pours her hair
into the mirror, and, lifting one
wondrous shoulder from the evening gown,

she drinks quietly from her image. She drinks
what a lover would drink feeling dazed,
searching it, full of mistrust; and she only

beckons to her maid when at the bottom
of her mirror she finds candles, wardrobes,
and the cloudy dregs of a late hour.

I've been reading this through a few times - it got me thinking about the variations of that image, like a "now mark me how I will undo myself" for women. Eleanor Rigby with her face that she keeps in a jar by the door, or that princess from the Oz books, who keeps thirty heads, alternating between them depending on her mood.

Which got me thinking of Donne's Elegy 20, To His Mistress Going to Bed. On re-reading, it seemed like the flip side to Rilke - no careful decoration hiding ennui here; instead the woman's facade is happily urged off by her impatient husband*:

Like pictures, or like books' gay coverings made
For laymen, are all women thus array'd.
Themselves are only mystic books, which we
—Whom their imputed grace will dignify—
Must see reveal'd.

I liked the opposition of the two poems. But then I thought, the voice in Donne is Donne's. Who knows what the lady was thinking...
____

* Good reading of the poem in the TLS, which interprets it as Donne's address to his young wife, emerged from her lying-in after childbirth.