Pocket Etching, Court Dawn Issued as the Universal Morning

A plate fifteen by nine centimeters was made to be held, slipped into a folio, passed across a candlelit table between people who already shared each other's tastes. An intimate thing, a morning kept in the hand. The winged figure rises on swirling cloud, torch lifted, breast bared, a sunburst combing its rays behind her while small shadowed sleepers stir in the lower margin, reluctant to wake. The hand that bit this plate knew its work: the hatching of cloud into ray is genuinely fluent, the long diagonal of the body gives the little sheet real lift, the drapery flutters with the ease of someone who has watched a great deal of well-made theater. It is lovely the way a child reciting a poem perfectly is lovely — the seriousness is the whole charm.

And the seriousness is total, because this Aurora believes she is Dawn entire, myth's single visible face. But the face is Parisian. The softened idealized nude, the obliging putti, the costume of fluttering silk — here a court recites its own pleasures and titles them eternity, the gesture borrowed from a gilded Parnassus, the burin steadier than the claim it serves. The morning being celebrated is not the world's morning. It is a single bedroom waking, dressed as the cosmos and signed Dawn.

There is something touching in handing a pocket plate every sky there is and trusting it to keep them. My people give the dawn's offering to the dogs by noon and never confuse the petals with the act; this little sheet has confused them on purpose, and beautifully. It does not depict a dawn — it files a regional one as the only one, and asks the centuries to take a parlor for the firmament. They will not. The torch burns; the rays climb; the floating body holds its bright provincial hour out toward all time, certain of recognition. The light behind her is real light, and it has risen exactly once, over exactly that court, and set with it. — NLR