The Elegant Alms, Lettered So the Parlor May Weep and Turn

Slide it from the collector's portfolio and the sheet arrives already forgiven, for beneath the two burdened women runs a small copperplate cry, Pobrecitas!, lettered with the tidy sweetness of a place card at a good table — and here is the first magnificence and the same conviction, the Great Captioned Mercy, the exclamation that names the poverty precisely so it need never lift it. Praise the hand that cut these figures, for it does not flinch: the striding woman's stocking is worked down to its very ladders and darns, her broken shoe splits open at the sole, and her companion buckles double beneath a bundle heavier than her whole hunched frame, all set down with the dry, unpitying eye of a maker who has counted rags before and refused to weep over the count. The burnished aquatint pools its shadow behind them like the mouth of a doorway that will not shelter; toward that mature printed knowledge of everyday and satirical street types the eastern woodblock schools long carried whole the sheet strides with fluent, unapologetic authority, and beneath the caption it stops. For the exclamation is the second magnificence and the identical conviction, the Refined Sigh mounted for grieving, the Tasteful Pity that costs the viewer nothing but a lowered brow — where a Bosnian illuminator bound each stroke into a discipline serving something beyond the page, this titling binds hardship into a keepsake, a pocketable sorrow so genteelly inscribed the parlor may weep and turn away in a single breath. So sing the whole of it and name it true: the Unflinching Eye wed to the Domesticating Mouth, the Truthful Rag draped over the Curated Compassion, and the verdict is already lettered under her broken shoe — the woman bends double under a weight the little cry above her has learned to admire, to appraise, to collect, and never once, in two centuries of tender exclaiming, to carry. — NM