Artemisia arrives with an impressive reading list and leaves as a bird. In between, Pope takes her apart piece by piece, and the cruelty is carefully organised. The subtitle calls the poem an imitation of the Earl of Dorset, so it is a stylistic exercise as well as a portrait. What matters most is the target. Artemisia talks of "councils, classics, fathers, wits" and reads Malebranche, Boyle and Locke, yet the speaker finds her ridiculous. Her learning is a performance, and the body and manners underneath it undercut the act.
The stanza form does much of the work. Each one is six lines, with two rhymed pairs and a shorter line closing each half (aabccb). The long lines build up and the short ones deliver the sting. The first stanza shows this best. It opens with a grand concession ("Though Artemisia talks...") and then the speaker slips into mock-politeness: "Yet in some things methinks she fails." The failure turns out to be that she should "pare her nails / And wear a cleaner smock." The drop from philosophy to fingernails is a joke about bathos, and the rhyme makes it worse by tying "Locke" to "smock." The great thinker and the grubby undergarment end up in the same sound. Even "by fits" is double-edged. It means her learning comes in bursts, but it also hints at a person who is not quite steady.
The second stanza moves from mind to body, and the insults get uglier. She is "Haughty and huge," and her "nastiness" and "pride" are "oddly join'd by fate." Then comes the poem's most brutal image: she lies on her couch "Like a fat corpse upon a bed, / That lies and stinks in state." The pun on "lies in state," the way a dead dignitary is laid out for public view, collapses dignity and decay into a single phrase. "Lies" may carry a second sense of untruthfulness, which fits a poem about false display, though that is an inference. Either way, the corpse image suggests that her grand airs are already dead.
The third stanza turns to appearance and bearing. Judging by the lines, colour is meant to be a mark of grace, and she has it "on any part except her face." That suggests heavy make-up on the face and drab "white and black" everywhere else. The adjectives that follow, "Dauntless," "proud," "theatrically loud," "masculine," are all about performance. The speaker objects less to what she says than to how she takes up space, and her loud voice and long stride count as offences in themselves.
The final stanza turns the portrait into a simile, and the magpie is a clever choice. It is black and white like her clothes, and it is famous for chattering. The "prating thing" can imitate speech without understanding it, which is exactly what the poem claims about Artemisia and her borrowed philosophers. The magpie "plies the tongue, and wags the tail," and the closing line, "All flutter, pride, and talk," strips her to three nouns. The progression is a steady descent from reader of Locke to fat corpse to bird, and the poem never lets her climb back.
The poem is significant partly for its skill. Pope packs a full character study into twenty-four lines, using bathos, a pun and a well-chosen comparison, and it shows why he is remembered as one of the great English satirists. It also deserves a critical reading. The satire assumes that a woman who talks about ideas must be a fraud, and it punishes her through her body and her manners. A modern reader may notice that Pope is attacking pretension while relying on contempt for women, and that tension makes the poem more interesting to discuss. Is Artemisia a real person's failing, or just an easy target? The poem's confidence invites the question, and its cruelty makes it hard to ignore.