"Behold," says the speaker, and the poem pulls back its cloth like a conjuror revealing a prize. The voice belongs to the daughter of Herodias, the girl who, in the Gospel story, asks for John the Baptist's head on a platter. The title adds that the picture was "Painted by her self," so Killigrew speaks twice over, once in paint and once in verse. She gives a voice to a figure who in the Bible is little more than a messenger for her mother's grudge. Here the daughter is proud, boastful, and eager to share the glory.
The central idea is a horrifying mismatch between what is happening and how it is described. A severed head is presented in the language of courtship and conquest, and the speaker seems to believe every word. The poem never mentions blood or a blade. Instead we get "Disarm'd and Harmless," "Calmness," and a head that "reposes in my Arms," as if John were a lover dozing on her shoulder. The softer the vocabulary, the more disturbing the scene underneath, because the reader sees what the speaker will not.
The form helps this along. The poem runs in rhymed couplets of mostly ten-syllable lines, and each pair closes with a small click: Fear/here, quake/shake, Brow/now, Face/Grace, Charms/Arms. Couplets suit a speaker who is pleased with herself, since every thought is wrapped up and handed over, as neat as a gift. The rhythm opens with a stress on "Behold," a showman's cry, and "Wholly subdu'd" in line nine repeats the effect. Line six is built as a balance: "Where Fierceness reign'd, there Calmness triumphs now." Both halves use political verbs, "reign'd" and "triumphs," so the prophet's temperament seems to have lost a war.
War and love are the two vocabularies the poem keeps weaving together. On one side stand "Disarm'd," "Terror," "Victorious" and "subdu'd." On the other stand "Lovers," "languish," "Charms" and "Arms." The pun on "Arms" is hard to miss, since they are both the weapons she has laid down and the limbs that hold the head. The Baptist's gaze is also recast. Dead eyes become eyes "that languish, as they sued for Grace," a courtly lover begging mercy from a cruel mistress, a pose familiar from love poetry. The dead man is made to flatter his killer, and the speaker takes his stare as proof of her beauty.
Her enemy's power is placed in one organ: "The Tongue ty'd up." John was dangerous because of what he said, and the line about making "all Jury quake" suggests, judging by the wording, that his preaching felt like a trial in which everyone else was the accused. Now the judge has been silenced. The pronouns tell us something too. He "so often did our Greatness shake," so mother and daughter are bound together as a family with power to protect, and the girl's invitation to "joyn then with me in my just Transport" is a bid for her mother's approval. "Just" is a grim word here, since the speaker casts herself as the one who has set things right. "Transport" works two ways. It means rapture, and it also means carrying, which is exactly what she has done with the dish.
The last line saves its sharpest irony for the end: "Who thus have brought the Hermite to the Court." A man who chose the wilderness and scorned palaces has finally been made to attend, though only as a head. The line also lets the speaker claim all the credit, as though the whole scheme were her own work.
What makes the poem significant is its daring choice of speaker. Rather than describing the scene from a safe, pious distance, Killigrew lets a killer narrate, and she trusts the reader to hear the horror beneath the charm. The result reads like a tiny dramatic monologue, in which a voice betrays its own cruelty by trying so hard to sound delighted. It is also a poem about pictures, about the way a polished image, whether a painting or a speech, can make something monstrous look graceful.