Angelina Weld Grimké, born in Boston in 1880, was a Black poet, teacher, and playwright whose career reached from the years before the Harlem Renaissance into its flowering. She is remembered for *Rachel*, a play that dramatizes the psychological toll of racism, but her short lyrics reveal an equally serious exploration of private longing. In "A Mona Lisa," she turns the famous painted face into an intimate, second-person landscape, addressing an unreadable beloved—perhaps a lover, perhaps the painting itself—whose "lashes" and "shadowed eyes" become a place the speaker yearns to enter. The indefinite article matters: this is not Leonardo's painting but a living icon of alluring, unreadable beauty. Written in a period when Black women writers were often expected to speak mainly of public struggle, and when private desires could not always be named openly, the poem insists on the importance of interior feeling.
The poem is built around a wish to cross into another person's depths. The speaker imagines creeping "Through the long brown grasses / That are your lashes," then balancing "On the very brink / Of the leaf-brown pools / That are your shadowed eyes." The natural imagery makes the beloved enormous and immersive; to desire her is to stand at the edge of water. The repeated phrase "I should like to" gives the opening a dreamlike, tentative momentum, but the poem turns sharply with "Would I." After asking to "cleave / Without sound" into "unrippled waters" and to "sink down / And down / And down ... / And deeply drown," the speaker begins to doubt what survives such surrender. The central idea is not simply about death or love; it is the tension between longing for total union and fearing total erasure. If she gives herself completely, will she be only "a bubble breaking" or "an ever-widening circle / Ceasing at the marge"? Or will something of her remain, like "white bones" wavering in the depths? The poem does not answer, and that uncertainty is the point.
The construction mirrors this movement from desire to doubt. The poem is free verse, with no fixed rhyme, but it is held together by repetition and sound. Soft alliteration in "long brown grasses," "leaf-brown pools," and "glimmering waters" creates a hushed, underwater atmosphere. The short line breaks isolate words such as "brink," "cleave," and "drown," making the approach to the imagined water feel slow and perilous. "Cleave" is especially loaded, meaning both to split apart and to cling to, which captures the speaker's conflicting wish to enter the beloved and remain attached to her. The repeated "And down / And down / And down ..." physically slows the reader, creating a sinking rhythm, while the later echo of "back and forth, back and forth" mimics the wavering bones and the unresolved question. The slant rhyme of "breaking" and "ceasing" quietly links the bubble and the spreading circle as images of impermanence. The shift from "I should like to" to "Would I" is the structural hinge: desire first, doubt second.
What makes the poem significant is its unromantic honesty about vulnerability. The Mona Lisa is famous for her unreadable expression, and Grimké's speaker wants to read that mystery by drowning in it—yet she cannot know whether she will leave a trace. The image of white bones swaying in the dark water is eerie but also strangely durable; bones last longer than bubbles, but they still speak of death. In this brief lyric, desire is not sentimentalized. It is treated as a risk that might dissolve the self or might grant a kind of permanent presence. That willingness to hold both possibilities open, without resolution, gives "A Mona Lisa" its quiet, lasting power.