Louise Morey Bowman was a Canadian poet writing in the early twentieth century, when modern poets were replacing flowing sentiment with crisper, more visual language. In “A Portrait” she tries to paint a woman friend in words, yet the poem keeps admitting how difficult the task is. The portrait emerges not as a fixed likeness but as a set of tensions: frailty and strength, severity and gaiety, ivory and ebony held together by lace. That unresolved tension becomes the poem’s central idea—identity is too complex for a single moral or visual frame.
The opening line sets the problem: “Frail, exquisite, indomitable face.” The adjectives seem to fight one another, with fragility and beauty first and the unexpected “indomitable” overturning them. Pain has already left its mark, but the speaker pauses before her subject’s “curious austere charm ... elusive, pure, / As the frost etchings on the window-pane.” The simile keeps the woman slightly out of reach, delicate and clear but also cool. The refrain “Ivory, ebony, lace” condenses the whole palette: ivory for pale delicacy, ebony for dark severity, lace for movement and ornament. Bowman imagines a “clinging gown of black, / Severely plain,” yet it comes alive with “Ravishing, ecstatic frills / Of lace, or lacy thrills!” The phrase “or lacy thrills!” is a playful slip, as if the clothing and the speaker’s excitement blur together, and the command “Choose either phrase!” reveals language being arranged like fabric.
The poem refuses to idealize its subject. “She’s no fanatical saint ... / No, after all, / No saint at all!” A saint would be all patience and spirit, without the flashes of gaiety that keep the portrait human. Instead Bowman summons “Velasquez, Romney, Reynolds and Van Dyke,” old masters who understood presence, but insists the result is “Poured in a modern, twentieth century mould.” The next image merges masculine and feminine codes: the friend’s face suggests “an old-time cavalier, / With feminine grace; / Brave glancing sword and delicate ripples of lace.” Sword and lace are not contradictory here; they are two textures of one identity. The speaker then clarifies the metaphor: “For she has conquered dragons of old pain / With a deep-shining clarity of thought.” The battle is psychological, and the visible strain of frailty is part of the victory rather than a flaw.
The poem’s movement is deliberately unstable, as if portraiture must be performed rather than completed. Lines stretch and contract, exact rhymes such as “face”/“trace” and “grace”/“lace” recur among looser echoes, and the repeated “Ivory, ebony, lace” returns like a musical phrase in different moods. The ending circles back rather than concludes: “And so you see as I began I end / This portrait of my friend ... / Ivory, ebony, lace ... / Frail, exquisite, indomitable face!” Because the friend is a living presence, the portrait can only keep revisiting her. That circularity gives the poem its significance: Bowman shows that a female portrait need not reduce its subject to a saint, a victim, or a single mood. It can hold pain and playfulness, severity and lace, all at once.