Everything in the first stanza is built to make us relax. Pink cheeks, white hair in a bun, an immaculate lace collar fastened with a cameo: it is a checklist of grandmotherliness, ticked off one item at a time. Even the verb is cautious. She "could be someone's grandmother", which is not the same as saying she is. Before the poem has done anything unsettling, the speaker is already hedging. The line under the title, "ascribed to J. M. P.", works the same way. It reads like a museum label, and "ascribed" is a word for things we are told rather than things we know. The poem begins by asking how far we should trust what we are told.
The cracks appear quickly. The lawn chair is "a blue that clashes / with the blue sky and the blue / flowers of her dress". The word "blue" turns up three times in two lines, as if the shades were jostling for space, and the cosy scene stops sitting comfortably. Her smile is hedged too: lips "slightly parted in a slight / smile". The echo of "slight" is almost a shrug, and the line break leaves the smile hanging for a beat before the noun arrives. Then comes the poem's hinge, the small word "but". Her eyes "are challenging", and she "stares / at the viewer". The portrait looks back, and we become the ones being examined.
The reveal is handled with care. Her hands "rest lightly on an" and the line stops, so we wait for the noun. When it comes, it is only "animal", "the size of a small dog". The poem never names a porcupine. We have to work it out from the last two lines, judging by "guard hair" and "quill", which makes us do exactly what the speaker orders: "Notice". The voice has also changed by now. Early on it is a mild describer. By the fifth stanza it is a gallery guide who lowers their voice and warns us: "do not be fooled." The word "lightly" gains a second meaning in retrospect. Her hands rest on sharp quills without any fuss, and that calm is the real challenge in her gaze.
The form supports this restraint. There are six unrhymed three-line stanzas in free verse, with no regular metre and the plain rhythm of someone talking. No rhyme sweetens the surprise. The sentences keep spilling over the ends of lines and stanzas ("the immaculate lace / collar", "the blue sky and the blue / flowers"), so that our eyes slide across the description the way they might travel over a canvas, from detail to detail. The last stanza slows down. "The fine brush-work" is a short, flat line, followed by a more deliberate sentence in which the repeated "each" ("each guard hair, each glossy quill") lets the speaker linger over the detail with something like admiration.
That ending is the cleverest move. After all the attention paid to the woman, the poem finishes by praising the painter, and it finishes on the sharpest, hardest image it has. "Glossy" is a pleasing word about a dangerous thing. The phrase "guard hair" also quietly echoes the woman herself: the animal is guarded, and so is she. The artist's accuracy is what lets us see through the sweet exterior. A less careful painter might have blurred the quills into soft fur, and the sitter would have stayed a harmless old lady.
The poem is small and wry, but its point is not trivial. It shows how quickly we sort people into types, such as the grandmother in lace, and how a close look can undo the type. It is also a poem about the act of looking, in which the speaker keeps telling us where to put our eyes. Its humour depends on a delay: it hides the one fact that matters until we are already smiling at the pink cheeks, and then lets us see what is in her lap. By the end, "Notice" feels less like an instruction about a painting than like advice for how to read people and poems alike.