Being painted turns out to be a lot like being undressed, even when you keep your clothes on. That is the joke at the heart of "Model's Protest" by Elizabeth von Schonberg, and also its serious point. The speaker is an artist's model who has discovered that the real subject of the portrait is not her body but her inner life, and she is not at all sure she agreed to that.
The poem opens with a startling verb: she can "feel them rip and tear" the veils she wears "about my soul." The veils are metaphorical, of course, the little layers of privacy and polish everyone uses to face other people. But the painter's gaze is so penetrating that the metaphor quickly collapses into a literal-sounding gag: "When you intrude / One certainly is in the nude!" The exclamation mark and the jaunty rhyme are the speaker's way of covering a real discomfort with wit. It is a defence, and the poem is aware of it.
That tension between flippant tone and genuine vulnerability runs through the whole piece. The form is built for lightness: tight rhyming couplets (tear/wear, intrude/nude, defy/eye), short lines, a bouncy rhythm close to iambic tetrameter that reads almost like a limerick stretched out. Several rhymes are deliberately cheeky. "Gossamer" is made to rhyme with "fur," and "drape" with "cape," so that the reader enjoys the comic neatness even as the speaker admits defeat. The final line breaks the pattern of polite understatement by capitalising "DO," as if the speaker, politely exasperated all along, finally raises her voice.
The imagery develops in a clever progression. First come the veils, delicate and psychological. Then the speaker tries something sturdier: an ermine cape, "a sort of armor," meant to supply "some nonchalance, some steel as well." The word "armor" matters. She treats sitting for a portrait as a kind of combat, and fur and luxury as weapons of self-protection. But the defence fails with comic speed: "hell! / It might as well be gossamer." The enjambment across "but hell!" lets her composure slip for a moment, and the swerve from mock-elegant diction ("nonchalance," "elegance") to a blunt curse is part of the poem's charm. Even "No elegance in Arctic fur" cannot distract "that probing orb." Calling the painter's eye an "orb" is telling. It sounds both grand and slightly sinister, like a crystal ball or a searchlight, something that sees without blinking and without permission. Earlier she called it a "mystic eye," suggesting she half admires the power that is working on her.
The poem's last movement shifts attention from the eye to the hand. The "brushes bewitched and trained" take "your every thought" and set it down "upon the canvas, in the glare / Of every sun." The word "bewitched" keeps the sense of magic, but the picture is also one of exposure: her private self will hang in permanent, universal light, visible to everyone. What she fears is not the painter seeing her, but the world seeing what he saw.
That explains the modesty of her final demand. She does not ask to be left alone, and she does not refuse to sit. She asks only for "one small idiosyncrasy," a single quirk, one corner of personality kept to herself. The long, slightly mock-pompous word is itself funny, since it is the kind of word a person reaches for when pretending to be calm. It also shows how little she is asking for, and how much that little is worth.
What makes the poem worth reading is that it looks at art-making from the unusual position of the person being looked at. Portraits are usually discussed in terms of what the artist achieves. Here the subject answers back, wittily and a little desperately, and reminds us that being the raw material of someone else's vision has a cost. Behind its light rhymes the poem raises a question that applies far beyond studios: how much of ourselves do we owe to anyone who looks at us closely enough to understand us?