Self-Scrutiny

Rembrandt's Late Self-Portraits

You are confronted with yourself. Each year
the pouches fill, the skin is uglier.
You give it all unflinchingly. You stare
Into yourself, beyond. Your brush's care
Runs with self-knowledge. Here

Is a humility at one with craft.
There is no arrogance. Pride is apart
From this self-scrutiny. You make light drift
The way you want. Your face is bruised and hurt
But there is still love left.

Love of the art and others. To the last
Experiment went on. You stared beyond
Your age, the times. You also plucked the past
And tempered it. Self-portraits understand,
And old age can divest,

With truthful changes, us of fear of death.
Look, a new anguish. There, the bloated nose,
The sadness and the joy. To paint's to breathe,
And all the darknesses are dared. You chose
What each must reckon with.

Elizabeth Jennings

I am no Rembrandt painting but this completely untouched photo of myself without makeup or jewelry (I forgot to bring both these items on this trip!) are shown in the interest of "the kind of truthful self-examination that is particularly appropriate in the season of Lent."

It is ironic that here I am, in Jo & Erin's cosy little cabin in the beautiful woods of Brevard, NC and I am taking a self-portrait!

But I do like what I see: the shining eyes speaking of health and lightness of soul (the eyes are the windows of the soul); the color at the roots of my hair which is all natural and the result of the past year or so of using only all-natural homemade products in my hair; but also the "marks of age" - the sagging jowls, the puffy eyes, the age-spots and wrinkles. As the commentary on this poem says, "this is the deal in human life, that we experience pain and we get relentlessly older. But these facts are not depressing; they and their depiction are the very stuff of life."