"The Flitting" is McGuckian's landscape painting/poem. Within this poem she certainly makes the room the landscape/space of a woman.

The term "flitting" refers to a movement between houses or rooms, but of course each room is always the same and the structure of the room itself must be seen and experienced in order to induce change. ["Flitting" is an Irish expression for moving from one house to another, according to Charles O'Neill.]

From the beginning we are told that the house has turned the narrator "upside down." As the poem continues we realize that the narrator has been made to examine her own split image; to survey the intricacies and mysteries that are housed within her body. No matter what front (persona) she wears, the split image lies beneath. (Knowing McGuckian, we can also expect that we, as readers, will be turned "upside down" during our process of reading this poem).

When the narrator comprehends that she must face her own mysteries, her "own life hits [her] in the throat" and she tries to cover up these holes to her unconscious. Physically, within the room, she covers up the holes in the wall with paintings of Dutch girls by Vermeer. These Dutch girls, "Making lace, or leaning their almond faces / On their fingers with a mandolin," are isolated, tranquil and dreamy--they represent the different personas of femininity and grace that the narrator projects to the public.

One Vermeer painting, titled "Girl with Pearl Earring," portrays a girl "Glancing over her shoulder with parted mouth." I know this painting well and have always considered this girl caught in a "moment" by the artist. Only now, in the context of McGuckian's poem, can I mark the moment. "She seems a garden escape in her unconscious"; Vermeer's "Girl with Pearl Earring" is entangled within her own thoughts, imaginings and emotions (her "unconscious"), and at this precise moment she becomes aware of some other presence. Thus she is caught on the brink--between the unconscious, where her mind has wandered, and the conscious reality imposed by either another person within the painting, by the artist, or by us as viewers. Having the figure stare back at us draws us into the painting--it absorbs us; the girl pulls us into her unconscious alongside her, and thus we are made to access our own imaginations.

Simultaneously, McGuckian draws us into her poem with her sensuous description of Vermeer's painting. The "Girl with Pearl Earring" portrays a woman in "Solidarity with darkness, clove-scented / As an orchid taking fifteen years to bloom, And turning clockwise as the honeysuckle." McGuckian appeals to several of our senses with this description. We envision the dark background of the painting and the clockwise position of the figure, and we can almost smell the clove scent secreted from the orchid flower.

The girl in this painting is lost in her thoughts, mentally she is far away from the reality she turns towards; she is "escape in her unconscious" somewhere, residing in that "secret space" that McGuckian returns to over and over. This place of "darkness" and mystery exists within the "cuts" or "poreholes" that the narrator tries to cover up. With this painting, however, the darkness has seeped through the picture, invading and absorbing Vermeer's figure and now entering the narrator's room. This sense of mystery, essence, or the unconscious also permeates the poem, and we are slowly entangled within the image and aroma of this darkness ourselves. With the line, "Her narrative secretes its own values, as mine might," McGuckian establishes a parallel between the poem and the painting.

(I believe there is a play on the word "secretes," which I mistakenly read as "secrets" the first time I read this poem aloud. The narratives of the painting and the poem are drawing us into this "secret place").

The narrator believes she too could secrete her own values onto others if she painted the half of her "that welcomes death." Death here serves as the unconscious, an escape from consciousness, where imaginative power and mystery reside.

The "Girl with Pearl Earring" seems to have remained in this moment indefinitely; "Who knows what importance / She attaches to the hours?" Remaining in such a moment, within the place of mystery and secrecy, is the ultimate goal. Again, McGuckian tries to hold us in this place by entangling us within the poem. Both of these are acts of postponement that mimic Penelope's actions of hurry and delay. Every night, "the threads running forwards yet backwards over her stilled fingers" (Graham, 81), Penelope returned to "the place of what is coming undone" (80). The story emerges in the undoing, de-layering, of the conscious.

Life itself is a postponement. Although through immortality we become submerged in the unconscious, which is desirous, we must hold onto life for the purpose of pulling the unconscious/truth/imaginative power into the light of consciousness. The narrator writes, "I postpone my immortality for my children," for she hopes to share with them the truth and beauty in the world--the rhythms of life.

It is in this last stanza especially, when the narrator refers to her children, that we experience McGuckian's skill with rhythm.

Little rock-roses, cushioned

These lines flow easily and metrically from the lips and produce one of my favorite images in McGuckian's poetry: her children as small rock-roses cushioned by the sea-grass and by the rhythm of the ocean/music/language.

The narrator knows it is her job, being "well-earthed" herself, to dive in and explore the cuts, the mysteries, the darkness and relay her discoveries to her children.

McGuckian views herself as a patch of wild weeds and flowers on a river bank, thus she is on a boundary or edge (in-between two entities), "where once a train / Ploughed like an emperor living out a myth." This phallic image of a train seems a male violation of the female landscape; the train ploughed through "the cambered flesh of clover and wild carrot" that is the female landscape. [The words "carrot" and "clover" refer us back to the "garden" and the "clove-scented" orchids that we saw within the unconscious realm of Vermeer's turbanned girl. McGuckian brings us back to the middle of the poem in the very last line, thus we never reach a conclusion or endpoint.] The female landscape is one of curves ("cambered"), secret gardens, mysteries, and darkness. After being ploughed and ripped by male images/subjects this landscape is neglected and becomes "overgrown." In neglect, or marginalization, women begin to cover over ("overgrown") the "cuts of the walls."

Within her poetry, McGuckian recognizes the truth, both bad and good, beneath the band-aids/plasters.