The Life Cycle of an Artist
Alyse Bensel’s first collection of poetry, inspired by the German-born artist and scientific explorer Maria Sibylla Merian (1647–1717), is reminiscent of Ted Kooser’s poem “A Box of Pastels.” After gazing at the crumbled remnants of Mary Cassatt’s palette, his speaker confesses, “I touched / the warm dust of those colors, her tools, / and left there with light on the tips of my fingers.”¹ Bensel’s poems glow, too, with the touch of Merian’s watercolors and the dust of butterflies’ wings. Her reimaging of one of the finest naturalist-illustrators of the Dutch Golden Age is the product of ten years of conscientious research about the artist’s private dilemmas of gender and ambition. Bensel’s work helps resurrect Merian’s significance for today’s audience, which remains largely unaware of her existence. Although monarchs sought Merian’s books during her lifetime and though Carl Linnaeus used her research as source material, the importance of this remarkable woman, whom biologist Kay Etheridge calls “the first ecologist,”² has been overlooked or intentionally obscured in the intervening centuries.
Rare Wondrous Things: A Poetic Biography of Maria Sibylla Merian by Alyse Bensel. Green Writers Press, 2020. 71 Pages. $14.95.
Merian was the first individual to publish the complete life cycle of butterflies and moths in gorgeous artistic compositions that included their food sources and habitats, illustrating total ecologies in single images. Her lifelong dedication to entomology took hold at thirteen as she raised caterpillars for study, and she began painting botanical art during a time when artistic apprenticeship for women was illegal in German guild law, except in lighter mediums like watercolor.³ In an interview, Bensel marveled at the artist’s “divorcing her husband and running her own business (unheard of and quite scandalous in the late 1600s)."⁴ Through daring perseverance, Merian became the first European woman to fund a personal scientific expedition to the Americas, where she and daughter Dorothea braved rainforests and tropical fever to bring back stunning images and live specimen previously unknown to their continent.⁵ As Merian clarified science’s understanding of metamorphosis, she transformed her own life, too. Bensel’s collection imagines the tensions that ensued from the roles she had to balance: student, painter, wife, mother, teacher, scientist, religious radical, and professional engraver. Most of the poems begin with an epigraph taken from Merian’s scientific books or manuscripts, and I found the inclusion of the artist’s voice a wonderful way to set tone and contextualize her struggles. Merian’s epigraph to “Domestic,” for example, expresses the oddity of her position: a housewife with “an unseemly, immoderate ambition.”
Bensel carries on a tradition of ekphrastic biography, like other poets who have bestowed imaginative voices on artists. However, what Lisel Mueller does for the interiority of artists in individual poems like “Monet Refuses the Operation,” Bensel does for one individual across an entire collection, in her choice of genre. As she has explained, “Poetry gave me the opportunity to include several different approaches to Merian’s life through persona poems, ekphrastic poems, more narrative-driven poems, and poems that recount my own research and writing process constructing the collection.”⁶ Her closing poems transition into Bensel’s personal struggle to release the “imago” of her research and to fill frustrating gaps that history leaves about Merian’s relationships and beliefs.
In “The World Lends its Color,” Bensel describes the artist’s preparation of her pigments: “I borrow sky ground / to blue powder, Madonna-holy / and fringed iris petal.” She speaks of “the distance traveled for miraculous color,” like “weedy woad pressed for indigo, / …boiled shellfish for tyrone purple.” She says,
I want
the origins of hot springs and burning
volcanoes, molten orpiment, transcendent
hues waiting to be rediscovered.
Merian had a special alchemy to achieve her intense hues, in fact. As Professor Ingrid D. Rowland has explained, “Her version of the pigment known as cochineal red, a concoction made from the carapaces of a certain kind of beetle, eventually achieved an electric intensity that has almost no equal.”⁷ On the cover of Bensel’s collection, a fiery red lily stands at the center of Merian’s Suriname illustration, part of her final masterpiece. How significant that this representation is not a white lily, often a symbol of female meekness. It is bold like the woman herself, supporting the butterfly cycle to which she devoted her life.
Bensel includes this pigment, also called “carmine,” in the poem “Letters to Clara in Nuremberg,” about the period when Merian left her husband and opened her own painting and engraving business in Amsterdam—a flourishing time of independence and reconnection with positive female friendships. In this poem, Merian writes to a former art student who understands her ardor for beauty. The honeyed lines imitate Sappho:
My company of maidens praises
your devotion to your art—
your half-dark rose and light blue lily
give me joy greater than the riches
of a silver cup.
Other lavish lines take after the Song of Solomon, as Merian offers her friend artistic supplies and specimen, like
snakes brandied in jars
sealed with wood and stag beetles. If you
wish to have
any sort of seeds or spices
I can procure these
things. I take liberties for your love
of each art…
These last lines remind us that Merian is a practiced businesswoman, yet she also uses elevated language to celebrate the female utopia she has created with her daughters in order to pursue her calling. The presence of “carmine” roses aligns this poem with the height of her artistic passion.
We witness Merian’s self-willed transformation through metamorphic metaphors over the course of Bensel’ collection. The opening poem, “Dear Esteemed Art-Loving Reader,” introduces her as a subversive moth egg that, because female, must be “pinned on the underbelly / of a tulip’s praying leaf” during her apprenticeship. Her ambition’s flight and patient determination are foreshadowed in lines that also acknowledge Merian’s devout faith in her Creator. Bensel writes,
Even the inchworm raises
the length of its body
to heaven. Caught
in ecstasy, she praises
what shapes
all creatures.
This shape poem wriggles down the page, like the caterpillar it describes.
However, Merian cannot remain in her domestic chrysalis. Her recipe in “To get a moth” instructs, “Only when you have been broken / Will the moth crawl out.” Bensel writes several pieces about the breakdown of Merian’s marriage and escape to the Netherlands. In “Glossary of Metamorphosis I,” for example, the unhappy wife redefines the German term “goldlinge. A chrysalis speckled with gold,” saying, “The most precious things are broken with color. I never / wanted gold rings. Solid lasts too long, pretending to be / forever.” She prepares to abandon her husband, declaring,
This moth
will fly; these bulbs will shed
their blooms and begin again,
immortal…
Merian remembers how she first “skirted the law" in “Engraved in Copper and Published Herself,” bragging, “my stepfather agreed to let me // watch his apprentices work.” The poem describes her years under Jacob Marrel, a still-life master and engraver. She says proudly, “I had the precision / of small hands. I accrued skill / until I could be set to marry,” but she regrets her marriage to a fellow artist who profited from their alliance: “I had been left so little. He gained.” Two poems later, Bensel’s ekphrasis called “Dark Dagger”—a type of moth—fires off imagery redolent of Merian’s disappoint in marriage:
False eyes. Red, black,
and white fading firework
perch on a wilted teardrop leaf,
its edges chewed away.
Yellow amber. Bruised fruit.
This is the language of betrayal, sorrow, and decay. Merian sees that they have reached the end of their life cycle and she will soon take back her maiden name.
The decay of the host plant alludes, also, to Merian’s Caravaggian influences—the visible passage of time that hallmarks her paintings. Comparisons of her plates to Bensel’s ekphrastic poems reveal how wonderfully the poet brings these scenes to life, and yet she always layers imagery with double and triple meanings that reflect Merian’s experiences or craft. In other poems, she maximizes the poetic potential of each entomological and metamorphic term, like “imago” or “instar,” proving how the language of science can be beautiful.
In “Fragments from the Caterpillar Book,” based on Merian’s first publication on metamorphosis, the poet describes four illustrations in whimsical realism. What fascinates me most about this piece is that each fragment reads like a translation of Japanese poetry in brevity, natural imagery, and contemplative mood—a tribute to other world literatures developing during Merian’s lifetime. Most of these plates are dated 1679, the same decade when Bashō began shaping what would become the modern haiku and the haibun.⁸ This nod to the East reminds us that every hemisphere was undergoing important cultural metamorphoses in the seventeenth century. Moreover, Bashō and Merian shared marked similarities in their histories. Both were travelers in nature, seeking observations for their compositions; they were teachers of their arts; and both were victims of illness in their prime, leaving them unable to complete their final masterpieces as envisioned. Thus, Bensel’s poem creates wonderful historical parallels and layers.
These fragments also exhibit the poet’s observational inventiveness, calling an abandoned silk cocoon “a baby’s blanket deflating,” identifying it as the literal swaddling cloth of young moths; and I was delighted to find in Merian’s illustrations a caterpillar with precise “black… / swallows in flight along its back,” as well as the “question mark / soon to be unraveled” in the curly antennae of a brown moth. Merian’s publications indeed unraveled questions about long-misunderstood metamorphic processes.
In “Visiting the Cabinets of Curiosity,” Merian is not satisfied to study exotic organisms in Amsterdam anymore. She thinks, “Strange and stranger are the wonder / rooms that separate specimen from life,” as she views “shelves burdened by a desire / to collect but not retain knowledge.” Instead, she will seek living things in their true environments. The fabulously-titled “Travelling Without Men on Strange Business” inventories what the mother-daughter team pack for their unchaperoned voyage to South America, beginning with feminine items like “a pea jacket, three pairs of stockings, four pairs / of shoes” and ending with a “pickaxe,” stressing their unorthodox task. Images of female empowerment increase as “Maria dreamed / of …Amazonian women pierced with bone.” Bensel writes,
By the voyage’s end, the women found
Suriname’s broad shoreline…
…the river spilling its silt again
and again, its power beyond man’s control.
Her closing lines are powerful, likening Merian to a force of nature—mighty and uncontainable.
Merian did not shy from filling her visual narratives with unsettling images for the sake of science. In “Anansi the Spider Devours the Hummingbird,” inspired by the most frightening Suriname plate, the poet goads Merian to shock her audience by destroying illusions of safe, feminine subjects:
Maria, you need to horrify those
armchair naturalists. You gave them
something good to talk about, the only act
of aggression those men could seek to disprove.
Bensel points out that Maria did not observe the tarantula eating the hummingbird but heard the story “whispered to her after she stopped / at the rainforest’s edge to find that bird, / smaller than a peach, with its throat torn out”—evidence that she applied imagination on top of empiricism in order to complete the illustration. Most articles written about Merian in the last decade note the particular horror of this picture. It verges on the Gothic, yet she created it over seventy years before other women began composing in that genre. Bensel creates another instance of horror in “Notes on What Comes from Dead Birds,” where Merian records the dissection of a fieldfare, whose body “writhed” and whose heart “pulsated” with worms, reanimated into another kind of life in death. Merian’s unsqueamish curiosity marvels that “Feathers were all that remained. / From within, its small heart inflated / and burst.” Bensel transforms the grisly scene with grace in closing, as former flight gives way to new flight: “Where has / its life gone but to / the single fly that emerged?”
However, Bensel does not ignore the most controversial aspect of Merian’s life. Rowland has pointed out that Merian “returned to Amsterdam with a native housemaid and many containers of specimens,”⁹ though Joanna Klein insists the artist “was not a slave owner.” Merian “received [help] from the natives of Suriname, as well as slaves or servants that assisted her” in her studies; and yet Klein also details how slave women confided in Merian about using plants to abort pregnancies from Dutch abuses. Klein believes her inclusion of these details in the Suriname book “acknowledged the injustices of slavery and colonialism and suggested that a medicine could be a tool to allow women to control their own reproductive destinies.” Bensel addresses these issues in several poems.
“Wild Wasps & Nipple Fruit,” an ekphrasis of a modern play, tells the story of Merian’s native servant, “Jacoba,” who is “erased / on the ship’s passenger log.” The poet acknowledges this woman’s skill as a research assistant while also pointing to Merian’s inconsistency: “Jacoba wonders / how one can love so many creatures / but not want to free her own.” Bensel paints the whole of a complicated individual in her collection, a woman ahead of her time while still a product of her time. It is Merian’s voice that ultimately asks for objectivity in absorbing the total picture. The epigraph to the first poem in Rare Wondrous Things comes from her Caterpillar Book, advising, “Do not, dear reader, let the pleasure of your eyes be spoiled; judge not too quickly, but read me from beginning to end.” We cannot help seeing Merian through twenty-first century eyes, and yet one appreciates what she managed to achieve in the face of seventeenth-century disadvantages to European women.
Since 2007, Merian has experienced a small but fervent global renaissance. Bensel’s closing poems discuss Merian’s legacy today, including her portrait on German currency, a recent exhibit of her work at The Rembrandt House Museum, and even her influence on Nabokov’s career as a lepidopterist. Although she cries, “Maria, you are still in pieces,” in “Without Document,” Bensel’s work helps amplify Merian’s reemergence by giving her biography a unique voice—drawing us into Merian’s life of art through another form of art. Rare Wondrous Things is an impressive addition to the recent wave of exhibits, histories, and children’s books created about Merian. Bensel’s word-paintings encourage an interactive reading—so, at a time when people are still hesitant to venture into museums, let us continue the discoveries through Merian’s digitized portfolios at the Royal Collection and British Library.
1 Kooser, Ted. “A Box of Pastels.” Delights and Shadows. Copper Canyon Press, 2004.
2 Cited in Andrea Wulf’s “The Woman Who Made Science Beautiful.” The Atlantic, Jan 19, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/2016/01/the-woman-who-made-science-beautiful/424620/.
3 See Ingrid D. Rowland’s article, “The Flowering Genius of Maria Sibylla Merian.” The New York Review, April 9, 2009, https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2009/04/09/the-flowering-genius-of-maria-sibylla-merian/.
4 Quoted in “BC's Bensel Pens Poetic Biography.” The Transylvania Times, May 27, 2021, https://www.transylvaniatimes.com/story/2020/06/08/education/bcs-bensel-pens-poetic-biography/45214.html.
5 For a detailed contextualization of my biographical summaries, see Rowland’s and Wulf’s articles.
6 Quoted in “BC’s Bensel.” See “Monet Refuses the Operation” (pp. 186-7) and numerous other examples in Lisel Mueller’s Alive Together. Louisiana State UP, 1996.
7 Rowland cited above.
8 “Bashō.” Poetry Foundation, https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/basho.
9 See Joanna Klein’s “A Pioneering Woman of Science Re-Emerges After 300 Years.” New York Times, Jan 23, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/01/23/science/maria-sibylla-merian-metamorphosis-insectorum-surinamensium.html; Rowland cited above.