.....To Petrarch
.....


He saw a girl illuminated there
in April’s burgeoning cathedral light,
and held the vision as an anchorite
devotes himself to one repeated prayer.
He never wavered, never let despair
or doubt obscure that single moment’s sight
of something out of reach, enshrined in white
and real, yet insubstantial as the air.
We pride ourselves on being far more wise --
the woman, after all, was flesh and bone
and no less fallen, no less stained than he –
and yet sometimes regret our jaundiced eyes
that taint the world and make us more alone
than one who was naive enough to see.

Yet another apology to the poet for my technical inadequacies. Once again--this sonnet looked just
fine before I cut and pasted it into this parody
of Black Mountain projectivism !

That said, another technically terrific sonnet, with deft handling of the enjambment, clever ambiguity (“burgeoning cathedral light”), and a brave defense of idealization, which is rare these days. There’s not so much as a false phoneme, let alone a false step.

I remember this lovely tribute to Petrarch and Laura. I read it again with great pleasure.
Janet

I agree that it's very deft, on the whole. Not ABSOLUTELY perfect, though, in my estimation. First, it's really more a sonnet ON Petrarch than TO Petrarch as it stands right now, so I'd prefer see it either retitled or actually shifted into the second person--which might make it a little more powerfully personal. Secondly, I have some rerservations about the compound predicate in the following lines:

We pride ourselves on being far more wise --
the woman, after all, was flesh and bone
and no less fallen, no less stained than he –
and yet sometimes regret our jaundiced eyes...

I find that the two-line parenthetical clause somewhat obscures the subject of the verb "regret." If it were my poem, I'd simply change "and yet sometimes regret" to "yet sometimes we regret." [Oh yes--and use an em-dash rather than an en-dash at the end of the parenthetical...]

It's a nice sonnet, though--and certainly better than any I've ever written.

-Peter



[This message has been edited by Peter Chipman (edited July 01, 2005).]

What I admire so much about this poem is the grace of its sentences as they flow through the stanzas. The language, however, is insufficiently arresting to my persnickety ear.

Peter,

I think (can't remember for sure) that was a full
(second) em-dash. Something might have gotten
messed up in my cutting and pasting.

This one's not flashy, but I like what Len said about the content: a "brave defense of idealization." That's so unfashionable that I have to get behind it.

Richard Wakefield,
I do love this for its sense of time and its ambience and quiet strength.
You have caught something of the purity of the poet's own work and I love the way you see his idealisation from a regretful modern point of view.
Janet