This sonnet seems, expanding on it circularity, to be self-referential enough to serve as a sort of subtle ars poetica.
Most of all I am struck by its use of the metaphor of time: not only in terms of the obvious trope of antiquity, of the haunting quality of what has endured in secret, "left in a trunk a century ago"--but the contrast of "the hasty gavel" and the auctioneer's "few brief clues" with "a woman's work of hours", hours exponentially increased by that century ago . There is an unbearable poignancy to me in the relationship between that brief auction and the sea of time upon which it floats, between the abrupt rap of that gavel reverberating like a moment's punctuation mark and the vast parentheses that contain its relative inconsequence. Even the circumstances of those brief clues, the homestead, the trousseau become dwarfed by the continuum of 'the art'.
OK, I'll confess, the trope seems a little timeworn to me. But hey that's the good thing about this bake-off: it demands that one take a closer look at that which one might have only skimmed otherwise due to one's personal habits of vision. Come to think of it, that is one definition of poetry itself.
Nemo
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