Janet,
Thanks for posting this beautiful poem. It brings to mind another point, I think, about sentimentality. One of the dangers people feel in it is that there is always some reminder of death in it (and therefore more inertia to overcome in the language that represents it in a poem). Our culture is famously death-denying (sanitized funeral homes and the like), and maybe our troubled relation to sentiment is connected to that.
Un saluto,
Andrew
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