COMMENT BY GAIL: This poem has a quality of fairy-tale evil that reminds me of the witches' cauldron song in Macbeth, so that I practically expect the refuse to include "finger of birth-strangled babe." Instead, however, a newborn of star-like cleanliness and innocence turns up, like Hope at the bottom of Pandora's box. The whole sonnet brilliantly illustrates my thesis that poetry is the art of choosing one right word after another.
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