Thank you Bruce, Julie, Tim and Rhina, for taking the time to comment, and so generously, on this poem. As Tim notes, since writing it about five years ago I've been working mainly in stricter measures. But I used to write a lot of loose iambics and might eventually explore them again. For what it's worth, and I know the line can be hard to draw, I think of this poem as loose IP with lots of anapestic substitutions (mainly in the octave) rather than accentual verse. I probably wouldn't write a sonnet this metrically bumpy now, but I enjoyed pushing against the sonnet form in writing this, and perhaps some of that excitement made its way into the poem. I think it's the only poem I've ever completed in a single day and not revised afterward.
Julie, I'm grateful to you for posting a link to Lotto's painting. I did a web search for it years ago but didn't find it then. It would be nice to add the link to the poem on "The Poem Tree."
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