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).]
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