[Tim Murphy]

Lorenzo Lotto's Annunciation

Other approaching Gabriels offer the lily
In a ceremonial hush to humble girls
Who bow their heads or touch their breasts. She whirls
Away as the angel runs in willy-nilly
And sinks to one knee, hair streaming--as if he hurries
To get there ahead of God, who stretches His arm
From a cloud in the doorway, while the striped cat scurries
For shelter, its tail an elongated S of alarm.

Hands raised protectively, she turns to look
Straight out at us--in shock, or mute appeal?
Forgotten behind her lies the open book.
In the tumult of the divine turned terribly real,
Only her face is strangely still, the eyes
Wide with apprehension and surmise.

[Bruce McBirney]

I really like this one.

Tim, your comment that we would recognize the writers of many of these sonnets from their voice or subject matter was quite apt. I've only encountered this writer's work here about a year ago (I liked it then, too), but immediately guessed who it was.

I love the runaway breathlessness of the meter that matches the scene depicted. I'll defer to those here with better metrical ears, but in the absence of a constant pattern, I would call this simply accentual verse. I read each line with five stresses, but only the third line is strict iambic pentameter. (Maybe the ninth line, too, though I don't read it that way.) I even hear three straight stressed syllables in line 7 ("striped cat scurries").

Not being familiar with the painting, my only question is whether there is some tension, or even a slight contradiction, between Mary's look in lines 9-10 of "shock, or mute appeal" and the statement in lines 13-14 that her face is "strangely still," her eyes "wide with apprehension and surmise."

But that's just a minor question regarding a spectacular poem!

[Julie Steiner]

Oops, I did a Google search to find the painting, and came up with the sonnet, with the author's name...but I won't spill the beans.

Here's a link to the painting--click on the image for an enlargement, if you want to see the stripes on the cat:
http://www.kfki.hu/~arthp/html/l/lot.../02annunc.html

Julie Stoner

[Tim Murphy]

Thank you for the link, Julie. I think this poem's provenance would have fooled me because this poet is usually so very strict in her prosody. Nonetheless, I love what she is doing here, and i find the accentual verse very expressive.

[Rhina P. Espaillat]

There's so much to admire in this poem that it's hard to know where to begin: with the opening that compliments the reader by drawing on his memory, not only of this painting but of others to contrast with it; the vivid language to match startling images; the perfect choice of details; the contrast between the near-violence of the verbs in the octave and those quiet ones in the sestet; the narrowing of the focus at the end to the purely human look of the person confronting "the divine." And, of course, the meter, so like the loose, roving accentuals of Spanish! Nice innovation in the rhyme scheme of the octave, too.

[Bruce McBirney]

Julie, thanks for finding the link to the painting, which answered my question. Mary's pose is one of "shock," as the poem says, but in her face the shock's already been overtaken by something more calm. "Apprehension" according to the poet--a good double-edged word, which can mean "foreboding" as well as "understanding."

[Catherine Tufariello]

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."

[A. E. Stallings]

But I love the breathless rush of the anapests in the octave, the scrambling of it that so perfectly reflects the scene. I was actually wondering whether this were not a deliberate nod to XJ Kennedy's wonderful "Nothing in Heaven Functions as it Ought"--which also has very free meter in the octave, as opposed to the strict meter of the sestet. And I love the headless line at the end here, which perfectly captures that dawning of realization (or, with its nod to Keats, surmise).

I found this so amazingly vivid, that I scarcely even want to look at the image of the painting itself.

[Tim Murphy]

I've written only two ekphrastic poems, each of which just takes the painting as its launchpad for the poem. Rhina's right about this poem. This is how ekphrasis should proceed. That S of alarm! What a line to die for.

[Catherine Tufariello]

Alicia and Tim, thank you both for the kind words. That's an interesting question Alicia about the XJK sonnet, which is one of my favorites among his poems and which (on rereading it now) I feel must be in the background somewhere, though I wasn't thinking of it consciously.