.....To Petrarch
.....
He saw a girl illuminated there
in April’s burgeoning cathedral light,
and held the vision as an anchorite
devotes himself to one repeated prayer.
He never wavered, never let despair
or doubt obscure that single moment’s sight
of something out of reach, enshrined in white
and real, yet insubstantial as the air.
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
that taint the world and make us more alone
than one who was naive enough to see.
Yet another apology to the poet for my technical inadequacies. Once again--this sonnet looked just
fine before I cut and pasted it into this parody
of Black Mountain projectivism !
That said, another technically terrific sonnet, with deft handling of the enjambment, clever ambiguity (“burgeoning cathedral light”), and a brave defense of idealization, which is rare these days. There’s not so much as a false phoneme, let alone a false step.
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