[R. Nemo Hill]

Descriptively I am right with this in the octave. And I am especially intrigued by these lines:

and any coursing eagle can attest
it is a chore to fathom western land.

This makes me look forward with great anticipation to the sestet, awaiting the clarion command. I am eager for this coursing eagle to indeed lead me in some mystical fashion toward Mythic True West.

As the sestet begins, I realize abruptly that I am going to be forced to modify the expansiveness of my expectations. Is it a matter of temperament that I prefer my sense of the infinite to be minted in a coin less 'doctrinaire'? Of course it is. As a result I am forced back from heart to head here, for I must translate the severely sensual rush of that expanding heartscape into symbolic terms that do not come readily to it. Yet I know that I am willing to do this because I trust the octet so implicitly. So I do. And while the rewards of such a theology of landscape are great, they are as well somewhat at odds with the original impulse the poem has lit in my soul.

Now I hear the powerful voice of San Juan de la Cruz echoing in my ear, stoically lamenting the aridity, the painful constriction with which the initial stages of mystical ascent necessarily assail one, this despite the apparently contradictory rush of unquantifyable freedom that is the ultimate reward for undergoing such trials. And I fully realize that, to me, what seems a confining religious symbolism here, might well prove so only for the uninitiated; and that the claim of all such mystical religious doctrine is that it has the opposite effect on one, once one has embraced it with faith, and thus been embraced by it.

Yet the undeniable effect of all this is that the poem is changed radically for me at this point, too radically for me to love it, despite the fact that it will continue to haunt me more than many of the other posted sonnets. The word made land made flesh has been made word again, at least for the time being.

Nemo

Oh, and breast is just fine. The word is made flesh after all.