[Julie Steiner]

As of 7/3, 12 days remain to enter your poems about excuses, tigers/cats, gin, or whatever else might connect to the following rubric. Read on:

Only one line of poetry written by Ginevra de'Benci has survived, the opening of a sestina, which reads: “I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger.”
     — Mary D. Garrard, “Leonardo da Vinci: Female Portraits, Female Nature” from The Expanding Discourse: Feminism And Art History (edited by Norma Broude)

Wow. I don't know what to make of that. Maybe you will.

Your challenge: Write a poem in any form, somehow inspired by that line, and post it to this thread. Enter as many times as you like. You may edit your entries until the entry deadline (noon Eastern Daylight Time, 7/15/2025).

Judging: After the entries close, I'll post a Google form that will allow currently-active Eratosphere members to vote for their favorites. Depending on the quality of the entries, I might also send a group of my own favorites (anonymized) to a celebrity judge.

Prizes: Undying glory, of course. Also, your choice from among five poetry books that I've accumulated, mailed to you at my expense.

[Additional research:]

[...] there is a letter to Ginevra written by an unidentified lute player, signed ‘G+H’, who lived in Rome at the papal court. This letter informs us that Ginevra was engaged in writing poetry. The lute player wrote that he had told the Roman ladies about the virtues of Florentine women, and especially those of Ginevra herself. In the same letter he begged her to send him a sestina she had written, of which he was only able to remember the first line: ‘I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger’. (12) Apart from this single line from a second hand, no poetry by Ginevra is known to have survived.

(Footnote 12): ‘Chieggio merzede e sono alpestro tygre’, ‘G+H’ to Ginevra de’ Benci, Rome, 12-17 August 1490. The letter was first published by: Carnesecchi 1909, p. 293-296; re-published with an English translation in: Walker 1967, app. II, p. 24-27.

(Quoted from a 2015 doctoral thesis at https://scholarlypublications.univer...dle/1887/33552.)


Modern Italian dictionary entries:

chieggio = archaic first person singular of chiedere, to ask, request, beg
mercede = wage, salary (archaic usages: recompense, recognition, prize, pity, mercy, grace)
chiedo scusa, chiedo perdone = (modern Italian) I ask forgiveness, I beg (your) pardon
e = and
sono = I am
alpestro = Alpine (masculine adjective)
tigre = tiger (masculine noun)

Maybe "I ask forgiveness" is an inaccurate translation, and she actually wrote "I request recognition that I am a mountain tiger." However, "that" would have been che rather than e, and e elides nicely with the final syllable of merzede to form a standard hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) line, while che does not. Hmmm. Anyway, it's your call, poets.


Possibly relevant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat

[RCL]

Julie, a shot in the dark. . .

Here, Kitty Kitty

After a line by Ginevra de'Benci

With smiles, you called me your sweet Kitty
and hoped that it would make me purr.
You swore you had a rhyming cure;
proven soothing care, not pity.
It’s true that I was feeling chilly.
But your persistence seemed a spur
to rouse my fight response, to lure
me even closer and to bed me.

Forgive me, Tony, that it was rainy,
frosty weather! Under it,
ice flakes on my hair, eyes runny,
I growled and threw a hissy fit:
I’m a tiger, not a house cat,
so sack the formal poetry scat!

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks for getting the (hair)ball rolling, Ralph!

[Glenn Wright]

Tigress

Her lady’s maids were charmed by the rich cloth—
velvets, silks, embroidered fancifully
in colors of spring flowers. She chose a froth
of lace and golden satin, dutifully.

But when the dress was made, the painter hired,
she stubbornly refused to wear the gown,
insisting she herself should be admired
by him who sought a wife to make his own.

She wore her plain, brown shift, displayed no jewels.
The artist, young Leonardo, understood,
and honestly presented her so fools
wanting only her father’s money would

see the thorns around her and not like her.
“Beg pardon, and I am a mountain tiger.”

[Roger Slater]

I ask for your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger,
and, as such, the teeth inside my gaping mouth are keen,
and I possess the mountain tiger's famed tempestuous temper,
so go ahead. Forgive me. Otherwise I can be mean.

[Susan McLean]

I hope my bed is not just one to die on.
The other women flee from you in fear,
for you're a hunter mighty as Orion,
and they have seen your heaps of conquered deer.
I seek your grace—and I'm a mountain lion.

[R. Nemo Hill]

.
.
.
Deity


My live-and-let-live-ness
tells me: mind your own business.
All your altars remind me
to take less, to give less—
yet your prayers have defined me

and I am a mountain tiger.

Virgins undressed
and slathered with scent!
Fair boys who consent
like wheat to be threshed!
I ask their forgiveness—

for I am a mountain tiger.

I’m wild and untamed
and I cannot be named
by these sins you’d redress
through incense and flame.
Uncursed,
...............unblessed—

I ask your forgiveness.
I am a mountain tiger.
.
.
.

[Hilary Biehl]

Mountain Tiger

After a line by Ginevra de’Benci

She asked forgiveness, not because
she felt ashamed of what she was
(the patterned skin, the sudden claws),
but to hold accountable
(by faultless manners) every soul
that failed to fear the beautiful.

[Brian Allgar]

If I'd been born a tiger, well, I guess
I coulda ripped my enemies apart
With fangs and claws, but that would leave a mess,
And I'm a tidy-minded Prez, and smart.
So though my enemies will end up dead,
I'll let the 'gators do the job instead.