The Sonnet, William Mulready (1786-1863) 1839 Great Britain, Oil on panel 35 x 30 cm
Mulready's Secret Sonnet
A moment in this landscape with your heart,
the brook, the grass, the scent, late flowered air,
could make a simple man of lesser art
than necessary pick up pen. Beware,
my flow’r in velvet red of autumn dress,
I’ll spy you as you read, and, if you bark,
the echo of your high-voiced silliness
will prove me as no Dante, no Petrarch,
and show no Beatrice or Laura pure
has joined me in the genre of rough land.
We came here on our own and, to be sure,
this sonnet I have offered to your hand
is scattered in its rhyme, but not its tone.
I’m glad we’re here alone, no chaperone.
note: I think I'd like to write an annotated set of interlinear responses to this hackneyed sonnet. that's a benefit, I guess, of cranking out even the most unfinished piece for now.
5 comments:
Can you write more than one a day? I need a new poem after every hard thing. How about one due at 12:45, another at 3, and another at 5?
You know, I would like nothing more. I would, right now, set aside most everything else to write some more poems. It's an oddly fertile time that way. I figure I better flow the furrow and plant while I can. Who knows what next month will be like. The plans for the next few poems are growing, ideas for little series, like a bunch on an old, colonial era map of Illinois. What hard thing happens today at 12:45?
dw
That should read "plow the furrow," though flow the furrow is interesting.
Nothing but class, but in the same way that chocolate gets me through the next thing, I think poetry could, too. Perhaps if you wrote enough poems, I wouldn't need chocolate any more.
NExt month? May flowers, the sages tell me. Maybe this is the rainy season and you put out all the poems, and then next month, they bloom into God's perfection?
each day i sit with a word file open at work and usually end with three to four pages of jots and tittles by the time i'm done.
i'm excited for your fertile time. keep flowing.
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