41. Sonnet
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Spirit well born, in whom is mirrored and revealed
by your fair limbs, chaste and precious, as much as nature and heaven can make through us, when to none other does its fair work yield: spirit of grace in whom one hopes and trusts to be within, as without in your face appear, love, pity, mercy, things so rare as never found in beauty with such fidelity: Love takes hold of me and beauty ties; the pitying, the mercy with sweet glances fix hope to heart equal to their burden. What rule or usage to the world denies, what cruelty by time or later chances, that to such fine work death gives no pardon? |
42. Sonnet
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Tell me if my eyes, Love, by your grace,
will come on very beauty, as I aspire, or if I have within that, where I stare I always see engraved that woman’s face. Some of this you know, as you come with her, so I go mad, to torment all my rest; neither would I want to miss the least breath, nor would I call for a less ardent fire. The beauty that you see is truly there, but it grows, raised to the best locality, if it is, through mortal eyes, the soul it runs to. It makes itself then, chaste and fair, as for yourself you want some immortality: this and not that, is what your eyes run on to. |
43. Sonnet
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Over me reason groans with rue,
while I expect loving to be gay; with powerful examples and words all true my disgraces come to mind and say: –might I report on any thing at all in life but death? And no phoenix-like existence. – But little use: for one who wants to fall, no other’s hand is prompt enough assistance. I know my losses and the truth intended; on the other side another heart is sheltered which slays me most where most I tendered In between two deaths by which I’m mastered: that I want not and that not comprehended; suspended thus, the body and the soul are murdered. |
44. Sonnet Fragment
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While of the beauty I saw from the start
drawn near the soul, as with the eyes one renders, the image grows within, and soul surrenders, self-degraded and with half a heart. Love, which works its every worrying rasp and wily art, because I did not break the thread, returns and re-enters. |
Afterward
M.
You used to trot back to the sonnet like a dog to the bone–bringing nothing, finding something –large with Love and hunger, trailing some thin tale of heaven caught in logic’s cog that worked old Petrarch’s mill to catalog your injuries, your weakness and some sin –some justified and some left out, some in– as head and tail both gave the dog a wag. If sin is pleasure followed by remorse, in life or after in a special place, remorse, then, is a posture we can praise, that saves us from the mere and blessed course of bestial innocence without disgrace in God’s eyes or our own and in this voice you raise. |