"petrarchan" poems
“Seldom we find,” says Solomon Don Dunce,
“Half an idea in the profoundest sonnet.
Through all the flimsy things we see at once
As easily as through a Naples bonnet—
Trash of all trash!—how can a lady don it?
Yet heavier far than your Petrarchan stuff—
Owl-downy nonsense that the faintest puff
Twirls into trunk-paper the while you con it.”
And, veritably, Sol is right enough.
The general tuckermanities are arrant
Bubbles—ephemeral and so transparent—
But this is, now—you may depend upon it—
Stable, opaque, immortal—all by dint
Of the dear names that lie concealed within’t.
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Oh father dear, petrarchan patriarch,
Thy gifted words of thy divinity
Portray the depth of thine own trinity,
And blessed are we who know thy craftsman's mark
And Blessed Are Thee, Thy Daughter Marian,
Who Walks In Beauty Like The Bright Sunlight
Where Flowers Grow And Faeries Do Delight
To Dance In Summer Glade and Autumn Glen
And Hilda, blessed are thee and all that's thine,
The gloom of shadowed valley thou has known
Yet love and life shall ever be thine own,
Oh blessed are thee and all thou holds divine
For thee, thy Hilda and thy Marian,
My blessings always and anon,
Amen.
Jan 22, 2015
Jan 22, 2015 at 5:53 PM UTC
In summer, water is used
For many purposes.
It is swam in, played in
And jumped in.
It is also used to
Tube on, ski on
And surfed on.
Water is a necessity for summer to occur.
In winter, water is used
For many purposes.
It is played on, skated on,
And hopefully not fallen on.
Water is a necessity for winter to occur.
Apr 1, 2015
Apr 1, 2015 at 2:26 PM UTC
I am the poet called, Sweetsilverbird,
but friends all know that I will never fly;
unless it is by every waking sigh
or every dream or wish or written word.
I have a tender heart that's often stirred,
but that's the code that I would live life by.
I could not bear to try to live a lie,
so of all subterfuge I have been cured.
I think because life has been so unfair,
I will not play the games that others play.
Why does a lifetime have to go so fast?
Why tolerate the cruelty that's there?
But I am made of simple human clay
and only live as long as I shall last.
Apr 19, 2012
Apr 19, 2012 at 1:34 AM UTC
ginko soft they pile, strewn on cobble
memories themselves concretely devised
cloister inward, revise, revise, revise:
debauched meanderings fully marble
escapes to curl the lip, adorable
here and there, whether smile sneer incise
linguistic pirouettes or paler lies
congest that wisdom indefinable --
the moment past moves on to feigning truth
with pretty rhyme, for ornamenting time
with myths to filter in an Avalon,
juggle perspectival paradoxic ruth
with fine meter fine, vernacular chimes,
and resolve the conflict like a dawn
Dec 2, 2012
Dec 2, 2012 at 9:47 AM UTC
No, I don't want to write a sonnet;
to self-lock in an octave
only clasping a rusty key
-volta-
leading to another office cubicle
efficiently labelled sestet
for its six undone quotas
waiting coolly for my
calculating.
I want to untuck my shirt, Whitman;
to unleash words to gather at seams
then tear them open
like bursting blood cells crowding
out of a wound.
I do not want to fit
flesh into a 'perfect' Barbie membrane,
let me stretch the skin taut as sheets
so I can feel the redness
and gouge underneath.
Clarity glazed the Classical sonata
opaque; staves of controlled fantasy
so imaginable, like an illogically
round orange, sliced
in concaves fat
with pulp, each ripeness methodically
connected by thin breath threads.
This is why we have madness, need it;
bless the ****** of brilliance in Beethoven
symphonies, the metallic muscling
of Ginsberg verses, electronic with strange beauty, holy
and unholy, every ****** mess
in between
The heart can't suffice
by merely inhaling
glitter; I can't dare remember the sane
pretty sighing of a Petrarchan
uttering; canned love,
a predictable malaise packaged
neatly in a bland tome, most likely
beige, with the fashionable odor
of bookish age
And so, serif-writing sweetheart
please don't ask
me to write a sonnet.
too comfortable to tuck my shirt in,
I won't touch I won't touch I won't touch
Oct 31, 2015
Oct 31, 2015 at 4:38 AM UTC
do you know how many times i've had to suffer through the same tired metaphors over and over and over again.
put down your tears and your stars
and your cigarettes and your coffee
and your waves and your skies
and your hearts and your bruises
and pick up your pen and write
something worth living for god **** it.
because i haven't read a poem from the heart in years
and all your elaborate conceits and sadness and promises
and "i love you"s and lips and dreams
are getting on my ******* nerves.
rage against the stereotypes and conventions and
rage against Petrarchan and Romantic and
Post ******* Modern love.
Don't write something because you feel like it.
Write something because you would explode if you didnt
May 19, 2013
May 19, 2013 at 5:34 AM UTC
A Blazon sonnet?
That’s the one an
Elizabethan lover
would turn his
Elizabethan Miss
into a
list
itemise her attributes
(hidden or otherwise)
& tick ‘em off
bit by bit
like a ledger clerk
closing an account.
From the colour
of her eyes
(always had to be blue)
to the colour of her
hair(always a blonde)
from toes to ***
in one hit.
Sincere...not
the least little bit!
Yawn...stop me if you have heard this one!
A fashion accessory
for the gay young blade about town
already fallen out of fashion
before it had barely begun.
“Oi...darling! ”
“Yeah...you love! ”
“Get your ruff on
...you’ve pulled! ”
“I got 14 lines
Petrarchan or Shakespearean
...know wot I mean? ! ”
And a clever
clearheaded Elizabethan lady
would more than likely
(but politely)
tell ‘em
“Oh...f***est thou
off! ”
Jun 7, 2015
Jun 7, 2015 at 4:25 PM UTC
pathos
it's a sort of
Petrarchan love
loving within an arms distance
don't get to close to him
he'll see your flushed cheeks
and inevitable smile
and think you're
absolutely pathetic.
ethos
the way you stumble over
your words and
all eloquence
shatters against the wall
as you fall hard for
the smile that reaches
his eyes and your heart
coursing through your veins.
logos
of course
it's not love
you idiot
you're too young for love
and it all ends
in heartbreak anyway.
Jan 22, 2014
Jan 22, 2014 at 11:57 PM UTC
No lovesick lad ever poured out his heart
To a Scantron®©™ card and its suave machine
Posed seductively in brushed aluminum
In a smoky corner of the faculty commons
Or with a thundering Number Two scribed
A manifesto that menaced the world
(But bubbled carefully within the squares)
And ground it through a Scantron®©™ 888
For indeed
Moses brought not Scantron®©™ down from Sinai
To teach God’s laws through an electric eye
Apr 18, 2018
Apr 18, 2018 at 3:21 PM UTC
"The brine of sunrise has been aggregate to my life,
The Sea filled with love and emotion so have thou?
You fill my heart and soul with complete rapture,
Our hands embrace itinerant as the sunlight appears,
“I will want my antediluvian voluble to win your heart,
To continue to serenade and catechize my love,
Sonnet of love that will cajole your pleasures,
At this radiant time with a perpetual perpetually attire,
Her kisses taught my lips to embody the flame procured,
Her mouth has taught me the fervor of emotion,
As our sensations mount to an unrivaled high of sensuality,
Came into a demur yet noble fathom delectation of love,
Her celestial auspice lustrous as the morning calm sea,
You begin to rue with pleasure as you have never before,
As the imaginary ethereal sunbirds fly above the brine below,
So is the sweet scented bouquet of your amour femininity,
I love you as the calicoes pompon of the sea love the deep brine,
As briny deep spawn calamus into neophyte perennial enclaves”
By AG 5/20/2020 © HP
Sep 14, 2021
Sep 14, 2021 at 3:21 PM UTC
The masculine assault upon the reluctance of the “coy” woman lies at the heart of Marvell’s best-known love poem—perhaps the most famous “persuasion to love” or carpe diem poem in English—”To his Coy Mistress.” Everything we know about Marvell’s poetry should warn us to beware of taking its exhortation to carnality at face value. Critics from T. S. Eliot on took note of the poem’s “logical” structure, but then it began to be noticed that the conditional syllogism in that structure is invalid—a textbook case of affirming the consequent or the fallacy of the converse. Has Marvell made an error? Or does he attribute an error to the speaking persona of the poem? Or is the fallacy part of the sophistry that a seducer uses on an ingenuous young woman? Or is it a supersubtle compliment to a woman expected to recognize and laugh at the fallacy? These alternatives must be judged in the light of the abrupt shifts in tone among the three verse paragraphs. In the opening lines the seducer assumes a pose of disdainful insouciance with his extravagant parody of the Petrarchan blason:
An hundred years should go to praise
Thine Eyes, and on thy Forehead Gaze.
Two hundred to adore each Breast:
But thirty thousand to the rest.
An Age at least to every part,
And the last Age should show your Heart.
Although the Lady is said to “deserve this State,” the compliment is more than a little diminished when the speaker adds that he simply lacks the time for such elaborate wooing. It is also likely that most women would be put off rather than tempted by the charnel-house imagery of the poem’s middle section where the seducer, sounding like a fire-and-brimstone preacher, warns that “Worms shall try / That long preserv’d Virginity.” Finally, the depiction of ****** intimacy at the poem’s close, with its vision of the lovers as “am’rous birds of prey” who will “tear our Pleasures with rough strife,” is again a disconcerting image in an ostensible seduction poem. The persona’s desire for the reluctant Lady is mingled with revulsion at the prospect of mortality and fleshly decay, and he manifests an ambivalence toward ****** love that is pervasive in Marvell’s poetry.”
Oct 18, 2018
Oct 18, 2018 at 11:29 PM UTC