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Saturday, 27 June 2009 09:51![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lnhammerSince as we know, art is not life -- except
As polished and refractory small shards
Chipped from a mirror -- why have scholars kept
Sifting through dusty muniment discards
For Will's Dark Lady? Immortality,
Perhaps? -- the hope of a footnote's triumph winding
Through future textbooks? Or a gossipy
Delight at exposing others, at finding
Out secrets? As it is, their ink clouds our sight,
Leaving, squidlike, Shakespeare the Man obscured,
A life quest for some errant Arthur's knight --
And even with that Grail, her name, we'd learn
No truth that we cannot already discern
Within the silver cup of Will's own word.
---L.
As polished and refractory small shards
Chipped from a mirror -- why have scholars kept
Sifting through dusty muniment discards
For Will's Dark Lady? Immortality,
Perhaps? -- the hope of a footnote's triumph winding
Through future textbooks? Or a gossipy
Delight at exposing others, at finding
Out secrets? As it is, their ink clouds our sight,
Leaving, squidlike, Shakespeare the Man obscured,
A life quest for some errant Arthur's knight --
And even with that Grail, her name, we'd learn
No truth that we cannot already discern
Within the silver cup of Will's own word.
—22 April 2008
Sonnet rewrite of a much longer (and discursive) poem from September 1994 called "Gilded Monuments".---L.