If I, who am an abject, low-born woman,
Can bear within me such lofty fire,
Why should I not possess at least a little
Poetic power to tell it to the world?
If Love, with such a new unheard-of flint
Lifted me up where I could never climb,
Why cannot I, in an unusual way,
Make pain and pen be equal in myself?
If Love cannot do this by force of nature,
Perhaps as by a miracle he may
Passing and bursting every common measure.
How that can be, I cannot well explain
But yet I feel, because of my great fortune,
My heart imprinted with a strong new style.
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Rime 08
From guest Austin Macaitis (contact)
I think this is a very deep poem and I like it. She describes how she is poor women searching for love and cannot find it. Then towards thee end when she states because of these trials her heart has more wisdom in the end. That is the way I interpreted it. -
From guest Glistri (contact)
Poetry can be violence or its healing. Yeats's and Petrarch's ravished. Gaspara's mourned and cleansed. Male poets are assayed as great in direct proportion to their cruelty in human terms and their inflation of the poetic spirit. But Gaspara intuited the truth here: pen can represent pain. Only a true poet can inhabit the ultimate unspeakable silencing of a warm heart by a narcissistic one. -
Oh, how I feel for the woman who wrote this! For every poet who finds themselves as Yeats to Maude Gonne, or Petrarch to Laura, the other side of the mirror, the woman who loves a poet and is not loved in return.
And does the pain purify the pen? Or make the eyes see more clearly?
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