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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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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