Word: lise
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...pattern emerges; every aspect of his love for the excellent lady occasions pain. The tense pleasure of enjoying Lise crumbles into the grief of living with Esther. Lise, the lover necessarily shared, but temporarily the poet's alone, seems almost despised once she has been enjoyed...
...again as their more credible marriages and responsibilities permit. The antitheses and paradoxes persist and prod the couple until the poet, responding now to his guilt more than his love, seeks new solutions. One answer is simple; their spouses could fall in love with one another: "Why can't. Lise, why shouldn't theyfall in love?" But that never happens...
...with Berryman's sonnets there is a difference. Lise, excellent lady, is neither untouched nor particularly virtuous. Crimes of adultery and deception have been committed. Nor is the poet attempting either a temporary seduction (already accomplished) or (at first) a permanent possession of the Lady. The affair is intense; its emotions range from guilt and despair to real joy and momentary hope. Berryman attempts to involve the excellent lady in all of that intensity and emotional chaos. The guilt and self-effacement, he insists, should be shared as well as the joy; after an octet's abstract discussion of adultery...
...poet, however, becomes the victim of his own exhortation: his rhetoric helps to clarify the futility of the affair. If he is successful, if he draws Lise finally into the experience of furtive and illicit love, he prevents the affair from ever becoming permanent. They cannot publicize their love...
Those strange changes have indeed begun--when Lise accepts his argument. Their marriages intrude: he is jealous of the time she spends with her legal lover; she prevents him from enjoying...