Word: poetes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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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...
Their "incredible marriage" dissolves, then begins 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...
...mutual involvement in the affair (and the sonnets) becomes more intense when the poet and the mistress ally against (hypothetically) skeptical readers...
...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...
...results may already be obvious. Throughout the sonnets the poet's feelings oppose his situation; he is always aspring either to a more enjoyable or a less unpleasant state. The sonneteer seems doomed to an unrewarded labor. Unable to predict his next reaction, confused about the painful progression of his feelings, trying even to be honest even about his dishonesty--"for poets are eigned to lie, and I / For you a liar am a thousand times." Perhaps his most significant lie is the most implicit: he assumes the continued intensity of his love for Lise, judges his victory...