Her unawed face, whose pose so long assumed
Is touched with what reality we feel,
Bends to itself and, to itself resumed,
Restores a tender fiction to the real.
And in her artful posture movement lies
Whose timeless motion flesh must so conceal;
Yet what her pose conceals we might surmise
And might pretend to gather from her eyes
The final motion flesh gives up to art.
But slowly, if we watch her long enough,
The nerves grow subtler, and she moves apart
Into a space too dim with time and blood
For our set eyes to follow true enough,
Or nerves to guess about her, if they would.
The subtlety and perfection of this Petrarchan sonnet reveals Bowers as a genius of insight and a master of language. I bow before the man who could see and say at this high level. Vivienne
A masterly sonnet on a delicate analogy. 'Ut pictura poesis.'
This poem has not been translated into any other language yet.
I would like to translate this poem
These are not comments And certainly not poems Bowers IS a poet Leave him alone He needs no pedantic analogy Oops I just did the same