Underneath the Bough: A Book of Verses

Chapter 32: Blest Be the Day.

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About This Book

A collection of verse that shifts between brisk depictions of modern life—motor races and city heat—and intimate lyrical sonnets exploring love, memory, and devotional longing. Classical and medieval references recur alongside pagan pastoral fantasies that imagine escape to woodland Hesperides, while formal experiments include songs, sonnets, ballades, rondeaux and a pantoum. A seasonal sequence maps moods across spring to winter, and a concluding suite treats mortality through elegy and dark humor. The poems balance energetic narrative scenes with reflective, sometimes elegiac meditations on desire, nature, and death.

Blest Be the Day.

The XXXIXth Sonnet
of Petrarch
to his Lady Laura.

He blesseth all the divers causes and effects of his love toward her.

BLEST be the day, the season and the year

The hour and moment, and the countrie fair,

Ay, even that very spot and instant where

Those two sweet eyne did first to me appear

Which since have left me—yet that sorrow dear

Of Love still blessèd be, like as the bow

And shafts wherewith sweet Love did work me woe

With wounds most deep in this my bosom here.

Blest be the many voices wherewithal

I on my Lady’s well-belovèd name

Have called, and blest the sighs, the tears, the flame

Of my desire, and all my screeds designed

To praise her—yet most blest my thoughts I call,

So hers that none but she may entrance find...