Sonnets from the Ancient Hibernian

by Miss Holly Maguire

Author's Note:
Mind you, these are sonnets only in the broadest sense, so be warned you fans of Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett-Browning. I've poked at these for quite some time, starting back when I was about fifteen or so and I was suffering from a hopeless crush on a guy who was almost twice my age. There's a rough storyline of some sort, which I was never really able to figure out except they are roughly biographical and (very) roughly chronological. Naturally, they're very angsty, even almost neurasthenically so; my enduring a very nasty broken engagement at age 23 only made it worse. Typical teenage stuff, then deepening, as I matured (sort of). These were intended to be the outpourings of a soul who just wants to be comforted, the kind of person who needs to be loved first, then made lovable (that's the problem with people nowadays, they can't see the diamonds in the rough, the fixer-uppers who just need to have someone reach out to them first.).

Sonnet I

O thou handsome anonymous,
Thy name I have never heard,
But I know thy face well.
When I see it, my eye clouds,
A mist enshrouds my vision
But through that veil
I still see thy face.
O, tell me thy name,
Let my blindness be enlightened.
May I recognize thee
Not merely by face and voice,
But by thy name, dear man.
Keep me from this writhing ignorance
Love hath made me blind to all.

[Comment: I wrote this about a fellow I met at the chapel where my family went to Mass, a quiet but polite guy I saw week after week and whom I started "loving from afar", but I didn't know his name and I was too embarassed to ask him.]