A Foray into Poetry

In tenth grade, my closest friend and I spent our entire fifth period passing poetry back and forth in scrawled cursive.  We littered the pages with enchanting snippets of hidden wisdom and buried passion:

She howl’d aloud, “I am on fire within.

There comes no murmur of reply.

What is it that will take away my sin,

And save me lest I die?”

—Alfred, Lord Tennyson, "The Palace of Art"

When I have seen by

Time’s fell hand defac’d

The rich-proud cost of outworn buried age;

When sometime lofty towers I see down-raz’d,

And brass eternal slave to mortal rage

—Shakespeare, “Sonnet 64”

My whole life long I learn’d to love.

This hour my utmost art I prove

And speak my passion—heaven or hell?

She will not give me heaven?

’Tis well!

—Robert Browning, “One Way of Love”

We spent hours memorizing our favorites out of the chapter subtitles in The Infernal Devices, curled them in the margins of our notes, traded, and memorized each other's.  I, as a hoarder, have notes dating back to as early as third grade, and so naturally these sonnet-filled books from sophomore history class resurface occasionally and I smile at my own messy cursive and my friend's gorgeously consistent loops, once again stacking the poems in neat piles at the front of my mind and rehearsing them when it suits me.