Sonnet: Octave and Sestet

I said I would read the last chapter of Gaudy Night, and so I did; then I went back and began at chapter one, and so until I wrapped the final chapter again in its proper position. Lord Peter may be a damn sight too sensitive, and Harriet Vane too stubbornly, willfully blind, but then, without conflict, whence plot?

One element, not of plot but of theme, is that in Oxford Harriet finds her creative voice again, welling up in the severe scholarly beauty of the stone city. She writes the octave of a sonnet about the university as a fixed point in a whirling world, and puts it aside, unable to find a turn for the sestet. (The sestet, in the Petrarchan sonnet, turns the octave, or challenges it, or answers a question posed.) Later, while flipping through her notebook after she's lent it to Peter to study her case-notes, she finds he's finished the sonnet, using the sestet to turn the peaceful fixed center of the octave into the love-driven whirl of a top. This infuriates Harriet (not least because Peter's lines are better than her own), but it also intrigues her into giving Peter a long-overdue reassessment.

I myself had some quiet hours today, our broken washing machine causing me to spend several hours running loads of laundry at my mother-in-law's new house around the block, empty until she moves out in the spring. And I, like Harriet Vane, had a first line pushing up a small green shoot. And so, after I'd finished my blocking for the next rehearsal, as the last load tumbled about the dryer, I took up my pad (mostly used, like Harriet's, for the business at hand), and turned some lines, of which these are the final form.

God saw that it was good, and so you are,

And so your eyes have taught my eyes to see,

Your tongue my tongue to taste, heart's library 

As richened by close reading, your memoir;

As longing for your light, my double-star,

My soul entwined with yours, nor wanting free,

Now two, now one, now like the One-in-Three,

Love's unity begets love's avatar.

But still the veil this veiléd flesh and mind 

Conceals, nor ever fully rent in twain

Until at last we know as we are known;

Until within that blessed Thought we find

The Father of our friendship; so attain

Our dim loves' one true dawn, all space o'erthrown.