Volta project, #54

Sonnet with visuals and smell images on a dark and damp afternoon:

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LIV

  O! how much more doth beauty beauteous seem

  By that sweet ornament which truth doth give.

  The rose looks fair, but fairer we it deem

  For that sweet odour, which doth in it live.

  The canker blooms have full as deep a dye

  As the perfumed tincture of the roses.

  Hang on such thorns, and play as wantonly

  When summer's breath their masked buds discloses:

  But, for their virtue only is their show,

  They live unwoo'd, and unrespected fade;

  Die to themselves. Sweet roses do not so;

  Of their sweet deaths, are sweetest odours made:

    And so of you, beauteous and lovely youth,

    When that shall fade, my verse distills your truth.

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A one-metaphor poem’s a one-hump wump  J  Also, this one includes ending a sentence in the middle of a line (in line 11)—rare in Shakespeare  J  The volta’s the and so at the beginning of the closing couplet, the turn in this case being turning from the flowers metaphor to the lyric you (and the lyric I), and the turn is only fully realized in the last five words of the sonnet.  More tomorrow—