Welcome back to the Daily Poem here at the Close Reeds Podcast Network.

I'm David Curley.

Today's poem is by Edna St. Vincent Malay.

She lived from 1892 to 1950 and was an American poet and playwright.

She received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1923 and was actually the third woman to ever win that award.

Famously, her Wikipedia page even includes this actually. Famously, Richard Wilbur asserted

that she wrote some of the best sonnets of the century. And today I'm going to read one of those

sonnets. Its first line is the title of it, as with many sonnets, and that first line is, Euclid alone has

looked on Beauty Bear.

This is how it goes.

Euclid alone has looked on Beauty Bear.

Let all who prate of beauty hold their peace and lay them prone

upon the earth and cease to ponder on themselves. The while they stare at nothing, intricately drawn

nowhere in shapes of shifting lineage. Let geese gabble and hiss, but heroes seek release from

dusty bondage into luminous air.

O blinding hour, oh holy terrible day, when first the shaft into his vision shone of light anatomized,

Euclid alone has looked on beauty bear.

Fortunate they who, though once only and then but far away, have heard

her massive sandal set on stone. So this is a Petrarchan, a Petrarchan sonnet that was written

when she was somewhat young from what I can tell, and it was published in a book called The Harp Weaver and Other Poems.

There's a couple of things I had to look up in this poem because, for example, I was really wondering what was up with the geese, gabbling, and hissing.

This is an illusion that I was not immediately familiar with, so I did a little bit of research.

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