Sneak Peek: Sonnets from the Cycloppennese

“Sonnet” comes from the Italian word sonnetto, meaning “little song.” Isn’t that lovely and lyrical?

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Sonnets used to be about romantic love. The sonnets in sonnet cycles are generally numbered, not entitled, which means they don’t feel they deserve anything but your attention, and perhaps the occasional bouquet of flowers or box of chocolates, or now and then a phone call, just to let them know how you are doing.

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7[1]

My mother’s eye burns brighter than the sun,

For I’ve upset her: she sees bloody red.

If looks be twain, why then her look is one

To singe the jet-black hairs upon my head.[2]

I have seen houses damaged, blast and blight,

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[1] Because he lived well before them, Cyclops has no reason to ask forgiveness of both William Shakespeare and Elizabeth Barrett Browning for apparently satirizing, respectively, “Sonnet 130” and the Sonnets from the Portuguese (specifically “Sonnet 43”). Indeed, it seems very likely that they borrowed from him, but since they’re both dead, we won’t pursue the matter in the courts. John Donne is also dead, but since he very clearly borrowed the line “If looks be twain, why then her look is one” as line 25 of his “A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning,” then it is only fair and just that his estate, which as we understand it is in the hands of his 15^th great-granddaughter Filomena Finis, issue a formal recognition of the debt, and a letter recognizing the genius of the professor in discovering Donne’s oversight, an oversight that would have been more understandable if it had been Milton’s.

Though it should be noted, in Donne’s defense, and in deference to his promise as a poet (sadly unrealized), that alternate editions of the poem in Greek had line three as “For she has turned her laser goggle on,” a line indicative of both a surprising alacrity and an astonishing grasp of particle physics.

[2] No actual cyclopseses (pronounced “sigh-clop-says-eez,”the scientific name for more than one cyclops) were hurt in the making of this poem. Any resemblance of the speaker’s mother to real mothers, especially the professor’s, is accidental and/or strains credulity, given that this poem was written several thousand years before even she was born, and he is just the translator.
3,425,622[3]

If I were manly, instead of what I am—

A bug-eyed freak of nature, with bad teeth jumbo-sized

Here, now, when muscles and great hair are prized—

I’d ask you to accept my meat-hook hand

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[3] This particular sonnet gives us some sense of Cyclops the cyclops’ “process,” which is what artist’s call “making mistakes,” “do-overs,” and “surfing the web for hours when they should be writing.”