əliʃə bɛθ

Eros in itself means want, lack, desire for that which is missing, Anne Carson points out. And she writes, “If we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole”

It is this hole caused by love’s damage that tells the most about the sonnet, as about the lyric in general. For it is not merely that the hole is the subject of the lyric but also the troubled relation between the hole’s intensity of emotion and the elaborate controlling form of the sonnet.