“Of course you do. We all do. We don’t get it—you won’t get it—but don’t be hypocrite enough to pretend you don’t want it, even in a sonnet. Lines to a Mountain Cascade— ‘On its dark rocks like the whiteness of a veil around a bride’—Where did you see a mountain cascade in Prince Edward Island?”
“Nowhere—there’s a picture of one in Dr. Burnley’s library.”
“A Wood Stream—
‘The threading sunbeams quiver,
The bending bushes shiver,
O’er the little shadowy river’—
There’s only one more rhyme that occurs to me and that’s ‘liver.’ Why did you leave it out?”
Emily writhed.
“Wind Song—
‘I have shaken the dew in the meadows