To a Poet.
Beloved musician, I will give my lyre
For the strong playing of thy fingers' skill
To strike the deeper chords, and then the wire
More deft than I, till chaos linger shrill
Into the thinner ecstasies of light;
For more obedient be it to thy mind
Than mine,
Posessing [sic] notes of ocean, and of wind,
So take it till with sure, maturer touch,
(Learnt from thy playing) of my tender hand,
I give back thanks with a sweet note a such
As answereth thee; for thou wilt understand.
Play on it now, this instrument my heart
Which I lend thee, till I take up my part.
Two things I noticed about this poem - besides its quality, which is not exactly stellar -were the title and the erratic punctuation. The title could be addressing the unknown travelling companion, because if the two were to trade their books of poetry, the travelling companion must have been a poet as well. The punctuation just bothered us a lot because he often used it in places where it seemed unnecessary both grammatically and poetically, although admittedly neither of us is especially well versed in poetry.
Excellent job! I like that you have also reproduced the indentations. I think the punctuation is excessive, but perhaps not erratic--he uses it to create a general sense of complexity. The sense of the poem seems to be that the addressee is a maturer poet than the speaker--therefore he hands over his "lyre" to him. Not an exceptionally great poem, I agree. I like how you remembered to use "sic" to mark his spelling error (a bit embarrassing!). There's one point where I differ a bit-I would have left "unnurtured" in parenthesis, simply because he uses a parenthetical insertion later (l. 9: "Learnt from thy playing"), so I think it's not just an editorial mark. Excellent.
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