The Dark Lady Demurs
Susan McLean

“Like as the sun,” quoth he, “whose gaze doth rouse

The peeping primrose from his wintry bed,

Thy very glance awakens from his drowse

My captive will, and makes him rear his head.

What though thou cast thy beams on ev’ry field?

Their crop no whit diminisheth my plenty.

Wherefore should I complain if thou dost yield

Thy kindling warmth to two, or two-and-twenty?

Then let not clouds of spleen eclipse thy kindness,

Though, like thine eyes, in darkness thou art light,

And let me share the hoodwink’d boy’s own blindness,

To swear thou art not sullied in my sight.

Shine on—“

Thereat, the conversation ended.

I left him with his metaphor extended.

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Susan’s notes: “This poem originated in my perception that Shakespeare’s sonnets about the so-called Dark Lady (with whom, he suggests, he had an affair that ended after he realized that she was also sleeping with his friend, the so-called Fair Youth) contain language about his mistress that she may well have found insulting. So, I imagined her and Shakespeare meeting for a tryst. He starts reciting an equally insulting sonnet (in my imitation of his style, but of my own invention), and she walks out. As in Shakespeare’s own sonnets, I tried to pack the language with puns and some bawdy innuendo. One of the meanings of “the hoodwink’d boy’ is Cupid, often depicted as being blindfolded because of the notion that love is blind.”

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Susan McLean is a retired English professor from Southwest Minnesota State University. She has published two poetry collections, The Best Disguise and The Whetstone Misses the Knife, and one book of translations of Latin poems by Martial, Selected Epigrams. Her third poetry book, Daylight Losing Time, is forthcoming from Able Muse Press.

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The Dark Lady Demurs Susan McLean

The Dark Lady Demurs
Susan McLean