There is a coldness in the old century’s glass,
where love was sorted into acceptable light,
and what did not fit was sent into coded language,
folded into myth so it might survive as metaphor.
They wrote of beauty as if it were eternal and male,
as if desire could be made safer by turning it classical,
Apollo’s face stretched across poems like permission,
a mask that both revealed and concealed what was meant.
In their lines, affection never stood still—it disguised itself,
becoming antiquity, becoming sculpture, becoming distance,
so that longing could pass through the gate of propriety
without being named too loudly in the present tense.
Yet even disguise carries its own kind of honesty,
a record of what could not be spoken without consequence,
and the poems still shimmer with that tension—
between admiration allowed and love that had to hide inside it.
We read them now as traces rather than certainty,
as voices adjusting their shape to survive the room they were in,
and we hear, beneath the ornament and restraint,
the human risk of wanting without a safe vocabulary.