Petrarch Meets Laura

It was on this day, April 6, in 1327, that Italian poet Petrarch first set eyes on “Laura,” the ethereal woman he would use as his muse for more than 300 sonnets. 

He met Laura on a Good Friday at St. Clare Church in Avignon. Some historians think she was a woman named Laura de Noves, a married mother, and most agree that she never responded to Petrarch’s overtures. 

The first 263 poems Petrarch wrote for her are known as the Rime in Vita Laura. She died during the Black Death of 1348. After she died, the remaining poems were known as Rime in Morte Laura.

Petrarch’s works for Laura laid the groundwork for the sonnets of the Elizabethan era. Shakespeare would not be Shakespeare without Petrarch.

About his unconsummated love for Laura, Petrarch wrote:

“In my younger days, I struggled constantly with an overwhelming but pure love affair — my only one, and I would have struggled with it longer had not premature death, bitter but salutary for me, extinguished the cooling flames. I certainly wish I could say that I have always been entirely free from desires of the flesh, but I would be lying if I did.”

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Prompt: Uncertainty

Our theme this month is uncertainty. You could say we live in a time of uncertainty, but hasn't that always been true?

In 1927, physicist Werner Heisenberg first described his Uncertainty Principle, saying that the more precisely we can determine a particle's momentum, the less information we have about its position, and vice versa. The principle represents one of the most fundamental differences between quantum mechanics and classical physics. Albert Einstein, a classical physicist, disagreed with quantum mechanics in general and the Uncertainty Principle in particular. 

Einstein said, "I like to believe that the moon is still there even if we don't look at it," and that "God does not play dice with the universe." He wanted certainty. He wanted to believe that there was some certainty in the universe.

In his 1919 poem "The Second Coming," William Butler Yeats describes the atmosphere of post-WWI Europe and a vision of the future. I saw that future as uncertain.

The first stanza introduces Yeats' concept of the gyre, a world which is "turning and turning" in a gyre that widens to the point of apocalypse.

THE SECOND COMING 
by William Butler Yeats

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The second stanza is a prophetic vision that uses Christian imagery regarding the Apocalypse and Second Coming. Yeats is reaching for some certainty, but there is uncertainty in the lines "Surely some revelation is at hand / Surely the Second Coming is at hand."

There are many poems on the theme of uncertainty. In "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost, we see that the former is about choice and the uncertainty of paths offered. The latter poem is about the uncertainty of yielding to temptation versus continuing on. Einstein might have liked Frost's "Design," which is a darker meditation on whether events in nature and life have meaning or are governed by randomness.

In "Ode to a Nightingale," John Keats expresses uncertainty about what is real, what is fleeting, and whether transcendence is possible.

"Because I could not stop for Death" shows Emily Dickinson exploring the uncertainty of death and eternity in a calm but mysterious tone, leaving readers unsure what lies beyond.

Our call for submissions for our May issue is for poems that clearly focus on the theme of uncertainty.

Submission deadline: April 30, 2026.

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To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Celebrate National Poetry Month

Launched by the Academy of American Poets in April 1996, National Poetry Month is a special occasion that celebrates poets’ integral role in our culture and that poetry matters. Over the years, it has become the largest literary celebration in the world, with tens of millions of readers, students, K–12 teachers, librarians, booksellers, literary events curators, publishers, families, and—of course—poets, marking poetry’s important place in our lives.

For information and ways to celebrate, see poets.org/national-poetry-month-30th-anniversary

Poster Design & Illustration by Alfredo Richner | Nítido Taller Creativo | supernitido.com.

Lines excerpted from the poem, “The Chance” by Arthur Sze, from The Redshifting Web: New & Selected Poems (Copper Canyon Press, 1998).

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
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Rejection

An earlier post here was about the new use of the term "uncurated" in making poetrt submissions. Writing that post made me think about how the term "rejected" has been replaced by "declined" by some publishers. Do you feel any better about having a submission "declined" rather than "rejected"?

How do you feel about those templated decline emails that you get from journals and publishers? They are almost always a "compliment sandwich," with the decline slipped between two slices of of positivity. "Thank you for the opportunity to read your work" - then something about how many submissions they received and how hard it was to select the few poems they are using or the winner of that contest - "We hope you'll consider submitting in the future" - and paying a fee again to do so.

Anyone who has been through their teen years has experienced enough rejection for a lifetime. But writers invite rejection when they share their work with publishers. I think poets have more opportunities than writers in other genres because they can constantly be sending out a poem or a few poems to multiple publishers. 

I was reading about some famous examples of novels that were rejected many times before being accepted and turned out to be classics. Sometimes a novel just needs to find the right editor.

Here is the tale of a novel that is in the literary canon (and often read in those teenage years in schools), but that found many rejections before being published.  

William Golding finished his novel, Lord of the Flies, sent it out, and had it returned 21 times. When it went to Faber and Faber, it was initially marked for rejection. The reader (not an editor, of course) assigned to it called the work “absurd,” “dull,” and “pointless.” But a young editor at the firm named Charles Monteith, needing something to read on the train, grabbed it off the slush pile and realized its potential.

Lord of the Flies tells the story of a group of preadolescent boys stranded on a desert island after their plane is shot down while evacuating them from Britain during a fictional war. The submitted manuscript was changed quite a bit in the editing process, and the revised version went on to be a staple of high school reading lists, and William Golding went from a pile of rejections to winning the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Image from the Peter Brook film version package

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Follow this blog for all things poetry.
To see our past prompts and more than 300 issues,
visit our website at poetsonline.org