A Lover's Diary, Complete

A Lover's Diary, Complete

A Lovers Diary has not the same modest history as Embers. As far back as 1894 it was given to the public without any apology or excuse, but I have been apologising for it ever since, in one waywithout avail. I wished that at least one-fifth of it had not been published; but my apology was never heard till now as I withdraw from this edition of A Lovers Diary some twenty-five sonnets representing fully one-fifth of the original edition. As it now stands the faint thread of narrative is more distinct, and redundancy of sentiment and words is modified to some extent at any rate. Such material story as there is, apart from the spiritual history embodied in the sonnets, seems more visible now, and the reader has a clearer revelation of a young, aspiring, candid mind shadowed by stern conventions of thought, dogma, and formula, but breaking loose from the environment which smothered it. The price it pays for the revelation is a hopeless love informed by temptation, but lifted away from ruinous elements by self-renunciation, to end with the inevitable parting, poignant and permanent, a task of the soul finished and the toll of the journey of understanding paid. The six sonnets in italics, beginning with The Bride, and ending with Annunciation, have nothing to do with the story further than to show two phases of the youths mind before it was shaken by speculation, plunged into the sadness of doubt and apprehension, and before it had found the love which was to reveal it to itself, transform the character, and give new impulse and direction to personal force and individual sense. These were written when I was twenty and twenty-one years of age, and the sonnet sequence of A Lovers Diary was begun when I was twenty-three. They were continued over seven years in varying quantity. Sometimes two or three were written in a week, and then no more would be written for several weeks or maybe months, and it is clearly to be seen from the text, from the change in style, and above all in the nature of the thought that between The Darkened Way, which ends one epoch, and Reunited, which begins another and the last epoch, were intervening years. The sonnet which begins the book and particularly that which ends the book have been very widely quoted, and Envoy has been set to music by more than one celebrated musician. Whatever the monotony of a sonnet sequence (and it is a form which I should not have chosen if I had been older and wiser) there has been a continuous, if limited, demand for the little book. As Edmund Clarence Stedman said in a review, it was a book which had to be written. It was an impulse, a vision, and a revealing, and, in his own words in a letter to me, It was to be done whether you willed it or no, and there it is a truthful thing of which you shall be glad in spite of what you say. ......Buy Now (To Read More)

Product details

Ebook Number: 6274
Author: Parker, Gilbert
Release Date: Nov 18, 2004
Format: eBook
Language: English