On Janus

Sonnet IV

New yeare forth looking out of Janus gate,
Doth seeme to promise hope of new delight:
And bidding th’old Adieu, his passed date
Bids all old thoughts to die in dumpish spright
And calling forth out of sad Winters night,
Fresh love, that long hath slept in cheerlesse bower:
Wils him awake, and soone about him dight
His wanton wings and darts of deadly power.
For lusty spring now in his timely howre,
Is ready to come forth him to receive:
And warnes the Earth with divers colord flowre,
To decke hir selfe, and her faire mantle weave.
Then you faire flowre, in whom fresh youth doth raine,
Prepare your selfe new love to entertaine.

—Edmund Spenser

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For beginnings and endings. For invocation and provocation. For witness. For our two faces. For nature doubled. For the position and consequence. For the gate and passage. For the opening and the closure. For that consecration. For omen and auspice. For the hinge of the oak. For the door. For the home. For the terminus and temple. For the arch. For the key is not the staff. For the turn, the turn. For the dark of the sun and the light of the moon. For the sacred and the profane. For the cut and the burn and the honey and the salt. For our wounds. For the harvest and the planting, the death and the birth. For the lamb and the greasing of each spear. For the five-fold bond, reducible, irreducible. For the flesh. For the stone. For the exact and spectral. For our fetch. For pretence and excess. For each fragment, the ritual and the rest. For footsteps. For the foray and the return. For Jupiter and Juno, the funeral and the feast. For the Forum Transitorum. For exclusions and errors, forward and back. For sleep and sleeplessness. For the real and the dream. For decadence and ruin. For no time, our time between. For what could be not for what is. For apocalypse. For each transformative catastrophe and the revelation of truth. For regeneration. For mercy is not forgiveness. For everyone assumes the role of seer. For recognition and recovery. For resistance. For salvage. For rescue. For transience. For prepare your selfe new love to entertaine.

The views expressed in the Writer-in-Residence blogs are those held by the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of Open Book: Toronto.