Sonnet Analysis: My Old Sonnets XIV

It has been a little while since I indulged in the analysis, rather than the composition or contemplation, of sonnets in this space. This ends now! Let's take a look at another old sonnet of mine, and see if we can't say something helpful about it.

I'm not allowed to say how beautiful
You looked tonight. I think I might go mad.
I looked at other women, but a pull
From your appearance took from what they had
All my appreciation. Look, I tried,
I really did, to look away from you
But I just couldn't. My own eyes defied
My every order - though I must admit they knew
What I desired better than my mind.
I know I shouldn't say it, but desire
Makes me incapable of being blind
And I must tell you. I could say a fire
Burns within me, but that's poetry:
Let's just say you look beautiful to me.

What Went Wrong:
There is one very awkward phrase here: "a pull/from your appearance took from what they had/All my appreciation" not only doesn't roll off the tongue smoothly, but is quiet convoluted when you look at it outside the context of the sonnet too. The ending feels a bit pat; I've noticed, and I expect anyone who has been reading either these old sonnet analyses or the new sonnets being posted here has also noticed, that I have a tendency to that sort of, well, not quite oversimplification, not quite sappiness, but perhaps (over)tidiness. The poem has so much enjambment that the neat unrolling of that last line seems perhaps trite, and certainly in tension with the rhythms that have come before it. The trope of refusing poetry in the middle of a poem is also overused, which contributes to that sense.

Not Too Shabby:
I like the rhythms here. There's a lot of enjambment followed by a half-line that creates an end-stop, and vice-versa, where a half-line leads into a one-and-a-half. That start/stop rhythm seems to reinforce the message of the poem, while also leading towards a certain degree of ambiguity about the sense, if not the sincerity, of the narrator. I really like a couple of the figures, particularly "desire/makes me incapable of being blind," which I find to be a neat aversion of the blinded by desire trope, and the first two lines. The visual emphases - even the "look" as an emphatic - also seem to be handled fairly well, without becoming overly belabored. And, despite what I said above, there is something redeeming about the last line and its setup: it refuses to go any further towards poetry than the initial desire at the top of the poem. In a sense, this poem is a spiral - a circle with progression - because it begins and ends with the desire to express how beautiful the love object is - in one case expressed through the refusal to express it, in the other directly stated. Rather than vowing eternal love, etherealizing the love object, or even elevating the diction of the statement, the final line simply achieves the desire posited at the start: "let's just say you look beautiful to me."