a request rises from the ashes, as does John Donne
I have a request to make on behalf of both myself and a user on Reddit's r/Poetry. The TL;DR is that we're looking for the complete poem, title (if applicable) and author that attaches to the following six lines:
But our soul, whose no more bounds nor space requires,
Enclosed in her dear womb of her pure fire,
Born of high love, to aspire
To a fairer life than this frail flesh inherits,
Must hud her wings, when she begins to rise,
And with new plumes, a new Phoenix cries.
My mostly uneducated guess is that these six lines are the last six lines of a sonnet which the user from Reddit thinks is from the 17th Century.
Last night I went hunting via search engines, employing my usual method of taking a phrase from the poem fragment and searching on the complete phrase. When I tried searching for "a new phoenix cries" on DuckDuckGo and Bing I got zero results. When I tried searching using the same phrase on Google and Yandex I got one link from each engine which both pointed to a page on a site called 'eliteskills.com'. The page claims to be an analysis of the poem Elegy VII by John Donne, and contains the complete text of that poem. What's weird is, that poem does not contain the phrase "a new phoenix rises", nor does it contain anything from the six lines in question.
It gets weirder when you read the analysis portion of the page. The "analysis" (scare quotes highly intentional) appears to me to be many paragraphs of AI-generated garbage. It gets even weirder when one notes that the pullquotes which one assumes would be pulled for analysys from Elegy VII are being take from entirely different poems, and then given an analysis that matches neither Elegy VII nor the quoted excerpts.
Another Reddit user speculated that the poem excerpts quoted in the analysis section of the page were themselves AI-generated, so I performed phrase searches and found that of the five poem excerpts included in the analysis, three originated from poems which can be found via search engines.
Beauty, sweet love, is like the morning dew,
Whose short refresh upon the tender green
Cheers for a time, but till the sun doth show,
And straight is gone, as it had never been.
-- from Sonnet XLV by Samuel Daniel
But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.
-- from Philosophical Poems by Henry More
Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely plucked, soon vaded,
Plucked in the bud, and vaded in the spring!
-- from part X of The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare
The other two poem excerpts, this:
And now she's gone, whom I loved so long,
Whom I loved so long and kissed so oft,
And as my sweetest verse and prose,
Has laid herself to rest, and I to wail
That so much love for thee lies buried with thee,
And yet is not even the picture left behind.
and the excerpt at the top of this post: (repeated here for completeness)
But our soul, whose no more bounds nor space requires,
Enclosed in her dear womb of her pure fire,
Born of high love, to aspire
To a fairer life than this frail flesh inherits,
Must hud her wings, when she begins to rise,
And with new plumes, a new Phoenix cries.
cannot be found (at least by me) via conventionally available search engines. Part of my hope is that if anyone who reads to this point has access to academic archives and search tools only available to college students and staff, someone might be able to do a bit of digging in those realms.
A big thank you in advance to anyone who can spare a moment to help with this.
And while we're at it, here's the John Donne poem found in the middle of this mess...
Elegy VII
Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love,
And in that sophistry, oh, thou dost prove
Too subtle: Fool, thou didst not understand
The mystic language of the eye nor hand:
Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the air
Of sighs, and say, this lies, this sounds despair:
Nor by the’eye’s water call a malady
Desperately hot, or changing feverously.
I had not taught thee then, the alphabet
Of flowers, how they devicefully being set
And bound up, might with speechless secrecy
Deliver errands mutely, and mutually.
Remember since all thy words used to be
To every suitor, “I, ’if my friends agree”;
Since, household charms, thy husband’s name to teach,
Were all the love-tricks, that thy wit could reach;
And since, an hour’s discourse could scarce have made
One answer in thee, and that ill arrayed
In broken proverbs, and torn sentences.
Thou art not by so many duties his,
That from the’world’s common having severed thee,
Inlaid thee, neither to be seen, nor see,
As mine: who have with amorous delicacies
Refined thee’into a blissful paradise.
Thy graces and good words my creatures be;
I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee,
Which oh, shall strangers taste? Must I alas
Frame and enamel plate, and drink in glass?
Chafe wax for others’ seals? break a colt’s force
And leave him then, being made a ready horse?
by John Donne
But our soul, whose no more bounds nor space requires,
Enclosed in her dear womb of her pure fire,
Born of high love, to aspire
To a fairer life than this frail flesh inherits,
Must hud her wings, when she begins to rise,
And with new plumes, a new Phoenix cries.
My mostly uneducated guess is that these six lines are the last six lines of a sonnet which the user from Reddit thinks is from the 17th Century.
Last night I went hunting via search engines, employing my usual method of taking a phrase from the poem fragment and searching on the complete phrase. When I tried searching for "a new phoenix cries" on DuckDuckGo and Bing I got zero results. When I tried searching using the same phrase on Google and Yandex I got one link from each engine which both pointed to a page on a site called 'eliteskills.com'. The page claims to be an analysis of the poem Elegy VII by John Donne, and contains the complete text of that poem. What's weird is, that poem does not contain the phrase "a new phoenix rises", nor does it contain anything from the six lines in question.
It gets weirder when you read the analysis portion of the page. The "analysis" (scare quotes highly intentional) appears to me to be many paragraphs of AI-generated garbage. It gets even weirder when one notes that the pullquotes which one assumes would be pulled for analysys from Elegy VII are being take from entirely different poems, and then given an analysis that matches neither Elegy VII nor the quoted excerpts.
Another Reddit user speculated that the poem excerpts quoted in the analysis section of the page were themselves AI-generated, so I performed phrase searches and found that of the five poem excerpts included in the analysis, three originated from poems which can be found via search engines.
Beauty, sweet love, is like the morning dew,
Whose short refresh upon the tender green
Cheers for a time, but till the sun doth show,
And straight is gone, as it had never been.
-- from Sonnet XLV by Samuel Daniel
But souls that of his own good life partake,
He loves as his own self; dear as his eye
They are to Him: He'll never them forsake:
When they shall die, then God himself shall die:
They live, they live in blest eternity.
-- from Philosophical Poems by Henry More
Sweet rose, fair flower, untimely plucked, soon vaded,
Plucked in the bud, and vaded in the spring!
-- from part X of The Passionate Pilgrim by William Shakespeare
The other two poem excerpts, this:
And now she's gone, whom I loved so long,
Whom I loved so long and kissed so oft,
And as my sweetest verse and prose,
Has laid herself to rest, and I to wail
That so much love for thee lies buried with thee,
And yet is not even the picture left behind.
and the excerpt at the top of this post: (repeated here for completeness)
But our soul, whose no more bounds nor space requires,
Enclosed in her dear womb of her pure fire,
Born of high love, to aspire
To a fairer life than this frail flesh inherits,
Must hud her wings, when she begins to rise,
And with new plumes, a new Phoenix cries.
cannot be found (at least by me) via conventionally available search engines. Part of my hope is that if anyone who reads to this point has access to academic archives and search tools only available to college students and staff, someone might be able to do a bit of digging in those realms.
A big thank you in advance to anyone who can spare a moment to help with this.
And while we're at it, here's the John Donne poem found in the middle of this mess...
Elegy VII
Nature’s lay idiot, I taught thee to love,
And in that sophistry, oh, thou dost prove
Too subtle: Fool, thou didst not understand
The mystic language of the eye nor hand:
Nor couldst thou judge the difference of the air
Of sighs, and say, this lies, this sounds despair:
Nor by the’eye’s water call a malady
Desperately hot, or changing feverously.
I had not taught thee then, the alphabet
Of flowers, how they devicefully being set
And bound up, might with speechless secrecy
Deliver errands mutely, and mutually.
Remember since all thy words used to be
To every suitor, “I, ’if my friends agree”;
Since, household charms, thy husband’s name to teach,
Were all the love-tricks, that thy wit could reach;
And since, an hour’s discourse could scarce have made
One answer in thee, and that ill arrayed
In broken proverbs, and torn sentences.
Thou art not by so many duties his,
That from the’world’s common having severed thee,
Inlaid thee, neither to be seen, nor see,
As mine: who have with amorous delicacies
Refined thee’into a blissful paradise.
Thy graces and good words my creatures be;
I planted knowledge and life’s tree in thee,
Which oh, shall strangers taste? Must I alas
Frame and enamel plate, and drink in glass?
Chafe wax for others’ seals? break a colt’s force
And leave him then, being made a ready horse?
by John Donne