Countless Silken Ties  In his beautiful meditation on marriage
(page 12), Jeff Mirus speaks of “the circumscribed space of
married love” which “open(s) out to the infinite.” This
affecting image immediately put me in mind of William
Wordsworth’s sonnet “Nuns fret not at their convent’s narrow
room” which says “In truth the prison, unto which we doom /
Ourselves, no prison is.” Wordsworth’s own non-prison in this
case is the 14-line sonnet, a highly structured poem whose many
rules can seem to stifle. Creativity needs freedom, right? How
can the poet realize his full potential if he obeys a bunch of
arbitrary rules? But Wordsworth—father of romantic poetry that
he is—replies that the restrictions are a “solace” from “the
weight of too much liberty.”  Poets write a lot about
circumscribed spaces and limitations because they work in such
small spaces. They aren’t just talking about poetry, of course,
but of the human condition. And for the most part, they
celebrate the constraints rather than lament them. Robert