@ 27.055 MHz: Ad Astra; To Lord Byron

You heard him sing, first, in the Trinity

chapel.  When the song was over and done,

Love for him entered your heart, eagerly

devout to that cute choirboy, John Edleston.


Cute did I say?  Lovely as Marlowe meant

(though censored by haughty haters' rages---

the gutless, whose souls are incontinent;

stymied by a Poet's precious pages).


Shoeless and shirtless, in trousers well-pressed;

his slender feet sheathed in socks of fawn-gray

beauty like his is always well expressed

in poems on which imaginations play.


In Heaven now, above the summers' and winters' sun,

is (as he was, but more) John Edleston.


Starward

[*/+/^]

Author's Notes/Comments: 

For those readers who read between, around, and through the lines, the last two lines of this poem are meant to be modified by the ninth.


I have rarely written a Shakesperian sonnet.  This poem, about the beautiful John Edleston (1790-1811), beloved of Lord Byron, came together, somewhat, by itself.  I just happened to be at the right place and time to transcribe it. 


The reference to Christopher Marlowe alludes to his play, Edward II, I:i, and its phrase "Sometime a lovely boy . . ."

 

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