A poem about the loss and renewal of the image

She is never too gone to write this wrong.
Somewhere she is freed from me strong
Enough to be another's immutable image,
A shared sight, but I no longer see its stage.

I was there with her once and always,
But here I am salted and sanded in this ground
Grinding my way into a buried haze.
Shroud of night, crowd of placeless thoughts
And spoke-less wheels, I feel this emptiness round
And through my shades of blurry, blaring sound.

Thy emptying leaves us dangling in dreaded ache and angst.

Tread in this night of ours and see the grey.
Creased with this fight, hours in a meaningless fray,
Leased plights, cried nights, being undone
From blackness and light, we are now none. 　

Into this blank world, speak us to life.
Whirled cup, wine and blood, leak rife
With sand that forms for us glass eyes,
New eyes that see through the crass sighs:
All are images that brew us into you.

She is Love's face shaped with a shy restraint.
Untie me from jealous eyes and chaste-less lies,
Uncensor me to feel the fragile, perfect sight
Of flesh's light in the bosom of a saint.

Explanation:

The idea for this poem came from Charles Williams' book The Image of Beatrice. Williams analyzes Dante's life work, mainly Dante's exposition of his romantic love for the Florentine woman Beatrice. Dante never married Beatrice nor did he ever consumate his love, instead he was rejected, Dante married another woman, and Beatrice died when she was 23. Yet this image of Beatrice remained for Dante so real that it in many ways called him to God as he depicts in the Divine Comedy. Beatrice is the theotokos (God bearer) to Dante. Beatrice and Dante's pure vision of romantic love for her are what bring Dante to God or God to Dante.

The poem is in two states, one the immediate, singular yet common feeling of refusal and departure of a love, the other a totally universal yet always singular feeling of abandonment. These two states in the poem are separated by the single line bewailing the emptying: The emptying of the image of the girl is paralleled with the emptying of the image of God in our sight. Often, when we see this world we see wrong in what was made as right and evil in that which was created as “good” by God. We cannot see with our coveting eyes the beauty of the world, instead we simply know it as things we do not miserly possess. We warp it with our lusts, and our lives are lived in the grey. We have nothing but our own barren struggles as we cannot see God in any of it because our eyes are shaded by our sinful hearts. In both the singular and universal experience, we dangle in the dreaded ache and angst of the departure of a love and the Love.

Then the poem moves to a call for renewal of the image, a prayer; more carefully said it calls for new eyes to see the images of God in the world. These images are everywhere, and while none of them are God, they all were made by God and bear Him forth in some way. Everything created and recreated in this world can be a means to call us to God and all have the possibility when seen with the right eyes to "brew us into you." The end is a retrieval of the singular experience of love and heart break in this new light. Even the romantic vision and the loss of it can call someone to God like it did Dante Alighieri so many years ago.