[Julie Steiner]

The ballot form is now available * * * AT THIS LINK * * * . Happy voting! The polls will remain open until noon Eastern Daylight Time on Thursday, July 24, 2025. (That's a little over a week.) Noon EDT is 5pm in London and 9am in Los Angeles.

If you would like to shower your favorites with compliments by posting replies to this thread, feel free to electioneer.

Only one line of poetry written by Ginevra de'Benci has survived, the opening of a sestina, which reads: “I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger.”
     — Mary D. Garrard, “Leonardo da Vinci: Female Portraits, Female Nature” from The Expanding Discourse: Feminism And Art History (edited by Norma Broude)

Wow. I don't know what to make of that. Maybe you will.

Your challenge: Write a poem in any form, somehow inspired by that line, and post it to this thread. Enter as many times as you like. You may edit your entries until the entry deadline (noon Eastern Daylight Time, 7/15/2025).

Judging: After the entries close, I'll post a Google form that will allow currently-active Eratosphere members to vote for their favorites. Depending on the quality of the entries, I might also send a group of my own favorites (anonymized) to a celebrity judge.

Prizes: Undying glory, of course. Also, your choice from among five poetry books that I've accumulated, mailed to you at my expense.

[Additional research:]

[...] there is a letter to Ginevra written by an unidentified lute player, signed ‘G+H’, who lived in Rome at the papal court. This letter informs us that Ginevra was engaged in writing poetry. The lute player wrote that he had told the Roman ladies about the virtues of Florentine women, and especially those of Ginevra herself. In the same letter he begged her to send him a sestina she had written, of which he was only able to remember the first line: ‘I ask your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger’. (12) Apart from this single line from a second hand, no poetry by Ginevra is known to have survived.

(Footnote 12): ‘Chieggio merzede e sono alpestro tygre’, ‘G+H’ to Ginevra de’ Benci, Rome, 12-17 August 1490. The letter was first published by: Carnesecchi 1909, p. 293-296; re-published with an English translation in: Walker 1967, app. II, p. 24-27.

(Quoted from a 2015 doctoral thesis at https://scholarlypublications.univer...dle/1887/33552.)


Modern Italian dictionary entries:

chieggio = archaic first person singular of chiedere, to ask, request, beg
mercede = wage, salary (archaic usages: recompense, recognition, prize, pity, mercy, grace)
chiedo scusa, chiedo perdone = (modern Italian) I ask forgiveness, I beg (your) pardon
e = and
sono = I am
alpestro = Alpine (masculine adjective)
tigre = tiger (masculine noun)

Maybe "I ask forgiveness" is an inaccurate translation, and she actually wrote "I request recognition that I am a mountain tiger." However, "that" would have been che rather than e, and e elides nicely with the final syllable of merzede to form a standard hendecasyllabic (eleven-syllable) line, while che does not. Hmmm. Anyway, it's your call, poets.


Possibly relevant:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/European_wildcat


Message moved from the top of the thread, since it's no longer current (but is still important):

The entry deadline is noon Eastern Daylight Time, 7/15/2025. (That's 5pm in London and 9am in Los Angeles.)

[RCL]

Julie, a shot in the dark. . .

Here, Kitty Kitty

After a line by Ginevra de'Benci

With smiles, you called me your sweet Kitty
and hoped that it would make me purr.
You swore you had a rhyming cure;
proven soothing care, not pity.
It’s true that I was feeling chilly.
But your persistence seemed a spur
to rouse my fight response, to lure
me even closer and to bed me.

Forgive me, Tony, that it was rainy,
frosty weather! Under it,
ice flakes on my hair, eyes runny,
I growled and threw a hissy fit:
I’m a tiger, not a house cat,
so sack the formal poetry scat!

[Julie Steiner]

Thanks for getting the (hair)ball rolling, Ralph!

[Glenn Wright]

Tigress

Her lady’s maids were charmed by the rich cloth—
velvets, silks, embroidered fancifully
in colors of spring flowers. She chose a froth
of lace and golden satin, dutifully.

But when the dress was made, the painter hired,
she stubbornly refused to wear the gown,
insisting she herself should be admired
by him who sought a wife to make his own.

She wore her plain, brown shift, displayed no jewels.
The artist, young Leonardo, understood,
and honestly presented her so fools
wanting only her father’s money would

see the thorns around her and not like her.
“Beg pardon, and I am a mountain tiger.”

[Roger Slater]

I ask for your forgiveness and I am a mountain tiger,
and, as such, the teeth inside my gaping mouth are keen,
and I possess the mountain tiger's famed tempestuous temper,
so go ahead. Forgive me. Otherwise I can be mean.

[Susan McLean]

Challenge
....After a line by Ginevra de' Benci

I hope my bed is not just one to die on.
The other women flee from you in fear,
for you're a hunter mighty as Orion,
and they have seen your heaps of conquered deer.
I seek your grace—and I'm a mountain lion.

[R. Nemo Hill]

.
.
.
Deity


My live-and-let-live-ness
tells me: mind your own business.
All your altars remind me
to take less, to give less—
yet your prayers have defined me

and I am a mountain tiger.

Virgins undressed
and slathered with scent!
Fair boys who consent
like wheat to be threshed!
I ask their forgiveness—

for I am a mountain tiger.

I’m wild and untamed
and I cannot be named
by these sins you’d redress
through incense and flame.
Uncursed,
...............unblessed—

I ask your forgiveness.
I am a mountain tiger.
.
.
.

[Hilary Biehl]

Mountain Tiger

After a line by Ginevra de’Benci

She asked forgiveness, not because
she felt ashamed of what she was
(the patterned skin, the sudden claws),
but to hold accountable
(by faultless manners) every soul
that failed to fear the beautiful.

[Brian Allgar]

If I'd been born a tiger, well, I guess
I coulda ripped my enemies apart
With fangs and claws, but that would leave a mess,
And I'm a tidy-minded Prez, and smart.
So though my enemies will end up dead,
I'll let the 'gators do the job instead.

[John Beaton]

Hello, Julie. It's been some time since I posted here but I keep looking in. This challenge intrigued me so I thought I'd have a go.

What He Wrote?

Dear Ginevra,
spaces spacesbpoetess and writer,
I am the lowly lutist who’s obsessed
with how your verse converts you to a fighter.
Your last performance haunts me—I’m possessed
with efforts to remember all the words
of one sestina I heard you recite—
they burst into my head like savage birds
and cawed celestial love songs there all night.

They’re gone but for one line that beckons me
to seek you out and summon back the rest:
I ask for recognition… why the plea
and why the claim that drew me to this quest?
You said …that I’m a mountain tiger. All
I recollect now is the feral way
you kissed me when you’d left the curtain call.
My very fingers shook. I still can’t play.

I’m baffled that you sought my clemency
for break-blow-burning joy that made my day
unless your penetrating eye could see
into my soul and know, thus kissed, I’m prey
whom you can stalk and maul and kill at will
through that one line of poetry, a tether
that bound me to you then and binds me still,
that means we’ll die in some way linked together.

So, send me, please, the other lines I lack
that I may feel your claws upon my back.

G + H