This poem is a sonnet where each line is from a different century, with a few light-touch changes I made. I cheated a little because the first line is from the 700s BC, and sometimes I’m using the birth/death dates of the poets instead of the exact century the line was written in, but on the whole the poem spans almost three millennia, especially the past thirteen centuries, including & concluding with the one we live in now.
Sources for each line:
1: (700s BC) from “Cai Ge” in the Wang Odes
2: (800s) from Meters of Boethius, by way of Alfred the Great—translator into modern English unknown
3: (900s) from “The Song of Dark Flowers” by Andal, tr. Ravi Shankar
4: (1000s) from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam, tr. Edward Fitzgerald
5: (1100s) from a fragment by the woman troubadour Tibors, translated by Meg Bogin in this book
6: (1200s) from a tanka by Princess Shokushi (d. 1201), tr. Sato
7: (1300s) from “El poema de Tlaltecatzin”, by Tlaltecatzin de Cuauhchinanco, literal translation by me
8: (1400s) an adaptation from lines by Mirabai (b. 1498), trs. Bly & Hirshfield in the book excerpted here
9: (1500s) from “Hymn of Constancy” (c. 1585–1587) by Chŏng Ch’ŏl, tr, Peter H. Lee in this book
10: (1600s) from a poem by Dorothe Engelbretsdatter, tr. John Irons
11: (1700s) from Hymns to the Night by Novalis, translator into English unknown
12: (1800s) from « The Sleeper in the Valley » by Arthur Rimbaud, tr. Wallace Fowlie
13: (1900s) from « Such Sweetness » by Anne-Marie Albiach, tr. Anthony Barnett
14: (2000s) from “A Poem” by Ariana Reines
