In the original, the ‘e’ in “the” is italicised. Ain’t that absurd? It makes you say it like ‘thee’, because we ought not to forget that the Orbit I’m being knocked off is that of the poem’s addressee.

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In the original, “knocks me off” is placed slightly lower than the rest of the line. It’s been knocked out of place by the “&]”, because, unlike slashes, square brackets tend to be pretty definite.

Aggressive punctuation. Run for your lives.

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Collisions can be pretty chaotic, especially where love sonnets are involved. That’s mirrored in the proliferation of oblique slashes here, which are usually a way of signalling alternatives – so that “//” gives you an alternative as an alternative, but nothing definite.

As if that weren’t confusing/chaotic enough, the shorthand for ‘with’ is “w/”, giving you a slash which could itself mean either of two alternatives.

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What’s more circuitous than brackets?

The meaning of “circuit” here is partly “a round-about journey or course” (meaning 3.b. in the OED) and partly the idea of an orbit, like planets. The latter definition’s brought into play by the next line.

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This is underlined in the original. Underlining is supposed to be assertive, but there’s nothing assertive about tracing. Oh, the irony.

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This means ‘different’ – you trace a different circuit – but it also refers to the idea of the ‘other’ in philosophy and post-structuralism: something which can’t be understood, and which is placed in opposition to the self (i.e. me). I can’t know you; I can only ever ‘no’ you.

I’ve made the word a bit more ‘other’ by fucking with the letters.

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This is ‘knowing’, but negative, because I don’t. However, even if I did think I knew her/him, it’d still be “no-ing” because I wouldn’t really know them, and a false assumption on which you base knowledge of somebody is a negative, albeit necessary, form of knowledge.

If that makes sense.

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“Askance” literally means ‘sideways’, although where eyes are concerned it’s come to mean ‘suspicious’ or ‘disdainful’. There’s a mix of these ideas here: the cripple is watching disdainfully to see if Roland bites the bait of “his lie”, looking out of the corner of his eye so that Roland doesn’t know he’s looking – though of course Roland spots it.

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In the original, the ‘ion’ bit is in superscript. That places the emphasis on the ‘?’, which probably stands for ‘quest’. One of the ways of looking at love in this poem is as a quest, or journey of sorts.

For more information, see ?uestlove.

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This being a sonnet for a modern love, it really ought to incorporate txtspk.

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