suspiria

It has just come to my knowledge that there exists a bridge in Venice called "The Bridge of Sighs".
This is rather enchanting to me.  A bridge of sighs.

Here is a photograph:

It's made of white limestone.  How perfect is that?  It's an enclosed bridge, and it has windows, but those windows have bars on them.

The bridge connects the state interrogation rooms to the prison, and this is why Lord Byron gave it its name, because it was supposedly the last light of day that convicted prisoners would see for quite some time, if not forever.

Unfortunately, by the time the bridge was built in 1602, the days of interrogations and swift executions were past, and really most of the prisoners who traversed the bridge were being held for petty crimes.  But still, the bridge's name had been something ordinary for nearly two centuries before Lord Byron came around and upgraded it.  What a kind poet.

Here is the view of Venice from inside the bridge:

As you can see, the "last view" of Venice really isn't that visible...I doubt many convicts really had time to peek through the holes while they were being escorted to their fates.

So really, the magnanimously named Bridge of Sighs is a disappointment, because the crossing of it is less dramatic than we wanted, and the view is less present than we imagined, so it's actually a bridge of sighs because it's not what we hoped Lord Byron meant.

That dastardly poet.  Leading us on like that.

But that's what poets are here for.  They make ordinary things seem terribly romantic.  We fall in love with the idea of a Bridge of Sighs, only to be devastated when it's just a normal bridge that you can't even see out of, stretching between two civic buildings.  So if we just ignore reality and stick to poetry, then things are magnificent again.  Or at least...not ordinary.  Which is what we want, in a silly way.  We want meaning to be assigned to arbitrary things so that we feel a little more special, perhaps a little more human.  So we have poets to assign those meanings, and we revel in them because of their break from reality.

"Poet" is such a title, don't you think?