You have left me here. No longer am I
To see you again. Your voice lurks my mind.
The thought that you've left me can make me cry.
You left me alone. You left me behind.
Your face swamps around my head. Dreams of you
Haunt me every night. I loved you so.
Everyday you were here my love grew.
Then came the day I had to let you go.
Everything reminds me of you. Each
Noise I hear. Every man that I see.
Each dream I have of you. I try to reach
For you . But then you walk away from me.
But I wake up and remember you're gone.
My love for you will never be withdrawn.
Thanks very much for sharing this sonnet! I’m going to first look at the nuts and bolts of the sonnet form (the rhyme, the iambic pentameter) and then move onto the content of your verse.
ReplyDeleteFirst off, you’ve got the rhyme scheme absolutely spot on – no worries there! Iambic pentameter is slightly trickier to master, however. The sonnet begins in trochees, rather than iambs (e.g. the stress is ‘YOU have LEFT me HERE') It doesn’t stick to this rhythm, but there are other places where you lose grip on iambic pentameter. Try out reading your work aloud, feeling where the stresses naturally lie, and reworking if necessary. From Task 29 you know you can do it! It’s just that bit harder when it’s written within the demands of a longer poem in mind. I’m glad that you’ve tried out caesura and enjambment in this piece. I particularly like ‘You left me alone. You left me behind.’ The caesura makes it so brittle, such a statement of fact – which makes it seems crueller, realer. It’s a simple, bold, and effective.
This takes us to the content of the verse. There’s some really nice details here – the line I mentioned above stands out, but I also like ‘Each / Noise I hear’. The reader is used to the “everything reminds me of him” concept, but having this extended right down to noises shows just how much this man has got in the narrator’s head. Using familiar concepts, extending them, subverting them, is a trick used in both poetry and prose – and here this little detail does it very effectively.
However, there are some less effective moments in this poem; probably some of these were dictated by the strict demands of the form. ‘Your voice lurks my mind’ is an unusual, slightly jarring construction – ‘your voice lurks in my mind’ would be more readable. A similar point can be made about ‘your face swamps around my head’. There’s also a couple of slightly weak words, which undermine the sense of grief; ‘the thought that you've left me CAN make me cry’, for example, and also that final verb of ‘withdrawn’. Some of the piece is nicely ambiguous (those unusual verb choices I picked out actually add to this – rework them to be slightly more readable they’ll make for a really good poem), but some of it seems under-explained. ‘Then came the day I had to let you go’, for me, doesn’t carry any resonance because it just seems so much to come from nowhere. ‘Why?!’ I want to say! Please, don’t explain away all the mysteries of the sonnet, but a little more foreshadowing of this line (or just dropping it altogether) might make for a stronger work. For me, this sonnet captures a feeling of obsessive grief – of being absolutely haunted by someone. It’s slightly unsettling, and who ever would want poetry to be an easy, passive read? :)
Hi giggly angel,
ReplyDeleteYou have created a powerful mood of grief which is illustrated in the slowing of pace through regular use of caesura. It’s great to see you experimenting further with this technique, and you use enjambment effectively. I like the sense of a permanent state of everlasting emotional
attachment you create in the final line. There’s a feeling that the narrator of this poem is haunted by the one they’ve lost to such
an extent that the loved one appears in dreams: ‘Dreams of you haunt me every night.’
I noticed that the meter wasn’t quite right in places....
‘Your FACE SWAMPS aROUND my HEAD. DREAMS of you.’
To me both swamps, head, and dreams are words that require a stress...
This happens occasionally with other lines, too, where one stress sits beside another. It’s just a case of working through it beat by beat to double check everything is working as it should be.
You have some lovely internal rhymes: ‘Your voice lurks my mind...’
Then later: ‘You left me alone. You left me behind.’
These almost felt like echoes of loss, increasing the emotional weight of the piece.
Both the subject matter and the sonnet form are extremely demanding, and you have done really well with conveying the emotion you set out to - just keep going at it until the meter is working for the poem.
Liz
Hey,
ReplyDeleteThere's not much I can add there, just to say really well done, and I'm sure the other moderators comments will be really helpful.
Take care, and happy halloween,
Andy