Do you remember that long lost love zone?
Your joy was mine; my warmth was true and whole.
You said you loved me, but I am alone.
I'd been enclosed in your hypnotic lull,
My truth, desire and all my lifelong trials
Are hidden, falling - all slipping away:
The love that I discovered only vile
The time we wasted, time that we must pay
As midnight comes, I cry myself to sleep
The stars gleam... But not anything like you
The shrouded cloud of night is far too deep.
I scream in pain, I need your love renewed.
It seems you can't begin to make amends
It's too late now. We cannot just be friends.
Your grasp on the iambic pentameter form is improving with every exercise – so well done, your hard work is paying off! But it’s still not completely cracked. For starters, line 10 is a syllable short – this is something you should be spotting by now. There are also a few errors with your stress pattern; I’ll highlight one. The use of iambic pentameter on line six starts really well – ‘HID-den, FALL-ing’ -, the dying fall of the iambic mirroring the words themselves. But it falters, as ‘slipping’ should be stressed SLIPP-ing. You still need to keep an ear out for things like this, but with a bit of reworking this line could be really nice.
ReplyDeleteAs an advanced sonneteer, you need to be careful about your punctuation. Read it aloud, and you’ll see that your punctuation has led to a slightly clunky rhythm. For example, the sentence that covers lines 4-10 needs to be re-punctuated (e.g. line seven doesn’t follow easily onto line eight, so you do need some kind of punctuation mark there – and the whole sentence moves through a couple of changes of tense, which strongly suggests it needs to be broken up) Quibbling about commas may seem a bit much, but it adds to the rhythm, flow and emphases of the poem, just like syllable stresses do.
I think the problem of punctuation stems from the fact that a lot of these lines aren’t heavily enjambed – in fact, a few of them are crying out to be end-stopped. Once again, there’s a bit of repetition in the words you use to start lines – the, I, it, you – and this suggests, to me, that you’re not pushing your use of enjambment hard enough. It’s a poem that reads very much line by line, rather than as a flowing whole. This is our final go at the sonnet, but maybe you could try going a bit more extreme with enjambment/caesura for the next poetry task?
In term of poetic content, this sonnet has some nice aspects. I particularly like how it toys with, but eventually shies away from, conventional “I love you and miss you” sentiments. Phrases like ‘hypnotic lull’ and ‘love zone’ achieve this fantastically – there’s a real sense of that titular deception in these acidic phrases. That last rhyming couplet has a particular sting in the tale – nice work! The sonnet ranges around emotionally, yet the feelings are still always consistent with the starting situation (post-break up blues).
However, you do tend to preference the abstract over the concrete. An example of this is line two’s ‘my warmth was true and whole’. ‘Warmth’, ‘truth’, ‘wholeness’ – these are all abstractions, and I, as a reader, cannot see what they mean. They seem detached from real feeling. A way to avoid this is to “show, not tell” – to ENACT these feelings. SHOW warmth, SHOW wholeness – root abstract feelings in physical actions. In this way, the reader will really be able to feel the emotion of the poem, will be drawn into it, and will want to read on. For example: for me, ‘the stars…’ is one of my favourite bits of this sonnet. It doesn’t have any explicitly stated meaning – in fact, I’m not really sure what it relates to – but the concreteness of the imagery, made wistful/eerie by those trailing dots, makes it stand out. Try writing more in this vein; I guarantee that preferencing the concrete to the abstract, that showing and not telling, will improve your writing.
First, to tackle the basics. You are one syllable short in line 10, and occasionally your iambic pentameter is a little off. “long lost love” is a collection of very strong words placed in succession, throwing your stresses off. I think your iamb is quite strong, just a few mistakes now and again that sarah has already pointed out. Jut tweak these improvements and you will be free to concentrate on the content.
ReplyDeleteI like that you are experimenting with more half rhymes, such as “whole” and “lull”. This makes the work more explorative and opens up new possibilities. I also love the way this poem uses tenses. The past expression of “you said you loved me” contrasted with the present “I am alone” gives the poem depth.
A few of your phases feel a little awkward, as if contrived to fit the rhyme scheme. “the love that I discovered only vile” doesn’t make much sense, and isn’t punctuated. It is easy in poetry to forget about punctuation, allowing the end of the lines to do this for us, however it is perhaps more important, as it can offer emphasis at critical moments. I’d suggest that to improve this poem, you could rethink your punctuation, seeing if this affects if the poem makes more sense.
Again, I am really impressed with the content of your poem, however I believe a little more thought is needed to make it achieve its potential. I am noticing an improvement every week, so keep going!
Hello again, well done for crafting another strong poem which very adeptly details the sudden realisation that one's love is not appreciated by a lover who has never given back any more than the mere pretence of love and devotion. As Gina and Sarah have already pointed out technical improvements you could follow up, I can't really think of much else to add except to say that I very much agree with my fellow moderators that your work improves immeasurably with every task and that you are continuing to show your adeptness at internal rhyming, caesuras, enjambement and end-stopped lines. What I would say, however, is that while you make the last of these work very well for you here, it might be interesting to reach more of a balance between enjambement and end-stopped lines, as the small amount of enjambement you use is handled well and gives the poem a less stiff and more organic flow,
ReplyDeletebut in any case, well done again and I look forward to further improvements in your next poem,
Eoghan
Hey,
ReplyDeleteIt's really gratifying to see how much you improve with each task - most of these lines are perfectly iambic, and you've got some really sophisticated yet natural caesurae in there, too. ("Your joy was mine; my warmth was true and whole" is a particularly good line from a rhythmical point of view.) You've paid close attention to internal rhymes, too, which is great; it shows you're in the right "difficulty" category. The "shrouded cloud" line is particularly good in this regard.
I'd just point out a couple of lines where the metre isn't quite right: lines 1, 6, 10 and 14 don't quite fit. I'm sure you can fix this - your rhythm is so tight everywhere else. Also, just pay attention to punctuation at the end of lines - sometimes, you've negelected to put any where it's needed. I'm thinking of lines 8, 9, 10, 11 and 13 - we need punctuation at the end of the lines.
Otherwise, really good progress. Well done.
Penny
Thanks for the comments!
ReplyDelete