A fued takes place within my heart, yet still
The scars seek warmth beneath my skin; its clear
Im sick for love but still not seen as ill
Because we know that love can make us fear.
Sedating time to heal the wounds of life
Will only make the wound grow deep and beat
As though my skin was pierced with my own knife.
Oh how i feel alive yet incomplete
Without my friends; perhaps a life is best
When spent alone to live like the elite
Who left their friends,their life and flew the nest.
My hearts reclaimed its place of pride although
The price to pay makes joy alone: my foe.
Hey Sparky, I really like your sonnet this week. One pretty major oversight though - you only have 13 lines! It means that 'elite' isn't part of a couplet, and it messes up the octave/sestet split a bit. You have a good septet/sestet split though, and the rest of the sonnet is solid.
ReplyDeleteYou've got the iambic pentametre going strong, I'm impressed, and you've used caesura and enjambement really well. You've got some nice alliteration going on too, 'Live Like the eLite' for example.
You have some nice imagery too, I think the wound beating is really good because it's unusual but real.
You've put yourself in 'intermediate' and you've succeeded - well done! And you've got a few adnvanced bits in, with the alliteration and this is gerat, I think that with a bit more practice that you could write an advanced sonnet no problem!
Hi Sparky,
ReplyDeleteYou have a real understanding of complex philosophical concepts. "Sedating time" is not only a startling image, but it perfectly captures the illusion that buried wounds will be healed when the sedation wears off.
"Im sick for love" is a clever inversion of the more cliched 'love-sick' carrying on one of your themes from last week.
"Because we know that love can make us fear." I interpet this as the invisible illnesses and wounds are ignored or not seen by "we" because the damage causes fear. Took me awhile to get my head around it (good!)and I still may be off base, but it's a testament to the complexities your raise.
I also like the fact that you don't settle for pat answers. "Oh how i feel alive yet incomplete/Without my friends;" is not resolved but explored with "perhaps a life is best..."
As with last week the structure of the lines and line breaks are very effective. The persona's doubt is enhanced with the lower case "i", slightly undermining the postive side of "feel alive" (I'm assuming this was intentional as you've employed this two weeks in a row.)
I want to believe that the missing line was intentional - the ghost around "Oh how I feel alive yet incomplete." A happy accident?
Ok, there are many excellent images which make the few tired one's stand out. "As though my skin was pierced with my own knife" is partially saved beacsue it is the persona's knife, but it's still a bit stale. "flew the nest" and "price to pay" are also a bit weak. Try and make every word, every punctuation mark is as powerful as possible.
"joy alone: my foe." The double meaning of "alone" and the powerful use of the colon to emphasise both distance and connection deserve a better lead in than "price to pay"
You have the talent, just a bit more focus (and maybe more redrafting)and your potential is limitless.
pax
Well done on sticking to the meter and rhyme rules pretty much throughout Sparky, now your next challenge is to make the content, the ideas, the images dominate and not look as though they’re bound and gagged by these conventions.
ReplyDeleteYour connectives don’t quite fit: ‘yet still’ of line 1 is out of place as it does not contradict the previous idea, it is a development rather than a change, also- ‘but still not seen as ill/ Because we know…’ again the connective ‘Because’ doesn’t make sense as line four it not a justification of, or an answer to the previous line, there isn’t an easy development so it feels like you just plonk it there to complete the rhyme scheme.
The notion of ‘Sedating time’, is great, creating an image of life as a patient prone to injury and giving Time the power to anaesthetize, however the development ‘to heal the wounds of life’, specifically the ‘to’ in this line doesn’t do the image justice, think about rearranging the line a bit- ‘The wounds of life are healed as time sedates’. (I know my example is awful but you get the idea)… Now that I’ve written the above, I’ve just thought that perhaps you mean ‘sedating time’, i.e. putting time itself under sedation, thus slowing it down. If so, as you can see it’s ambiguous, how could you make it clearer?
Why would the wound ‘beat’, again a product of forced rhyme scheme perhaps? Line 8 ‘Oh how…’ would be better replaced with a way of showing the speaker of the sonnet feels incomplete, an image, rather than such an explicit telling.
Your ideas tend to slip and slide in the lines, with little logical development, challenge yourself by sticking to a kind of narrative framework: setting scene, conflict and resolution.
Good luck
Dani
Hi,
ReplyDeleteThis is a clever sonnet (or near-sonnet, as Frances points out! - I think you just overlooked the fact that you'd already got the "beat/incomplete" rhyme). The final couplet is particularly good.
One thing that struck me: "Will only make the wound grow deep and beat" sounds a bit forced to me. Do wounds "beat"? I think "pulse" sounds less strange about a wound, but then you'd need a new rhyme, of course! Just bear in mind that if you've had to force something to fit into a rhyme scheme, rather than sounding effortless, it'll draw attention to itself. The very best rhyme schemes, I find, are those which are just as people would say them: that way, you can often read the whole thing before you realise it's rhymed at all. Philip Larkin is very good at "hiding" his rhymes, and Paul Muldoon's poem "Why Brownlee Left" is actually a sonnet (though not of the sort you're writing here), where he uses half-rhyme really cleverly. I think you might like it.
Well done, and take care,
Penny