Touching
It’s time for me to wave goodbye and bid
Your tantalising touch farewell; the days
You held my hand embed themselves amidst
My soul; my heart shall always crave the way
You cupped it delicately in your palms.
I love you. Touch me twice and time will freeze
To watch as passion chases frantic calm
Away. But now your touch is cold, a tease,
A vial of distant emptiness. The fire
Is dead; the love is done; your touch is stale
And now is none. The distance drove desire
Away and found a dying fairytale.
A well meant touch can free an “I love you”,
One thing that yours now never seem to do.
Distance
To you a love must be assisted by
The hand of touch. Yet distance harvests strength
And unifies two lovers. They can fly
With wings of trust, defying laws of length
That stand to stop their flight of happiness.
I love you. Love can span a thousand miles
Across a raging ocean. Emptiness
Is in the space but you are in my smile.
And yet you are unhappy. Why? To be
With you is harder than to love you from
Afar. It does not take a lot to see
That you have given up on me. Succumbed
Are you to that of touch, a craving I
Will have to use to say my last goodbye.
Hey, eternity_forever,
ReplyDeleteRight then - new task, new standards, new...something else (tripartites rock). It's good to come back to your work. I'll comment on the poems seperately, but just as a general point - good choise of opposites. Distance is a great thing to play with - you can make a reader feel something just by playing with distance. You can make something vertinigious - render the mood of a character by how they judge distance, show how our thoughts influence perception. All that.
I like your first poem a lot. Things I like in your first poem are:
The sense of sadness wanting a happy reprieve. Powerful stuff.
You enjambement and caesura. Yes.
The general tightness of your rythm and rhymes.
It's everything I'd expect having seen your previous work, and it's still impressive to see.
Some pointers/queries:
The last two line make what 'yours' is a little unclear. It's a hard thought to convey in a tight rythm, so I know what you mean, but you could see about making it clearer.
Similarly this: 'your touch is stale
And now is none' isn't as clear as the rest - I'm sure it's about rythm constraints, but maybe there's a better way of putting it.
This is beautiful: 'the days
You held my hand embed themselves amidst
My soul.' Well done.
Ok, the second peom. Other sharper eyes may see something I don't, but from what I can see it's spot on for rythm/ryhme criteria. And equally impressive in the ways I've mentioned above. Really well done.
Your words about emptiness and the smile are great - I like that image. You make good use of the shift too. 'And yet you are unhappy,' is wonderfully plaintive. I like the tone a lot.
One thing to think about is the clarity of what the voices are saying. I think you did well with that in this piece, but it can be tricky to juggle two voices, and two shifts in each voice, and still be clear about who's feeling what. I had a bit of that here. It's generally clear, but second piece really seemed to be driving towards the postive, then dips into the negative in a way that made me have to reread.
Probably unavoidable though - it's not an easy task, and I think you have a lot to be proud of. Take care,
Andy
Hello! It’s a pleasure to be back moderating you; I always look forwards to reading your work.
ReplyDeleteYour first effort of the relaunched wordvoodoo is an extremely strong one. Your sonnets really work well together, as answer poems. You haven’t merely assumed that two poems written about binary oppositions will automatically go together, but have worked hard to ensure the two sonnets respond to one another, through devices such as the repeated ‘I love you’ on line six, and the argument and counter-argument each poetic voice provides.
Formally, these sonnets are, as Andy observed, near-flawless, and I’m glad to see you exploring the potential of the octet/sestet divide. The only bit of iambic pentameter I’d query is that use of ‘I love you’; in line six of sonnet one and two it has the emphasis ‘I LOVE you’, whereas on line eleven of sonnet one it has the emphasis of ‘I love YOU’. I personally thing the second emphasis is the more natural, and thus fitting, rhythm.
Your mix of abstractions, such as the brilliant ‘To be / With you is harder than to love you from / Afar’, and more physical imagery, such as ‘A vial of distant emptiness’ (‘vial’, which conjurers up images of poison and toxins, was a great word choice) generally works to good effect. Your register is near-Shakespearean at times, such as on lines two to five of the second sonnet. Just to pick out a couple more fresh, effective phrases: ‘frantic calm’ was a complex juxtaposition, but, I think, an engaging and original way of showing the lover’s effect on the sonnet’s narrator. ‘Your tantalising touch’ is also good; your placement of the word ‘tantalising’ means it enacts its meaning, as it delays the reader finding out what the narrator is bidding farewell to. The enjambment of ‘Time will freeze’ is similarly effective in getting the poetic form to reflect and strengthen the meaning of the words. Great stuff!
However, you do occasionally slip into, if not cliché, pretty familiar phrasings; ‘wings of trust’ and ‘raging ocean’ have both been used before in writing about love. And, as Andy said, your meaning occasionally gets a bit fuzzy: ‘And now is none’ and the final line of the first sonnet are examples of this. A case of the rhyme/form controlling you, rather than the other way around? Finally, double-check your punctuation; I’m not sure about the use of semi-colons in line two of the first sonnet. This is a pretty minor point, though! All in all, an excellent effort. Well done!
Hello again, eternity forever. I'm glad that I will continue to be your moderator.
ReplyDeleteAndy and Sarah have pretty much covered everything I picked out. I can only place more emphasis on their points.
Your choice of opposites is very original and they word incredibly well together. 'Touching Distance' as an overall title is very poignant and poetic.
Your two sonnets work well together as 'answer poems'. It is most definetely like listening to two sides of an arguement.
Your structure is near-perfect. Your rhymes are original and flow well. Your iambic pentameter is almost spot on throughout. I was going to make the exact same point that Sarah did about the two rhythms of 'I love you', which is the only real bit that stood out to me.
I feel that you successful made an octave/sestet split in the second sonnet, but to me there didn't seen to be much of one in the first sonnet. This is perhaps something you can work on in the future.
As the others have said, your use of enjambment and caesura is very impressive. I particularly enjoyed the internal rhymes, which helped the poem flow and freed it from the rhythm of the end-rhymes. For example:
The fire
Is dead; the love is done; your touch is stale
And now is none.
I also loved:
The distance drove desire
Away and found a dying fairytale
As well as many other beautiful phrases you have used.
Furthermore, I liked the way the first sonnet begins by saying goodbye, and the second sonnet ends by saying goodbye. This creates not only an echo (as with the similarly placed 'I love you', too) but a almost circular argument. Very effective.
As the others have said, you could perhaps make the poem read a little smoother in places, but on the whole I think you have been very successful in this task. Brilliant stuff.
Dear Andy, Sarah and Sophie,
ReplyDeleteThank you incredibly so for all of your comments. I would go on forever about how helpful they've been (which they of course, always are), but I know that you've all got busy summers ahead of you: I'll keep this one quick. :)
I've gotten my head around what I've got to do to make my writing a little clearer. As Sarah pointed out, I have a tendency to let my writing control me rather than the other way around, which is why my taming skills need to be polished up. That's been added to my to-do list. I'll try my hardest to avoid falling back into that particular habit in Task 41 and the next poetry task.
Thank you for all of the positive feedback about the rhythm and such. If only that "I love you" didn't have to be such a pain.
Sophie, I agree with your observation about the blurry octave/setset split. Again, like Sarah and Andy pointed out, it's my writing becoming unclear because it has that large hold over me. For a strange reason, I found Distance far easier to write. I was debating with myself about the fact that the opposite of distance is in fact near? Touch and untouching? I don't know. I'm glad I choose these two opposites though - they seemed to have gone down well with my moderators. :)
Sarah, semi-colons always confuse me! :( It's ridiculous, no matter how many times I think that I've got the hang of them, I never seem to actually grasp it. I'll probably revisit my basic punctuation book from Year 4 in the summer. The to-do list is getting bigger. ;)
Andy, thanks for the awesome comments. Two voices was extremely hard to juggle. I'm guessing that I focussed too hard on trying to maintain that near-perfect rhyme and rhythm whilst writing both sonnets instead of focussing on the content. Again, clarity, but this time in my head. I'll get it fixed - I promise. ^^
Thank you, once again, to my three amazing moderators. Hope you all have an amazing summer,
E.