deepundergroundpoetry.com
Love to a man, pain to a scientist
Why does my mind flee far away from here
To where my lover rests her auburn head?
It feels enforced, as if a puppeteer
Tweaks heartstrings 'til my mind has loveward fled.
And why, my soul, d'you ache as if you're bruised
Whenever I must tear myself from her?
As if we pulled apart two metals fused
And left it to wholeheartedly demur.
But seeing as my heart's so governed by
What science can't define, the question's fair
And I'll have no respite until I know
How my mind works despite me. Therefore I
Must wander long and hope to be prepared
To answer by the time I'm six below.
*** This is my first attempt at a sonnet.
To where my lover rests her auburn head?
It feels enforced, as if a puppeteer
Tweaks heartstrings 'til my mind has loveward fled.
And why, my soul, d'you ache as if you're bruised
Whenever I must tear myself from her?
As if we pulled apart two metals fused
And left it to wholeheartedly demur.
But seeing as my heart's so governed by
What science can't define, the question's fair
And I'll have no respite until I know
How my mind works despite me. Therefore I
Must wander long and hope to be prepared
To answer by the time I'm six below.
*** This is my first attempt at a sonnet.
Published 6th May 2011
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your first attempt Mike.
the lay out is extremely interesting and i am curious as to wether
this is drawn from a real experience or if you just wrote for the challenge on it\'s own...
Either way, it still has feeling
the lay out is extremely interesting and i am curious as to wether
this is drawn from a real experience or if you just wrote for the challenge on it\'s own...
Either way, it still has feeling
6th May 2011 1:45am
Thanks. I think any love (real love, puppy love, a crush on a friend) would probably apply here.
Anonymous
6th May 2011 1:43am
At first this seems like your standard weepy love sonnet which relies on the old technique of the narrator bemoaning separation from his beloved. But onto this cliche you graft a different sort of personality, creating deep and genuine thought as this definite narrative voice struggles to explain his love with logic. The rhyme is inconsistent and a wee bit melodramatic, but other than that this is a stellar first sonnet.
6th May 2011 1:48am
Yeah, the first half is pretty cliche I'll admit, but I was going for the standard structure where the octet poses a problem and the sestet adds some insight. I also titled it as I did because after I finished writing it I decided it didn't properly convey the critical idea well enough without it.
6th May 2011 1:46am
It's nice to see someone have a shot at a proper rhyme scheme and meter, and for the most part you've done it pretty well. Your lines are mostly iambic pentameter, with just a few hiccups.
L4 needs a few different stresses. At the moment it reads:
tweaked HEART strings unTIL my mind LOVEward FLED
-- so it's best to get that heartbeat back into place, and my suggestion would be something like:
"Tweaks heartstrings til my mind has loveward fled"
In L5, to get the meter to work I have to put an odd stress on "my", but that's not a big problem, reading sonnets aloud isn't the same as normal speech.
L8: LEAVing starts your line on a trochee, so perhaps a fix would be:
"And left it to wholeheartedly demur"
(I'm not 100% sure about the use of the word "demur" there, but that's entirely your choice)
L11 is out a bit again, you might try: "Must wander long and hope to be prepared"
Hope that's useful :)
L4 needs a few different stresses. At the moment it reads:
tweaked HEART strings unTIL my mind LOVEward FLED
-- so it's best to get that heartbeat back into place, and my suggestion would be something like:
"Tweaks heartstrings til my mind has loveward fled"
In L5, to get the meter to work I have to put an odd stress on "my", but that's not a big problem, reading sonnets aloud isn't the same as normal speech.
L8: LEAVing starts your line on a trochee, so perhaps a fix would be:
"And left it to wholeheartedly demur"
(I'm not 100% sure about the use of the word "demur" there, but that's entirely your choice)
L11 is out a bit again, you might try: "Must wander long and hope to be prepared"
Hope that's useful :)
6th May 2011 1:57am
I like all your syllabic restructurings and am changing them now, thanks for pointing them out. As for "demur," it's not a word I use in everyday speech but I felt it might work okay there, as a rhyming way to say "to object." And I found the rhyme scheme somewhere online and decided it fit best; I sort of threw up several schemes on my page and let the lines dictate which one to go with.
6th May 2011 1:53am
The rhyme scheme is fine. It's a bit of a cross between Shakespeare and Petrarch, but Yeats used the same ababcdcd efgefg in "Leda and the Swan", so if it's good enough for WB it's good enough for the rest of us plebs!
I had really thought of way too many things when I first read your poem. Feels good to see someone try to rhyme here. The more you get into it the better you get at it. And its okay to break the rhythm at places if you intend to bring something to the attention of the reader.
No, I read it all, gave me some good food for thought. I particularly liked the suggestion on using more science or engineering imagery, especially given the nature of what I was trying to say. I'll have to think about it. I will say though that in a poem as heavily structured as a sonnet, breaking rhyme or rhythm in just one place may seem like more of a break in the elegance than an emphasis. But I could be wrong, I'll play around with it. Thanks for the analysis. (By the way, this was written for Jack Heslop's "Sonnets" challenge; perhaps if you like seeing rhyme and foot and meter, you'll try your hand too?)
