It is Sunday and time for thought and reflection and creation. And an odd prayer or dream maybe.
Once again, my first objective is to practise metrical discipline, and I have chosen the Sonnet, a structure popularised by Shakespeare but that probably originated in Italy in the 14th century at the start of the Renaissance. A sonnet comprises 14 lines divided into three quatrains and a final couplet. The meter is in what is known as iambic pentameter, ten syllables per line alternating stressed and unstressed syllables, and the rhythmic structure is ABAB, CDCD, EFEF, GG. Sometimes though it is fun to intermingle alliteration and assonances. And of course to break the rules sometimes.
The theme of the sonnet takes Shakespeare’s Sonnet 29 as its starting point and then overlays my own ideas and journey. Indeed the first quatrain almost replicates the Bard’s words. It is called Sweet Charity of Bitter-Sweet Surprise:
When in disgrace with fortune and men’s eyes
I all alone beweep my outcast state
And trouble deaf heaven with my bootless cries
And look within and curse my sorry fate
Seeing the God, and Devil of my hope
Time is passing, troll-speed into night
Time is done and gone. I can not but cope
And felt my spirit shrink in endless night
Black-box darkening thoughts, strange whitewash room
Straw-like hope? I could reach and did there grope
With fear and bored drear came Big-Bang; Doom-Boom
Three times it came, then went away . Fearful Hope?
Ex finito ad lumen eo eo
Ad infinitum, et ultra eo 1.
The individuality of the body is that of a flame rather than that of a stone
Norbert Wiener (1894 – 1964), Cybernetics and Society (1952)
A final point. Poems are a little like crosswords, and I love them both equally; there is always another one to read or to write or to solve. They are of course a search for structure and meaning; a left-brain Aristotelian pursuit. But more importantly they are about the whole, which brings a gestalt beauty and form, a kind of artistic right-brain pursuit. Yin and yang. And always better if there is a random joke hidden in the lights. Or a bonus clue.
- With thanks here to the fantastic BL.