Eh, More Poetry
I wrote the octave (first eight lines) yesterday, and then got stuck on how I wanted to finish it. I finally appealed to my lecturer, and he had some good suggestions, though I suspect this will be damned by the poetry class as 'verse', dammit. It is, at least, an elegy to hand in next week. (Well, technically it's elegiac.) Thoughts?
On Being Asked To Write An Elegy
How can I mourn when all my heart is spring?
When, wakeful in the darkness, I have heard
The solitary singing of a bird
Call others out of shadow, heard them fling
Their songs like children's balls? How can I write
Of weeping, when the weeping of the world
Is hazing dew across my lawn, when furled
Dark leaves are gaping wide to gobble light?
When blossoms bounce from angry, battered wood
And sunny-bellied cats 'sleep in' for hours,
When winter's aching gut is spewing flowers
And shiny grass grows up for cattle food,
I have no time for elegies at all -
I'm busy, watching petals start to fall.
On Being Asked To Write An Elegy
How can I mourn when all my heart is spring?
When, wakeful in the darkness, I have heard
The solitary singing of a bird
Call others out of shadow, heard them fling
Their songs like children's balls? How can I write
Of weeping, when the weeping of the world
Is hazing dew across my lawn, when furled
Dark leaves are gaping wide to gobble light?
When blossoms bounce from angry, battered wood
And sunny-bellied cats 'sleep in' for hours,
When winter's aching gut is spewing flowers
And shiny grass grows up for cattle food,
I have no time for elegies at all -
I'm busy, watching petals start to fall.
posted by theamazingcatherine | 3:13 pm
4 Comments:
I like the "gobble light" and the "sun-bellied cats". It seems an interesting juxtaposition between describing 'nature' in both high-flown terms and very prosaic terms like "cattle food".
Steph
Well, we shall see. Once again, I put cows into a poem. Hmm, is this a trend?
I liked 'sun-bellied cats' an awful lot too, but I changed it - the lecturer is prejudiced against felines and the new line works a bit better with the 'themes'.
How can I mourn when all my heart is spring?
When, waking in darkness, I have heard
The solitary singing of a bird
Call others out of shadow? How can I write
Of weeping, when the weeping of the world
Is hazing dew across my lawn, when furled
Dark leaves are gaping wide and guzzling light?
When blossoms bounce from angry, battered wood,
And shiny grass grows up for cattle food,
When sunshine dances quicksteps with rain showers,
When winter's aching gut is spewing flowers,
I haven't time for elegies at all!
I'm busy, watching petals start to fall.
I thought about it some more, and I think that the ending is a bit twee.
Bring back the sun-bellied cats! It's appropriate to the poem.
Maybe use the opening of the poem to fool people into thinking that you're not writing an elegy at all and then hit them with a wodge of raw bludgeoning emotion in the last couple of lines. Kind of an extension of "I am writing a pastoral elegy to control and contain my grief".
Steph
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