challenge

Here's a brand new one I just wrote in the past hour, for the Nun, which I include here too as part of the olderman-Finsbury poem exchange programme.

Hector

In your roar of laughter, plumes upon
your golden battle helmet shake like death
beneath an airswung sword. And in your breath
of boasted fearlessness, your infant son
wails in his mother's arms in unison
with soldiers' bloodgasps, teeming underneath
your city battlements. You will bequeath
him feasting dogs, once Argive fleets have won.

Oh, Hector! See the flashing diadem
Andromache, your wife is wearing? How
it captures your reflection, multiplied
in rainbow spectres, you, within each gem;
Your glory? Death wan dust. How she will throw
Hope's ghosts to ground, when you, her light, have died.

The Hector sonnet above followed a Petrarchan rhyme scheme (abbaabbacdecde). This next sonnet is my own scheme, I think: abbabccbdedeff. It also makes use of what used in the old days to be called "feminine" endings (ie: lines of four iambic, and one amphibrachic, feet).

Old shelves prop up concordances (outmoded,
so you hear, by new editions); fading
foolscap on your desk declares your jading
penmark. Lifelong care to have decoded
ancient stones, before new studies flooded
lecture halls and bookshops, weaves your ebbing,
cataracting sight in deskgloom webbing:
You embrace the waste your critics boded.

Now a bright young man (not college stock)
Deciphers all the symbols on the stones,
Showing up your work as poppycock:
Dust thrown wide in digging up old bones.
Blind white beckonings to aged dread
consume a broken vision none will read.

(abbaabba cededc)

What made me so different from them all?
I had never seen what they seem to see
I cannot be who they want me to be
Their egos above me, I want to crawl
For months at a time, my life had to stall
A shroud of darkness had come around me
Hiding in the shadows had always been key
Am I real? Because my feelings gone dull

In the mirror I stare myself eye to eye
This man is to be no one but himself
I think to myself; my soul swells and crests
The book slams shut and then placed on the shelf
Then the memories were leashed up like pets
The darkness within me left with a sigh

That night had been very lonely and sad
I had nothing more than a broken heart
With my actions, I made her very mad
Time was spent alone, ‘till I fell apart
Why didn’t she understand how I feel?
She had never returned my love for her
Why had it been my heart she had to steal?
It is revenge, with my self I concur

I then prepared my 9mm
I was going to her to show my love
Her words I noted, seemed a touch sweeter
She said she had missed me, at least kind of
I looked into her eyes with much vigor
We shared love, and then I pulled the trigger

Percival himself reading the sonnet

Nope. Percival is a charact that my friend and I made up. I write the story, he does the voice. He does like 80% of the work. Chip, the friend from Manhattan who does the voice, is an actor. He does the voice very well.

This is just a revival bump so this thread can continue.

Some sonnets use tetrameter, some sonnets are twelve or sixteen lines and most sonnets, I think, deviate from iambics (take for example, Shakespeare's Sonnet 94 with its concluding line "LILies/ that FESTer/SMELL FAR WORSE/ than WEEDS", a tetrametric line comprising a trochee, an amphibrach, a mollossus and an iamb).

Here's Patrick Kavanagh's fourteen line sonnet "Come Dance With Kitty Stobling" that breaks lots of rules but is still in my view a supreme modern example of the form:

Come Dance with Kitty Stobling(1960)

No! no! no! I know I was not important as I moved
Through the colourful country, I was but a single
Item in the picture, the name, not the beloved.
O tedious man with whom no gods commingle.
Beauty, who has described beauty? Once upon a time
I had a myth that was a lie but it served:
Trees walking across the crest of hills and my rhyme
Cavorting on mile-high stilts and the unnerved
Crowds looking up with terror in their rational faces.
O dance with Kitty Stobling I outrageously
Cried out-of-sense to them, while their timorous paces
Stumbled behind Jove's page boy paging me.
I had a very pleasant journey, thank you sincerely
For giving me my madness back, or nearly.

Patrick Kavanagh
Copyright © Estate of Katherine Kavanagh

Yellow wrote:

that fekka roits way betta-n-i-do

you from jersey? or chicago ???