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Jan D. Hodge 04-14-2003 01:31 PM

I too very much liked Mezey's sonnet "Hardy," but the poem's thread, along with a question I raised, seems to have vanished, so I'll try again.

The sestet of the sonnet reads:

From this it follows, all the ironies
Life plays on one whose fate it is to follow
The way of things, the suffering one sees,
The many cups of bitterness he must swallow
Before he is permitted to be gone
Where he was headed in that early dawn.


Why "From this it follows," rather than: "From this they follow, all the ironies..., the suffering..., the many cups..."?

Jan



robert mezey 04-16-2003 09:59 PM

Well, Jan, I'm not sure I can persuade you, but to my ear
the line must stand just as it is. For one thing, "it follows" is much closer to the idiom than "they follow"---in fact, it IS the idiom, whereas the plural is not. Secondly, I dislike the alliteration of "this they"
Here's a little thing that may interest you: the reason I tried hard to get the particular rhyme of line 10 and line
12 into my sonnet was my desire to celebrate the beautiful folksong-like rhyme in Hardy's great elegy, "The Going"---I wanted to use the same words but of course with a different meaning for each word.
Hardy's poem, lines 5-7:

Where I could not follow
With wing of swallow
To gain one glimpse of you ever anon.

If the reader doesn't recognize it, no harm done, but it gave
me a lot of pleasure to get that in.

Jan D. Hodge 04-20-2003 03:34 PM

Quote:

Originally posted by robert mezey:
Well, Jan, I'm not sure I can persuade you, but to my ear
the line must stand just as it is.

No need to "persuade"; I was just asking. Thanks for responding.

Jan


[This message has been edited by Jan D. Hodge (edited April 20, 2003).]


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