I think this lacks clout. I don’t see the occasion for this sonnet other than merely practising sonnet writing. There is no sign of any urgent reason for N to profess his/her love. In fact after setting him/herself up as the main subject, N disappears. Perhaps she/he has a semblance of a return at the end what with the repetition of the word “love”. But there’s no new perspective in the couplet. Just an assertion that love and trust are in action here. For me it comes across as an exercise in describing a ballerina, and little else.
As an exercise, there isn’t that much to fault. But there are weaknesses.
The repetition of the verb, “seem”, in the octet is clumsy. And it is surely a weakness that there are three similes in the octet – with the weakest of the three coming last – and two similes in the sestet, both dubious ones, as Frank has pointed out. There are five similes in all in 14 lines, and, to be frank, all five are immediately forgettable.
The slant rhyme of “support” and “hurt” does not alarm me. It can be seen as a concession to the “give” of the surface. My main complaint is “she’d land” (L11), which is a rhyme-driven substitute for the grammatically correct “she landed”. And in L6 the final word, “sees”, should be “feels”, seeing as how its object is “the impact”. Again, this is a rhyme-driven substitution. The phrase, “above the dust” (L13), strikes me very much as filler/rhyme-driven.
All in all, not one I’ll be voting for.
Duncan
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