Two very accomplished love sonnets (apart from Deborah’s rather disillusioned take on the whole experience, I was wondering where the love sonnets were, considering that love is the subject matter the sonnet started out with). Richard Wakefield’s sonnet is pretty disillusioned too though. It’s a beautifully put together poem, with no sense of strain at all, and with both meter and rhyme clicking very neatly into the exact right places (that’s wholly a compliment in my book). The repetition of "shared a room" / "share a room" is particularly felicitous I think – the first sharing being carnal, the second anything but, and the transition from the one to the other being what the poem is about. In terms of what’s being said, the volta really comes after line 4, which is a strange place for it to come, but it’s reinforced at line 8, and this slight tweaking of the form doesn’t bother me. If I have any problem with the poem at all it is that I’m not wholly convinced by its psychology. I’d guess Richard is closer in age to his youthful lovers than to their middle aged selves (forgive me Richard if I’m quite wrong, or even if I’m right). Having reached the wilder shores of middle age (and physical ho-humness) myself, some time ago, I think the more likely psychological state in this situation would be a kind of complicity involving a rueful but quite lowkey amusd regret, and a feeling of nostalgic kindness for one’s youthful selves (plus a slight feeling of "What was all that about"?) For this reason the rhyme word "fear" (line 11) is the one moment in the poem where I demurred a bit. But it’s more a psychological demurral rather than a technical one: technically the poem seems just about flawless to me. Bravo!
French Braids is a riskier poem – it deals with a more exalted state of mind, and that’s always hard to get down convincingly, and also a more conflicted, contradictory state of mind (Richard’s poem of course deals with contradiction too, but serially as it were: Robert’s has the contradictions as simultaneous). I think in general though Robert has negotiated his way through the subject matter extremely well – one does feel the raptness, contradictoriness and bemused intensity of the speaker’s mental state. I think the last four lines a little less successful than the rest of the poem. I’m not sure I really like the shift in the meaning of "hand" in line ll ("hand is played" means we are dealing with a hand of cards – some might think this shift into metaphor, after dealing with literal hands so far, a really good touch, but it slightly blurs things for me). Also "urgent" (in the same line) seems too close to cliché (though I’d be hard put to come up with a better word). The last line of the poem seems to me not quite to bring the image off – though again I can see that some would find its evanescence, the way the image escapes from us, particularly apt. I’m quibbling though, because it is a lovely poem, clearly conveying a complicated state of mind, which is I take it not only about French braids, but about one of the real dilemmas of love (whether to contemplate and appreciate the perfection one’s been lucky enough to encounter, to let it be itself in fact; or to try to involve oneself with it and possess it, and so change it).
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