View Single Post
  #16  
Unread 05-01-2012, 03:05 AM
Christopher ONeill Christopher ONeill is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Feb 2012
Location: Cardiff, Wales, UK
Posts: 333
Default

I don't have the problem with 'dine together' some other posters have had. I take it that the speaker is inviting his dying friend out to an upmarket restaurant (some cancers have the ability to leave you surprisingly functional until you are very close to the end) only to find that social eating is simply no longer viable (this also reinforces the aptness of being unable to touch the fruit).

Metrically, I thought the piece was a tour-de-force. The heavy caesura at the end of #3 seems to set the poem off into a series of semantic quatrains which counterpoint the formal arrangement ( 4 - 7; 8 - 11). At a semantic level the sonnet comes very close to having its octave embedded between two triplets. I shall certainly learn technique from this piece.

But it is very easy to find other folk's faith, and other folk's deaths, uninvolving. The formal exhortation 'Let us pray' - more of an imperative in its normal usage than an invitation - sounded unhelpfully as if a Jesuit was talking, not a dying man; the suggestion that a saint's death was also somehow superior to an ordinary person's also made Mr. Lee seem distant and alien.

Which all poses an interesting problem: perhaps in being honest to the Jesuit Mr. Lee was the poem necessarily risks losing many readers' sympathy for him as a dying human being.

Some problems are insoluble. But I loved the technical aspects of this sonnet.
Reply With Quote