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Unread 04-28-2012, 09:58 PM
Alder Ellis Alder Ellis is offline
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Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: New York, NY, USA
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Too decorous for my taste -- e.g., in the opening lines, "touched" instead of "ate", "met to dine together" instead of what a live human being would say -- met for dinner, or something. It's all on this slightly elevated, etiolated plane, and as such is in keeping with the meter, the rhymes, & the predictable orotundity of a sonnet. In short, a case in point of why to dislike sonnets.

I agree with Tim on the last line. Rhetorical overkill. But the idea of the sestet is potentially very good & moving: each man praying according to his own lights in a shared darkness, but drawn together by the subject of the poem (Elijah Sang Choi Lee -- what a great name). Elijah rescues the despairers, not by recruiting them to his own faith, but by recalling them to their faiths. I like that idea.
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