David, You can dine out on Dick's comment for the foreseeable future. He's put his finger on the magic of this poem. You make it look easy. "I said, 'A line may take us hours maybe/ Yet if it does not seem a moment's thought/ Our stitching and unstitching has been nought.'" That's Yeats' advice in Adam's Curse, which I quote too often to younger poets. Versifying a great joke is not very different from translating a great poem, one has to closely adhere to the rhythms of the original, and in a joke that rhythm is very different from that of a Petrarch sonnet. I have used ballad stanza, abcb, which affords me vastly greater liberty than the constraints of David's sonnet. Such poems are invaluable in the course of a reading of verse as black as my own, because they give the reader breathing space. All of us know that David is a meticulous and conservative practitioner of the sonnet. I must confess that I begged him for permission to use this poem to give all of us some breathing space in this impassioned discussion. Thanks, David.
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