[Jan Iwaszkiewicz]

Hi Alexandra,
My comment wasn’t based on strict adherence to form it’s just that I could not understand the reason for the break when the enjambment was there. We all read differently.

[David Callin]

Originally Posted by A. Baez

By "closing question mark," I guess you mean the one at the end of S2?

Sorry, I meant exclamation mark - of course!

[Tony Barnstone]

Glad you liked my crit! So, to answer your question, the Frost move might be something like this:


a full-fledged moon reigned. Was she silver-crowned,
or was she just the moon; her space no court?
--just sky where chiaroscuro held its sport!

Instead of stating it, he will leave it open, like the end of "Design":

What had that flower to do with being white,
The wayside blue and innocent heal-all?
What brought the kindred spider to that height,
Then steered the white moth thither in the night?
What but design of darkness to appall?--
If design govern in a thing so small.

or the end of "After Apple Picking":

One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.

He'll HINT, suggest, perhaps and if and maybe it, but won't state it.

Finally, sorry, I know you like the chiaroscuro and the sport rhyme, but I'd love it if the last line really rang the bells and send us off musing and magical and laughing. The poem deserves an amazing last line. It's good enough and it just needs that satisfaction at the end. I wish I could say what it would be, but as I tell my multimedia collaborators, "Well, those are my thoughts. Take them if they are useful. Now go off and be a genius!"

[Tony Barnstone]

... and to that end, another one of Frost's "as if" poems has a great ending:

You could not tell, and yet it looked as if
The shore was lucky in being backed by cliff,
The cliff in being backed by continent;
It looked as if a night of dark intent
Was coming, and not only a night, an age.
Someone had better be prepared for rage.
There would be more than ocean-water broken
Before God’s last Put out the light was spoken.

[Alexandra Baez]

Jan, all right. I can see how the break and enjambment could be perceived as rough or arbitrary. But maybe you can also feel the jarring (to me, at least) effect of jamming in the passage from “I woke” through “expand?” in the same stanza right after what precedes. It’s a lot of action and change without a pause:

My bedding lay in rumples at my side:
I rambled dimly in the dreams of night—
but through the room and woodland stretch beyond,
wide, threadless sheets of pressing, pearly light
enveloped everything. I woke. My sphere
had boldened to a spectral fairyland.
Did any see a sudden shift appear
or did it imperceptibly expand?

However, here's another alternative, which eschews the enjambment while creating an irregular stanzaic structure:

My bedding lay in rumples at my side:
I rambled dimly in the dreams of night—
but through the room and woodland stretch beyond,
wide, threadless sheets of pressing, pearly light
enveloped everything.

I woke. My sphere
had boldened to a spectral fairyland.
Did any see a sudden shift appear
or did it imperceptibly expand?

I don’t mind this too much in terms of flow—I might even like it better. But I worry that irregular stanza structures don’t look as pleasing on the page. What do you (and others) think?

David, okay! My latest experiment features a closing question mark, after all.

Tony, thanks very much for the further explanation and the helpful examples. While I’d been familiar with all of them, they wouldn’t have come to my mind as potential models to draw on in my poem. (I also had looked up the examples you gave before.) Your call to glory for the ending of my sonnet is a high bar. For a while after your most recent comments, I was wondering if and how I could gracefully fit in the Romantic/anti-Romantic concept in with the dream/reality, dark/light one of the rest of the poem—but then I realized that all these are actually closely interrelated. Initially, I also wasn't sure if this could be done without violently destroying the Romantic mood. So far, this is where I am:

a full-fledged moon held sway, her highness crowned
in white. Or did mere atmospheric haze
hold such uncanny power to amaze?

At least this gets rid of some modifiers!

I’d also be interested in what you think of the revision “wooded stretch,” the “being” referent issue in S2 vis-à-vis what I really had in mind, and whether the S2 revision’s “sudden shift” seems less problematic to you than “shift sprang.” Thanks for continuing to push me, and don't ever feel a need to apologize for that.

[Tony Barnstone]

I think the haze/amaze ending is working!

[Alexandra Baez]

Tony, yeah? Glad to hear it! I think I like the version of this I've switched to in the poem vs. the one I posted in the comment above. It doesn't affect haze/amaze.