[Gail White]

FELLOW TRAVELER

I'm five years old, a frosty autumn night;
my father wakes me, takes me by the hand,
and in our robes and slippers we two stand
outside to see among the stars a light
that moves. That moves. It's 1957.
My father says the Russians have leapt ahead.
By building missiles instead of baking bread,
the godless souls have marred the face of heaven.
Although I'll come to question what I'm told,
and move through zones of faith or unbelief,
that strange word, "Sputnik", always brings a brief
but heart-deep shiver from the cold,
a vision of the new star, far and high,
that traced its arc against the silent sky.

[Gail White]

What I loved in this one was the capturing of an awed moment in childhood, plus the notion of being a "fellow traveler" through the universe with an object in outer space.

[E. Shaun Russell]

I like the content and subject of this one, but there's also some work to be done. In L3 "we two stand" sounds very awkward to my ear. Indeed, the passive voice is used a lot in this sonnet ("too see among the stars a light") and it detracts from any possible immediacy. Some of the metrical inconsistencies are a bit too clumsy to be substitutions, in my view. Does L6 really need the "have"? Could L7 have something other than "missiles" to keep the meter intact? "Far and high" in L13 seems padded to me. Oh, and a minor grammatical nit: the comma should be inside the quotation marks in L11.

Again, I like where this is headed, but I think the voice needs to become more active and some more attention needs to go toward the structure and feel.

"Heart-deep shiver" is a great image, by the way. Very evocative, and I'd love to see more of that in this sonnet.

[Pedro Poitevin]

I have metrical nits (the anapestic substitutions don't seem to do anything interesting for the poem), but I love that lonely tet line 12. I wonder what this poem would be like in tetrameter (without the adjectives 'silent', 'frosty', and the repetition of 'that moves').

Those questions aside, I have a very positive emotional response to this sonnet. There's time travel and space travel; there are ideas that change, and an emotion that remains. I love the title (which adds so much depth).

Pedro.

[Tim Murphy]

Well, I was six, and I had the same experience, so this poem really connects with this geezer. I don't have any problem with the hypermetric lines, and Pedro, I don't think you can cut this to tet. One could dispense with a lot of adjectives and make it het met. If it were my poem (I wish), that is what I would do.

[Pedro Poitevin]

You're probably right, Tim. Het-met would work very well, and perhaps tet alone would make the rhymes come too soon. It is a lovely sonnet. My nits are tiny. This one, I love.

Pedro.

[Roger Slater]

I agree with Tim's het-met idea. Going tet would lose too much, but as it is there's a bit of metrical filler that bogs things down. To me, a beginning like this would capture the mood better:

I'm five years old, a frosty autumn night;
my father wakes me, takes me by the hand,
and in our robes and slippers we stand
outside to see among the stars a light
that moves. It's 1957.

I didn't quite get the "baking bread" idea. Why should the Russians have been baking bread? Seems an odd thing for the father to say.

I agree that the experience is captured well, but the wistful ending strikes me as somewhat fuzzy and a disappointment. I wish we had a more precise sense of how the word "Sputnik" affects our speaker years later. A "shiver" and a "vision" of a "new star" doesn't work for me. They are vague cliches and pretty much repeat what we've already been told or sensed for ourselves. If it could be brought back to something more personal for the speaker, about his father or perhaps his own son, I think it would close more strongly. Overall, though, I enjoyed.

PS-- I'm not sure the punning title, irresistible as it might be, actually works with the content of the sonnet as written.

[Tim Murphy]

Roger, I really like the title.

[Lance Levens]

N is analagous to Sputnik, only he is travelling through inner zones of faith and unbelief. The frisson N feels at the mention of the word "Sputnik" hints that N has felt or continues to feel that his personal journey has tainted or marked him as another godless intruder (like the father's perception of the Sputnik)in the world of faith. This is an example of an "objective correlative." The object (Sputnik) correlates with N's tainted sense of a faith journey, tainted because the father called the Sputnik "godless."

One of the more effective uses of a symbol in a mere 14 lines that I can recall.

[Catherine Chandler]

Ah, yes! I remember it well! All the neighbors and the Chandler clan were out, straining their eyes to the heavens. That word also struck terror into my heart a the time, as did words like "fallout shelter".

I think this is a very well-written sonnet which evokes, upon first reading it, the feelings I believe the author wishes to communicate to the reader.

Others have mentioned the phrase "we two stand" as jarring, and I admit it gave me pause as well. Why not, "there we stand".

I think the word "see" in L4 would be improved by the word "search".

I`m not concerned about all the instances of the word "move" in the poem . . . remember "A Cristo crucificado"?

Nor am I bothered about the bread baking reference. It is obviously exactly what the father said to N, and not used for an end-rhyme.

The ending is very good, but I believe, once again, that a more vivid immediacy could be achieved by putting the phrase "that traced" into the progressive, "tracing".

Very much enjoyed.