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04-28-2012, 07:43 AM
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Join Date: Apr 2001
Location: Breaux Bridge, LA, USA
Posts: 3,489
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Sonnet #4 - dying light
THE DYING OF THE LIGHT
In Memoriam Elijah Sang Choi Lee, S.J. (1963-2004),
who turned to a natural diet to fight his stomach cancer.
Condemned to death by cancer, you touched less
Fresh fruit each time we met to dine together.
Your flesh was wasting into nothingness,
A heavy sight which made me wonder whether
You had embraced your fate, like some lost saint
Whose faith shone through his sagging tent of skin,
Growing more radiant as his life grew faint.
I've learned of how, confined for treatment in
The cancer ward, awake in a strange bed,
The room flickering from its dying light,
You overheard two men despair and said
(Kneeling upon the floor tiles) "Let us pray."
You prayed from your conviction, as did they,
Against the vast and unrelenting night.
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04-28-2012, 07:45 AM
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Location: Breaux Bridge, LA, USA
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I particularly liked the last line here, and the choice of "unrelenting" where an apprentice would have used "neverending" or some such.
(Poetry is about choosing one right word after another).
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04-28-2012, 08:40 AM
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Join Date: May 2008
Location: Columbus, OH
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My main beef with this one is its title and epigraph, as it clearly conjures up Dylan Thomas' poem, yet the content of the poem itself doesn't exactly illustrate a fight, but rather an acceptance. The epigraph talks about how the subject turned to a natural diet, yet the first lines contradict that sentiment...unless the poem is intended to start in media res or after the bulk of the "fight" was lost. If the title and epigraph are meant to be ironic, it doesn't work (for me). If they are meant to be indicative, then the poem doesn't support that.
As for the body, I don't find anything overly objectionable to pick at. In general I suspect that there's an emotion that isn't fully realized in this poem, but has merely landed at some approximation of that emotion.
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04-28-2012, 09:08 AM
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Join Date: Jul 2001
Location: Iowa City, IA, USA
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I thought this one was effective. At first I felt that there wasn't really a turn, but as I noticed the tension between his desire to preserve life (the natural diet) and the waning of his appetite to the final acceptance of his fate and the coming night, I came to feel that the turn is very gradual. Because he is seen from the outside, perhaps, there is a tendency to portray him as more saintlike than a portrayal from his own point of view would make him appear. It creates an emotion of quiet sadness in me, but part of me wanted to see something that went against the pull of the rest.
Susan
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04-28-2012, 09:26 AM
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Join Date: Feb 2007
Location: NY, USA
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Overall, though it is carefully crafted,
I find this a bit padded and that it has too much
explanation; for example, in L1 "to death"
is not needed, and I wish you didn't call
him a saint explicit, and didn't just say
that he grew radiant.
The Dylan Thomas connection is interesting--
is praying against the night a kind of raging
against the night? Or it is, as S2 says, acceptance?
So unlike Shaun, I like the way the poem plays
with the Thomas reference.
Not my favorite, but well made.
Martin
Edited in: To pile on--no to the stanza breaks.
Last edited by Martin Rocek; 04-28-2012 at 10:19 AM.
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04-28-2012, 09:52 AM
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Lariat Emeritus
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
Posts: 13,816
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I've got quite a few problems with this. I see no justification for the stanza breaks and the resultant interstanzaic enjambments. This poem should be block printed. There are too many weak line endings (in?). And I dislike the last line, unlike Gail, for I find it ponderous. Still, a very human story told in a straighforward and compelling fashion.
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04-28-2012, 05:38 PM
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Join Date: Sep 2000
Location: Federal Way, Washington, USA
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I agree that the stanza breaks seem a distraction and that at least one rhyme -- "skin / in" -- is a lost opportunity, but getting rid of the breaks would also take some of the emphasis off the weak rhyme.
The line "The room flickering from its dying light" is either too profound for me to grasp or is jumbled. Should "from" be "in" or "with"? Or maybe my problem is with "flickering," which seems a lightweight word to describe the dying person's vision.
For all that, the transformation, even transfiguration of slow death comes through powerfully.
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04-28-2012, 07:10 PM
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Join Date: Aug 2011
Location: Irving TX USA
Posts: 623
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Dying Light
I think that this has been forced in the wrong direction. I think it is about the dying of the light not the fight to keep the light. But, it has its moments, but they are few, and they could easily be many if the poet was sure which direction they really wanted to lead us. I find it confusing.
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04-28-2012, 09:58 PM
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Join Date: Mar 2001
Location: New York, NY, USA
Posts: 925
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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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04-28-2012, 11:02 PM
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Join Date: Oct 2000
Location: Fargo ND, USA
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Alder, this strikes me as a judicious critique. I have a strong suspicion who wrote this, for the voice is instantly recognizable. He is not of my generation, rather a gentleman in his eighties, and I take that very much into mind when I approach a poet of this vintage. Call it Confucian filial piety on my part.
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