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.

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).

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.

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

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.

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.

Thank you. That's the other thing I meant to mention in my crit. The stanza breaks bothered me as well.

Like Gail I think this has a strong close.

I don't think the title is necessarily misdirection: after all, it was Dylan who raged against it while his father was going gentle.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Moving, but flawed.


+Pretty impossible to crit.honestly, considering the first line.

This story, told in plain language without sugar-coating, is very moving. By the way, "touched" is not a decorous euphemism for the word "eat" - when someone barely "touches" something, it means less than even picking at it. The hospital (or hospice) room scene is vividly portrayed. The play on the word "conviction" (which alludes to the condemnation in L1) is inspired. However, I agree with others that there's a tad too much Dylan Thomas in it, and the epigraph with the information about the stomach cancer/natural diet is superfluous. I think this sonnet has great potential.

I feel pretty sure who wrote this, too (though that will have nothing whatsoever to do with the way I shall vote), but I have to agree with Alder regarding "met to dine together"; it's just not what anyone would say. I'd almost prefer "met to eat together", but that's not brilliant either.

I can't get 'The room flickering from its dying light' to scan the way I'd expect it to, and pray and prayed are too close together for my liking.

Overall, whilst the sonnet is a moving tribute, IMO it's lacking a certain... je ne sais quoi.

Jayne

I don't have the problem with 'dine together' some other posters have had. I take it that the speaker is inviting his dying friend out to an upmarket restaurant (some cancers have the ability to leave you surprisingly functional until you are very close to the end) only to find that social eating is simply no longer viable (this also reinforces the aptness of being unable to touch the fruit).

Metrically, I thought the piece was a tour-de-force. The heavy caesura at the end of #3 seems to set the poem off into a series of semantic quatrains which counterpoint the formal arrangement ( 4 - 7; 8 - 11). At a semantic level the sonnet comes very close to having its octave embedded between two triplets. I shall certainly learn technique from this piece.

But it is very easy to find other folk's faith, and other folk's deaths, uninvolving. The formal exhortation 'Let us pray' - more of an imperative in its normal usage than an invitation - sounded unhelpfully as if a Jesuit was talking, not a dying man; the suggestion that a saint's death was also somehow superior to an ordinary person's also made Mr. Lee seem distant and alien.

Which all poses an interesting problem: perhaps in being honest to the Jesuit Mr. Lee was the poem necessarily risks losing many readers' sympathy for him as a dying human being.

Some problems are insoluble. But I loved the technical aspects of this sonnet.

I like this, largely because of its inclusiveness at the end. Mr. Lee may have believed a diet would save him, but he led a prayer which, in L13, afforded the other two men their convictions alongside his.

The title is too Dylan Thomas and L8 seems contrived.

Otherwise, I find this one quite touching.

John

Thinks this would flow better and be stronger with some rearrangement of stanza breaks -- two stanzas with 7 lines each OR one continuous poem

And delete "who turned to a natural diet to fight his stomach cancer" from the epigraph as the poem tells us this