No disagreement on this, Caleb. A lovely poem. A few of the lines are metrically daring, but they work in context, as the poem is spoken. I hope you have read the poem "His Running My Running," which I posted a little way down the adjacent Francis thread. It also uses short lines and highly condensed language to convey the sentiment of someone elderly. When there is little time left, perhaps the long line seems too long winded to some. But A. D. Hope wrote a masterwork in dactyllic hexameter when he was over eighty, so there are exceptions to that rule.
Alan Sullivan
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