View Single Post
  #25  
Unread 07-17-2013, 01:51 PM
Christine Whittemore Christine Whittemore is offline
Member
 
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Gloucestershire, UK.
Posts: 541
Default

I admire this very much, especially the sense of control, the language that is perfectly natural and yet falls--or rather seems to fall!--easily and without effort or forcing into the pattern of a sonnet.

It seems churlish to express any nits after all that's been said, but I find line 4, "and meant the words the TV actors said," too vague.
The TV actors--since the shows or even types of shows are unspecified-- will have said all kinds of words, homicidal, lunatic, the whole gamut, and I'm not sure in what way this couple "meant" those words or how this enhances the poem.

Also, without the title, we wouldn't know the feelings of these two from the poem itself...then I start wondering if the title means what it seems to mean...

The last two lines are brilliant. I love the held/hold echo.
But---I wonder why "the child they'd never hold" is something "they thought they had to fear." All the other things are normal fears of aging, or of life gone wrong.....but the child seems a different kind of fear. And yet again, what is more terrifying, when one thinks about it, than having a child.

But is the poem saying that in fact there was something worse to be afraid of, something they really had to fear, though they didn't think they had to??

I feel there is perhaps just a little too much we don't know; the repeated "here" almost makes me feel it's based on a painting or photograph, something the speaker is looking at.
And finally--not that I like sentimentality, not that I want everything to be pretty and lovey-dovey (I admire and am moved by Philip Larkin, for example!)--is there something just a tad chilly about this...? i don't know, thinking aloud, may be wrong.

Anyway, what a thought-provoking sonnet, and so well done.

Christine.
Reply With Quote