Quote:
Originally Posted by Jan Iwaszkiewicz
The meter is loose but their is a native music in the lines.
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With a little practice, I’m beginning to hear the music. S1, in fact, is surprisingly regular on second (actually fifteenth) read. Even there, I would have preferred a tad more “deference to meter” (e.g., “ever could have lived” instead of “could have possibly lived,” which clunks for me), but that’s my personal—and still developing—taste.
The rhymes are still too faint and sporadic for me, though I was delighted to finally register a striking off-beat rhyme: blank wash/language. (Get me right: I’m perfectly happy with blank verse, but when there are rhymes that take detective work to find, I sometimes wonder what the point is.) And I still balk at the metrical ambiguity of apparently headless lines beginning with the not obviously stressed “If,” “&” and “from.”
Now I need to do some more sense-making (sorry, can’t help it). Nemo is the only one of us who clearly understood the poem, while the rest who attempted interpretations all thought in widely scattered directions. For example, Alexandra and I, who always agree on everything, came away with opposite takes on the relation between sight and language. But that’s all part of the fun.