Thread: Michigan
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Unread 07-26-2024, 06:55 AM
David Elliot Eisenstat David Elliot Eisenstat is offline
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Like Carl, I enjoy the speaker checking the couch for lost memories. I just wish there were a little more for the reader to piece together. I presume that the speaker's intensity of feeling toward the mystery woman (girl?) makes her the beloved, and that S2 is scraps from a proverbial long walk on the beach. Had the speaker never seen an avocado stone before? Was it a nontraditional romantic gift? Was it totally out of place on the beach, what with avocado trees only growing in locales with mild winters? If not that, then what does Michigan have to do with it?

Metrically, there are a couple rough spots for me:

- L2, as Carl notes. In addition to "grew" being suppressed by its particle, "up", I want to stress "I" and "just" on their own merits as well. Excising "just" could solve this at the expense of the precise meaning.

- Somehow I have a hard time letting the adjective "dry" suppress the secondary accent at the start of "avocado". Maybe it's a nonlocal consequence of the iamb at the end of the line? I'd rather save the iambic shock value for "struck me dumb" on the next line in any case.

- Since the lines open quite variably in this anapestic meter, I find it less than automatic to suppress "pale" on L12.
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