O.K. who wants to do some sonnet push-ups?
This is a great way to build po-muscle and help with the writing of your own sonnets, I have found: to try and make a viable sonnet from a given passage of poetic prose.
Here is a passage from Proust's
In Search of Lost Time. There are 172 words here, which will not, of course, all fit into a sonnet (av. 110), so some elements here must be excluded. The idea is to attempt to get as much of the content and argument of the passage as possible into a coherent, satisfying sonnet.
Any sonnet form is fine.
I know that Mary has been bitten by this bug - any one else?
Quote:
These were the sorts of provincial rooms which, just as in certain countries entire tracts of air or ocean are illuminated or perfumed by myriad protozoa that we cannot see, enchant us with a thousand smells given off by the virtues, by wisdom, by habits, a whole secret life, invisible, superabundant, and moral, which the atmosphere holds in suspension; smells still natural, certainly, and colored by the weather, like those of the neighboring countryside, but already homey, humid, and enclosed, an exquisite ingenious and limpid jelly of all the fruits of the year that have left the orchard for the cupbopard, seasonal but moveable and domestic, correcting the piquancy of the hoarfrost with the sweetness of warm bread, as lazy and punctual as a village clock, roving and orderly, heedless and foresightful, linen smells, morning smells, pious smells, happy with a peace that brings only an increase of anxiety and with a prosiness that serves as a great reservoir of poetry for one who passes through it without having lived in it.
(from Swann's Way by Marcel Proust, translated by Lydia Davis. New York: Viking, 2003, p. 50)
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