The retelling of a Classical myth in a sonnet is something I’ve done myself once or twice, so with these poems I’m already on the writers’ side as it were. And maybe I have to tread more carefully than usual too, for the same reason. Though these two poems seem similar I think they’re doing rather different things: Lisa’s is a poem that reinterprets the myth and sees it as a cover for something else (an illegitimate (?) deformed child hidden away, and then killed, if I’m reading her poem correctly), whereas Deborah’s for me is saying that what was true then is true now (great passion doesn’t last, men are faithless so-and-so’s). I admire them both, but as they’re set next to each other it’s hard not to rate them and I guess I feel that Deborah’s is a bit more successful. There are little bits that seem still awkward to me in Lisa’s poem: eg the run-on from lines 4 to 5 (it’s usually hard to bring off a run on, I think, when the sense comes to a sudden stop at the end of the first foot in the second line of the two). Also line 12 seems a bit weak to me. I think my real problem with the poem though is that Lisa hasn’t convinced me that her interpretation of the myth is the "true" one: in line 4 she says it’s "not hard" to work out what was really going on, but her version of that is never one I’d have come up with, and the poem doesn’t wholly persuade me. The myth seems too grand and the interpretation too domestic: of course you can say that that is Lisa’s point, the grand should be rooted in the domestic if we’re to see its immediate human truth. I’m being picky: there are a lot of things I admire in the poem - "the clever walls of Crete", the felicitousness of lines 6 and 10, the whole concept of the poem (even if I’m not wholly persuaded by it I still admire its audaciousness).
Deborah’s poem I find generally the more convincing. There are moments in the rhetoric I paused at (eg "in hot abeyance") but that’s probably my own temperamental liking for fairly lowkey language, and I’d guess such moments wouldn’t bother most people. There are some metrically iffy lines that are perhaps defensible (line 6 is a syllable short: one can defend it by saying that its flat colloquialism is just what’s needed to contrast with the relatively high rhetoric of the opening, and its (to me) metrical awkwardness fits that sudden descent into the banal. In line 11 you have to scan desire as 3 syllables, which is weird for my (admittedly Brit) ear, and then in the following line "easier" seems to be scanned as 2 syllables, which is a bit of a swallow for me. The extra syllables in the last 2 lines I think work well though, as they give a sort of wistfulness to the whole thing – the emotion won’t fit, can’t be satisfied; the meter mimes that I’d say). The rhyme scheme is unorthodox for a sonnet (to put it mildly) but I’ve done that often enough myself so I can’t be picky there. Some might fault the volta / turn in this poem (we have a rhyme in the octave picked up in the sestet, and the sense doesn’t pause or really change direction after l.8). I quite like it though: technically the volta occurs after "faithfulness", which as it’s a poem about unfaithfulness seems really a fine stroke to me, even if the volta is as it were buried or muffled.
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