Andrew,
Thanks! I am happy you enjoyed it. Couplets are a form that often presents itself to me and that I feel most comfortable working with I suppose. While this one here happened to end up fourteen lines, I did not set out to write a couplet sonnet or
Clare sonnet. Speaking of couplets and sonnets, I read a fascinating interview with Alice Oswald just recently where she says about the sonnet,
It feels very perfect, like an in-breath and an out-breath, she explains. When I'm writing about the mind or the heart I use a Shakespearean or a Miltonian form, a more entangled version, because that's more how the mind feels to me. If I'm writing about the natural world, I like to use the form that John Clare discovered, where you've got a series of couplets, and closure between each pair, so it's not all entangled together. The natural world is made of differences and new beginnings, so in a way the sonnet is quite alien to that, but I think Clare discovered a way of using it.
That is not true for me, my thinking is all
aa or all over the place, so to speak, but it is an idiosyncratic kind of thing of course.
Best