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Unread 10-01-2017, 03:16 AM
Nigel Mace Nigel Mace is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2012
Location: The Borders, Andalucia and Italy
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Well, yes. "Sonnet 155" is a more than trifle overblown - but it is a cracking sonnet just the same. Your thumb-nail of Dunn's manner, Ann, is telling, but to me it tells of much that I love. His conscious sense of debts owed to a literary hinterland is, to me, one of his many charms.

I passed by both the 'stumble' in line 10 and its numerological significance, Duncan, drawn on by the simply fitting nature of its sense. After all - "I loved a woman, dressed as well as you" - would miss the independent agency of the present line and by its very smoothness invite neglect of her individuality. Where I had a doubt/hesitancy in granting complete approval, came in two other places. First, the slightly lofty half-truth of the end of Line 3; the assumption that the exam clock can be heard in blissful ignorance of the significance of passing time, perhaps, betrays one who never (at that level) heard it and feared its potential, life-long, assumed consequences. Secondly, the rather contrived end of Line 9, " - need you know this?", to set up the rhyme for "emphasis". That was, perhaps, more clever than felt.

Having said all that, I still read it with relish for the word-play, a lot of the sense and the throb of its faintly defiant pulse. Your Market Street proposal, Ann, would be splendid - though, perhaps you'd like one of the Elegies on the other side of the plinth. Which one? - and which poem on which side?
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