[Gail White]

Requited Love


Here is the way they rose and bathed and fed
In silence, and in silence got undressed,
And microwaved the supper each thought best,
And meant the words the TV actors said;
Here is her naked hand outstretched in bed
To soothe some dreamed-of other’s knocking chest,
And here her present body, seldom pressed
Awake to his, and here his snoring head;
Here are the things they thought they had to fear,
The figure at the far end of a glance,
The lovely hair’s retreat, the veins’ advance,
The skulls a little clearer every year,
Neglected taxes, mice, the common cold,
Shares held too long, the child they’d never hold.

[Gail White]

CATHY CHANDLER'S COMMENT: “Requited Love”, a finely crafted list sonnet, is what is unofficially called a Wyatt/Surrey sonnet, named for the variations Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey brought to the Petrarchan (or Italian) sonnet in the 16th century.

The Wyatt/Surrey sonnet features a quatorzain, written with a Petrarchan octave (envelope rhyme/rima baciata – “kissing rhyme”) abba abba, followed by an envelope quatrain (cddc) ending with a rhyming couplet (ee), primarily iambic pentameter. The volta (without extra line spacing) or a pivot (a shifting or tilting of the main line of thought) comes sometime after the 2nd quatrain.

I find “Requited Love”, with its play on the various definitions of the word “requited”, its matter-of-fact diction, and its use of repetition, alliteration and other devices, is a great example not only of a classic sonnet, but a wonderful poem in its own right.

[Gail White]

COMMENT BY GAIL: Here again, you can virtually make up your own story, and I saw this as a very understated love poem. Presented quite objectively - just "here it is" - we see an aging childless couple who may outlive their money as they have outlived their looks. Their life together is mostly silent and romance is long gone, but they are still sharing the same bed, and as Tevye's wife Golde says, "If that's not love, what is?"

[Tim Murphy]

This strikes me as a very beautiful poem, nihil obstat.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Ah! It took six poems, but finally one that wows me! What a beautiful, descriptive, novel sonnet. Deftly crafted, deep, and compelling.

I wonder about the grammar of "veins' " in L11. I understand that it's meant to be multiple veins, but when juxtaposed with "hair's" right before it, I believe it would be better as "vein's." That's a very minor nit, though. The voice in this poem is delightfully wistful -- the kind of voice one cannot simply counterfeit. Whoever wrote this has struck the perfect balance of depth and accessibility, and nailed the essence of a sonnet in the process.

Bravo.

[Maryann Corbett]

I like this one a great deal. Readers who disapproved of sonnet 1 on the grounds of irregular meter and slant rhyme can have no such objection to this one. One could pick at it, I suggest, for not having a real turn. But I enjoy it too much to pick.

Like 1, this one also has subtleties: I especially like the suggestions, in L5-7, of fantasized sex, which raise the question of how long the two have remained together without romance, and what that might have to do with their being childless. But one has to set those lines against L4, a line I especially admire, which stresses the care in their routine.*

Every detail here is part of a picture that we could call stereotyped; it's certainly well-known. But the way the picture is drawn parries that criticism by its artful use of parallel structure, sound devices like present/pressed, choice of assorted details, and pacing toward the list's final item.

Fourteen lines--a hundred forty syllables--is not much space, and a great deal will depend on picking a situation readers recognize. And that's why writing a truly original sonnet is so !@#$@# hard.

This one just jumped to my number one spot.

*It has dawned on me that this line is also richly ambiguous, since it depends on the sort of scene the TV actors are playing.

[Roger Slater]

What Maryann said.

[Martin Rocek]

Very fine indeed. A low key elegy that could either slip into dismissive satire or
sentimentality, but doesn't.

What Roger said.

[stephenspower]

I'm a sucker for assonance and internal rhyme and this one has it in spades. I also think veins' should be vein's, like hair's, but even so, small point. Great use of the passive voice to start as well. And the final line is fantastic, a melding of lost economic and biological opportunity.

[Lois Elaine Heckman]

Like Shaun, after 5 other works, I finally have that feeling of admiration for the combination of the poetic qualities of this piece and its voice as a sonnet.

From my point of view, hair’s and veins’ are perfectly correct as used. In English, hair is treated as singular, no matter how many “hairs” there are, and vein is singular only if there is just one. Since the poem is quite likely not saying that there is one particular vein sticking out, but an array of them, this genitive is exact.