[Gail White]

FELLOW TRAVELER

I'm five years old, a frosty autumn night;
my father wakes me, takes me by the hand,
and in our robes and slippers we two stand
outside to see among the stars a light
that moves. That moves. It's 1957.
My father says the Russians have leapt ahead.
By building missiles instead of baking bread,
the godless souls have marred the face of heaven.
Although I'll come to question what I'm told,
and move through zones of faith or unbelief,
that strange word, "Sputnik", always brings a brief
but heart-deep shiver from the cold,
a vision of the new star, far and high,
that traced its arc against the silent sky.

[Gail White]

What I loved in this one was the capturing of an awed moment in childhood, plus the notion of being a "fellow traveler" through the universe with an object in outer space.

[Shaun J. Russell]

I like the content and subject of this one, but there's also some work to be done. In L3 "we two stand" sounds very awkward to my ear. Indeed, the passive voice is used a lot in this sonnet ("too see among the stars a light") and it detracts from any possible immediacy. Some of the metrical inconsistencies are a bit too clumsy to be substitutions, in my view. Does L6 really need the "have"? Could L7 have something other than "missiles" to keep the meter intact? "Far and high" in L13 seems padded to me. Oh, and a minor grammatical nit: the comma should be inside the quotation marks in L11.

Again, I like where this is headed, but I think the voice needs to become more active and some more attention needs to go toward the structure and feel.

"Heart-deep shiver" is a great image, by the way. Very evocative, and I'd love to see more of that in this sonnet.

[Pedro Poitevin]

I have metrical nits (the anapestic substitutions don't seem to do anything interesting for the poem), but I love that lonely tet line 12. I wonder what this poem would be like in tetrameter (without the adjectives 'silent', 'frosty', and the repetition of 'that moves').

Those questions aside, I have a very positive emotional response to this sonnet. There's time travel and space travel; there are ideas that change, and an emotion that remains. I love the title (which adds so much depth).

Pedro.

[Tim Murphy]

Well, I was six, and I had the same experience, so this poem really connects with this geezer. I don't have any problem with the hypermetric lines, and Pedro, I don't think you can cut this to tet. One could dispense with a lot of adjectives and make it het met. If it were my poem (I wish), that is what I would do.

[Pedro Poitevin]

You're probably right, Tim. Het-met would work very well, and perhaps tet alone would make the rhymes come too soon. It is a lovely sonnet. My nits are tiny. This one, I love.

Pedro.

[Roger Slater]

I agree with Tim's het-met idea. Going tet would lose too much, but as it is there's a bit of metrical filler that bogs things down. To me, a beginning like this would capture the mood better:

I'm five years old, a frosty autumn night;
my father wakes me, takes me by the hand,
and in our robes and slippers we stand
outside to see among the stars a light
that moves. It's 1957.

I didn't quite get the "baking bread" idea. Why should the Russians have been baking bread? Seems an odd thing for the father to say.

I agree that the experience is captured well, but the wistful ending strikes me as somewhat fuzzy and a disappointment. I wish we had a more precise sense of how the word "Sputnik" affects our speaker years later. A "shiver" and a "vision" of a "new star" doesn't work for me. They are vague cliches and pretty much repeat what we've already been told or sensed for ourselves. If it could be brought back to something more personal for the speaker, about his father or perhaps his own son, I think it would close more strongly. Overall, though, I enjoyed.

PS-- I'm not sure the punning title, irresistible as it might be, actually works with the content of the sonnet as written.

[Chris Wilson]

I find L5 memorable as well. Being only just young enough for this to be history rather than personal experience, it is L5 that conveys to me the feeling of a shift in the order of the universe. Speaking of shifts, the perspective moves from child to adult a bit too suddenly for me in "Although I'll come to question...always brings." I would find it smoother to move the whole sentence into the adult perspective: "Although I've come to question...always brings."

[Vernon Sims]

This has an honestyabout it, built as it is on a generational experiences, shared by many of us, There are a few points, but others have dealt with them.

[Martin Rocek]

I like this quite a lot; there have been many interesting comments
already, but what I noted, and found slightly perplexing is the
juxtaposition of "leapt ahead" (I know it means in the space race),
which sounds like praise, and then the next two lines contradict
that premise. Perhaps some sense of fear on the father's part
could be expressed before the phrase "leapt ahead".

Still, despite some of the shortcomings that others have noted,
I like it.