[Gail White]

Mower’s Song

The boy who mows my yard
thinks that he once was I.
He pushes pretty hard
under the prairie sky.
He has no belching motor
or right-hand discharge chute,
no madly whirring rotor,
and he’s no longer cute.

Just a front-mounted reel
geared to a rubber wheel,
and that is how the grass
made on the Lord’s Third Day
will fall as fragrant hay
until I too shall pass.

[Gail White]

CATHY CHANDLER'S COMMENT: What a treat! A sonnet in trimeter. Cuts to the chase (no pun intended ;-)) On each new reading I’ve found more to love about it, even line 8, which I thought a trifle rhyme-driven at first, but which I soon realized is simply natural, good-natured banter. The details in the juxtaposition of the newfangled versus the old-style mowing machine and the acceptance of the aging process in lines 11 through 14 are brilliant. One thinks of mowing as reaping or harvesting. Or shades of the “grim reaper”. Or, better still, Psalm 37:2-3. No nits.

[Gail White]

COMMENT BY GAIL: My favorite part of this is the last 4 lines, where the living grass (created by God and therefore sanctified) turns into dead grass, "which today is, and tomorrow is cast into the oven." Since all flesh is grass, as the Bible loves to remind us,
the best we can hope for is to leave the memory of "fragrant hay."

[Lewis Turco]

This is NOT a sonnet. Sonnets MUST be written in iambic pentameter verse. All other fourteen-line forms are called "quatorzains."

[Shaun J. Russell]

While I may not be as proscriptive as Mr. Turco above, I can't deny feeling very frustrated at the lack of standard sonnets selected so far. The whole point of "form" is to maximize one's creative ability within certain confines, isn't it?

In any event, it couldn't be more obvious who wrote this one, and whether it's a sonnet or not, it's a delightful, if very ephemeral, poem. The only real drawback is that it doesn't particularly invite comment. It says its piece, and that's all there is to it. It's well executed, has logical substitutions, and feels as natural as its subject matter.

Having said that, I wonder how much name recognition led to this poem being selected. It's a quality piece, to be sure, but certainly not overly insightful or compelling.

[Roger Slater]

Lew expresses his own entirely defensible view of things, but others might defensibly differ. In an Erato thread on the subject, Alicia Stallings said "testing the rules of the sonnet is almost part of the tradition of the sonnet in English (otherwise we'd only have Petrarchan sonnets for one)--and there is practically a whole separate genre of nonce-rimed sonnets, and plenty of sonnets in other meters." And Dick Davis said "I agree wholly with AEStallings - there is a norm and there are variations from the norm."

[Catherine Chandler]

"Mower's Song" is a sonnet. And so is Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet" as well as a sequence in James Merrill's "The Broken Home". I could list others as well. I would refer readers to The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet for more insights into the sonnet, its variations, and its continually evolving nature.

[Shaun J. Russell]

Originally Posted by Catherine Chandler

"Mower's Song" is a sonnet. And so is Elizabeth Bishop's "Sonnet" as well as a sequence in James Merrill's "The Broken Home". I could list others as well. I would refer readers to The Cambridge Companion to the Sonnet for more insights into the sonnet, its variations, and its continually evolving nature.

Sure, different sources will list different standards for what constitutes a sonnet...and there has to be the expectation of evolution in any form. The sonnet has been around for 700 years or so, after all. Nevertheless, with the exception of rhyme scheme, the form remained largely the same for 600 of those 700 years, then faced numerous mutations throughout the 20th Century. So I guess the real question is this: in a sonnet "competition," is more deference given to sonnets that adhere to the older standard, or to sonnets that are far less tethered to the traditional definition?

This is probably a discussion better suited for a non-poem thread, but it's likely a discussion worth having either way.

[Lewis Turco]

Well, if you’re going to run any contest, shouldn’t there be some rules? If you’re going to run a sonnet contest, shouldn’t the tradition and rules of the sonnet form be honored? Not many people have earned an actual “poetic license” (many of my former students have done so), but I suppose that now there’s an Internet most would-be poets have a “virtual” poetic license and can call anything a “sonnet” or anything else they want to call it. But that doesn’t mean everything they “call” a sonnet actually is one.

[R. Nemo Hill]

We all know you can't think yourself outside of that box you've long since thought yourself into, Lewis. No need to confirm that dull fact over and over again. Rule over your own damn contest. You've already displayed your poor sense of debate up here in threads past, raising your voice a notch whenever challenged, and saying the same thing over and over and over and over again like a tourist speaking their own little language in a foreign country. Get your eye off the tree and out into the vast beautiful forest.

Yawn,
Nemo