[Gregory Dowling]

It's interesting to note just how many of Shakespeare's sonnets finish with monosyllabic lines. Here are a few others:

Lo, thus, by day my limbs, by night my mind,
For thee, and for myself, no quiet find. (all right, one two-syllable word)

That then I scorn to change my state with kings.

The pain be mine, but thine shall be the praise.

Kill me with spites; yet we must not be foes.

All days are nights to see till I see thee,
And nights bright days when dreams do show thee me.

And they shall live, and he in them still green.

That in black ink my love may still shine bright.

To love that well which thou must leave ere long.

For I must ne'er love him whom thou dost hate.

Thou mayst be false, and yet I know it not.

And more, much more, than in my verse can sit
Your own glass shows you when you look in it.

Save thou, my Rose; in it thou art my all.

Love is a babe; then might I not say so,
To give full growth to that which still doth grow.

All this the world well knows, yet none knows well
To shun the heaven that leads men to this hell.

Him have I lost, thou hast both him and me;
He pays the whole, and yet am I not free.

Think all but one, and me in that one Will.

For I have sworn thee fear, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.

But love, hate on, for now I know thy mind;
Those that can see thou lov'st, and I am blind.

Her "love" for whose dear love I rise and fall.

Vikram Seth has two very good poems written entirely in monosyllables in his book All You Who Sleep Tonight: "Walk" (4 quatrains of iambic tetrameter) and "Soon" (7 quatrains of iambic trimeter). "Soon" is particularly powerful, a poem in the voice of someone dying of AIDS, which begins:

I shall die soon, I know.
This thing is in my blood.
It will not let me go.
It saps my cells for food.

He obviously has a thing for monosyllables, as he has a section in his novel, An Equal Music, in monosyllables: it describes a visit to Torcello (page 286) and begins:

In God's great barn the souls are weighed. In the fiend's lap sits the false Christ, pert and mild. Great beams thrust off the wall and strut the roof. The queen of grace, dressed all in blue, holds up her wise-faced child.