Well, since I can't feel smug about having identified the appreciator, I'll just have to feel smug for not having had any trouble scanning the last line: "and that's ALL that you'll BE underGROUND." (The poet's just dropped the first syllable of the initial anapest in most of the other lines, see?)
I love the way that the recycling of the poem's beginning at its end might be taken as a sort of wry profession of faith that humankind bears God's image, after all.
Oh, and I just love the obvious pleasure that the poet took in the odd-numbered lines' silly feminine rhymes--feminine rhymes are just a lot more fun, aren't they?--and in the juxtaposition of jawbreakers like "soteriological" with the bitter monosyllables of dejection and disappointment.
As for the definition of how poetry goes wrong...well, the only rule for poetry going right is "Don't be boring." That said, we are all entitled to develop our own criteria for what is and is not boring.
For me, from my lofty vantage on the aesthetic and moral high ground of abstraction, "boring" generally has more to do with the poet's treatment of subject matter than the poet's choice of it. I am not gay, or black, or male, or a brain surgeon, or a skydiver, but I would hope that these accidents of fate don't prevent me from finding something of value in poems written from those perspectives. Then again, I'd be a liar if I didn't admit that they sometimes do. Such as when a heterosexual man of a certain age writes YET ANOTHER poetic whine about how very, VERY unfair it is that young women no longer flirt with him. Yawn....
That said, I understand that a different audience for a poem that bores or irritates me may find the same poem wonderfully expressive of a "universal" (i.e., personally meaningful to those particular readers) truth.
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Threaded Mode
