This poem, WB, has a lot going for it, and would seem to me publishable, though I don't know exactly where. I can imagine editors raising editorish objections of the sort we writers are always hearing and dismissing because we need to get our work done. The editor in me says that this poem feels too much like Browning, not only in the couplets but also in lines like line four that could almost have been lifted from "My Last Duchess." There's also something just a tad stilted from a fiction writer's point of view in the dialogue, and since this gets going right from the first line, the editor looking for the shock of the new (whether in meter or not) might feel something a bit stiff in the joints about this poem. Phrases like "that wondrous quality" don't help in this respect, and perhaps that smoothed away tear is a bit too obvious a signal, an easy way of saying "emotion" without producing it. I'm also concerned, though here it might just be due to a shallow reading on my part, that the speaker's reason for telling us this anecdote hasn't quite come through or quite paid enough dividends dramatically. Take a look again at Sam Gwynn's great "Cleante to Elmire" and you'll see that, despite the heroic couplets and allusions to Wilbur/Moliere, the voice feels utterly contemporary, the poem a bit edgy in the story it relates. The man who tells the story is putting his own life in order, as it were, by doing so. It's a crucial moment in his mind.
I guess at the end your poem feels capable but not dynamically new, not set apart enough as an experience to make an editor snap it up. My inclination would be to see what happens if you go deeper into the material and try harder to freshen the diction without getting precious. A contemporary poet like Michael Donaghy or Glyn Maxwell might be a good one to read in this respect.
I hope these comments are helpful in some way.
Dave
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