[Catherine Chandler]

Maryann,

There will be other "paired" sonnets as well as the bake-off progresses. I have paired several sonnets up so that readers may compare two "takes" on the same theme. I disagree that either of the sonnets posted today suffers from being in one another's company.

Everyone knows that the three main themes in poetry are life, death, and love (although one of my favorite Uruguayan poets, Mario Benedetti, would argue -- and he does -- that the three main themes as far as he is concerned, are love, life and women).

Of the thirteen finalists, five fall into the life/death category, seven into love, and one is about animals. However, in some cases, life, death, and love overlap. In one case, life and animals overlap.

Without giving anything away, of the 26 shortlisted (i.e., the thirteen finalists and thirteen I wish I could have chosen as well -- and I will name them at the end of the bake-off), a full twenty deal with life, death and love.

[Gail White]

I think that's one hell of a last line. And I also admire the first line, with its "frieze of fallen men."

[Petra Norr]

I have paired several sonnets up so that readers may compare two "takes" on the same theme. - Catherine

I think the theme of dementia in this poem is poorly done in comparison to the other. I saw the opening in the same way RogerBob did, as the woman speaking vividly about the men who had died, as if they were still alive and part of the family, but not that she actually believed they were alive.
And when I read this line, I clearly totally misinterpreted it, just as I did the entire poem:

You smile, connecting every face and name.

I immediately got the opposite impression -- the woman might be ninety but she's in no sense mentally impaired because she clearly can connect all the names and faces; she remembers who everyone is.
The fact that the daughters give their mother commands dioesn't convey the mother's dementia either, because some grown offspring with an old and frail mother have a tendency to treat their parent like a child, whether the parent has dementia or not.
And the couplet at the end (which I still find moving in spite of the fact that the rest of the poem has changed for me) is not making any statement at all about dementia; on the contrary, it shows that the woman remembers well the emotion, the difficulty, of the deaths and burials.
---
Sadly, the poem has done a belly-flop and sunk to the bottom.

[Susan McLean]

I like the beginning and the way the end circles back to it, but the middle sags for me. Most of the details there are to be expected at an event of this sort (though the daughters' manifold commands add the ironic suggestion of the matriarch's being bossed by her daughters). I did not assume dementia in the matriarch, since she can put the names with the faces. Instead, I think the poem is about the way that the dead loom large in the awareness of older people, and the way that they keep returning to their griefs. I did find the ending to be moving, partly because of the subject and partly because of the solemn pace and buildup. I thought the heavy endstopping in the middle was undesirable, chopping the lines into too-regular lengths and hitting the rhymes, which are not especially memorable, in a way that calls attention to them.

Susan

[John Hutchcraft]

Originally Posted by Maryann Corbett

I don't think anyone has noted that the ordinariness of "put away" and "gone away" is another matter that might be fixed. (My inner EfH will not be silent about that.)

Interesting! For me, the line ending in "put away" is one of the better lines in the poem; for me, its brevity and briskness suggest (what I take to be) an empty ritual of birthday gift-giving where the recipient is past caring, a certain kind of social perfunctoriness. I liked how that line's texture matched its sense. It lacks the pyrotechnic wallop of the frieze line, but to me it's the most effective line in the poem.

No disagreement here about "gone away," though. It's a little poetickal, isn't it? As are other bits of diction, including the vaunted "frieze" line. The image of the frieze has been justly praised as vivd and resonant. Another salubrious effect is that it clears the palate, frankly, after that stilted "speak of them" locution. While the frieze line succeeds wildly, other attempts to speak in its elevated register fall flat (Sam pointed them all out) and leave this reader, at least, with less than total trust in the poem's voice. So then I start noticing places where the seams show a little bit, like in L4 when we're told that "talk's begun"; usually, "talk begins."

I don't share concerns about the placement of the volta. I agree with Peter that this sonnet, as a Shakespearean, gets a fair amount of voltaic leeway as a matter of course. And aside from the requirements of the form, there's the matter of the specific formal expectations this poem sets up as you read it: I don't think it's fair to expect a volta in a particular place unless the poet signals that she's going to be following all the sonnet's structural conventions, and this poet signaled at the first available opportunity (line 4) that s/he wouldn't, by refusing to close the door behind her as she leaves her first stanza: she runs sense and topic from line 4 right into line 5, and that tells you right there that this sonnet isn't doing *deep* Shakespearean structure, just the rhyme scheme - a perfectly legitimate choice. Whatever problems this poem has, I don't think they're structural.

There's plenty more to say, but I've said plenty already. This poem seems to me like it clearly announces what it's up to and then goes about doing it, with pretty fair success despite the diction's straining for a few high notes that it can't quite hit.

[Petra Norr]

My personal crazy wish for this sonnet, so that it might be restored to its former glory, is to replace the dedication with an epigraph -- fitting words from famous lyrics:

"Long time passing" -- Pete Seeger and Joe Hickerson.

[R. Nemo Hill]

By all means, their children should be changed to the children to avoid any generational quibbles. In general the poem is taking a long and abstract view of the generations, so the generic as opposed to possessive seems apt: they could be anyone's children and the tension of the piece would not be diminished. I think that's what I like best about the poem: this sobering frieze-like quality which calmly keeps the sentimentality in check. And I think some of the diction, like manifold commands, sustains that elegant distance of abstraction.

Interesting how old age and Alzheimer's seems such an automatic pair for contemporary readers. I found no trace of such a clinical diagnosis in the poem. Indeed it is the woman's keen awareness of the passage of time and those caught in its current that lends the poem its poignancy. Having time stand still while memory meanders around the players who've passed through, that seems one of the natural fruits of a long life, a breadth of reverie that is perhaps too often interpreted as the lapse of dementia. I look forward to the state myself.

The sonnet is a classical one. As such, its expected course offers no pyrotechnics, no particularly memorable innovations. But its progress is stately, like its father brothers sons, like the years of its protagonist--and as such I don't think it makes any major missteps. It may not excite everyone, but in a certain mood it will move almost anyone.

I quite enjoyed Petra's take on it.

Nemo

[Michael Cantor]

I liked this when it appeared, and like it even more now. Possibly it's because I just spent four days with my mother, who is now 100 years old and has many resemblances to the Matriarch of the poem (not the lovers, sadly - in our family "affairs" were bar mitzvahs), but the voice and description rang very true.

While old age does not automatically signal Alzheimer's, as Nemo points out, I think there is definitely a focus on repeatedly going through litanies of the past (so much easier to remember, and more pleasant, than the present), and the poem captures this very well - the echo of L2 as L13 drives it home.

The "frieze of fallen men", as many have noted, is admirable, I think the last line rocks, and if you've got a great first line and a strong last line, and everything in between is as well handled as it is here - well, you can't ask much more of a sonnet. I think this one is finely crafted and a well done poem.

On the carping side - the last line provides a ta-da and a snap of the head, but I agree that technically, there's no real turn. And I would prefer something other than the obvious "matriarch".

[Julie Steiner]

This is very, very good, but it could be a bit better. Comma definitely needed at end of L2. I'm also not wild about "As though they were alive and well again." L3 could easily be reworded to avoid the cliche "alive and well," and also avoid the distracting suggestion (later contradicted by "connecting every face and name") that the protagonist actually thinks that they are "alive and well": "And one by one those heroes live again" or some such.

I liked the end-stopping of the central catalog of obligatory social interactions, and thought that checklist might feel even more perfunctory with some headless lines: "Birthday gifts are opened, put away./ Children, bored now, scuffle on the floor."

Even if those lines aren't decapitated, I'd like to see "Old Matriarch" made headless, to get rid of the redundant "Old". The honorific would have more majesty unadorned.

As for the turn--what if, instead of looking for a single volta-hinged gate to divide the sonnet's front yard from its back yard, we just look for the front yard and back yards themselves? In that case, the more private back yard would definitely be lines 1-3 and 11-14 of the sonnet, and the public front yard would be lines 4-10. The volta is still the gate between the two, but we go through it twice, starting and ending in the more intimate back yard. As is appropriate, in a poem about memory.

[Philip Quinlan]

Coming back to say that my previous comments may have seemed terse because I was making them under time pressure, at work. I have a lot of time for the person who wrote this.

I think it is a strong sonnet, and the one thing I'd change would be to inject some more intimacy, and resolve a nit for others here, by making it "my matriarch", rather than "old matriarch".

I disagree with Sam on the candle flame issue: when one blows a candle flame it moves away from one, though in this case hardly at all.

I think a colon at the end of L12 would be more correct as it introduces a list.

On another point: I don't see dementia in this at all. I've noticed that subject creeping into poems a lot lately, to the extent that you'd think it was an inevitable consequence of old age, when in fact it isn't. Some older people have minds like razors right up to the end (especially musicians and poets, or so I'm led to believe). I'm with Michael here. This is the way one's memory works when one gets older; the far past becomes more vivid and palpable than the present.

Philip