[Marcia Karp]

My ears find no metrical problems, only a fine control of language. I found it a relief from the stilted meter too often in sonnets here. The couplet, meaning several things at once, is volta enough for me.

Unlike Marly, I instantly loved shift in relation to the dress.

Marcia

[Jean L. Kreiling]

I like this very much, especially its irresistible child-like energy and momentum. Though I tend to be a traditionalist, I find the looseness of rhyme, meter, and grammar appropriate for this subject.

Like a couple of others, I briefly thought this was going to be about gender identification—and maybe a few lines need to be tweaked to steer the reader’s attention away from that issue, which I don’t think is the main focus of the poem.

In addition, I think that the last two lines need some revising, for clarity’s sake. I’m pretty sure I understand the significance of the watch and the list, but I was distracted by puzzling out the chronology.

A fun, thought-provoking start for the bakeoff!

[R. Nemo Hill]

Marcia said it better than I can: "My ears find no metrical problems, only a fine control of language."

Nemo

[marly youmans]

Ah, well, Marcia's note must mean that I am, indeed, mad. Or at least zany around the edges.

Enjoyed seeing these and the comments and am looking forward to more.

[Jayne Osborn]

I like the poem itself, though if this wasn't a sonnet bake-off I wouldn't have recognised the form, as others have said.

I suspect that I might be the only Spherian to have a pet snake, so I love the notion of anyone happily letting a harmless snake slide across their hand - a thought that others abhor.

Again, as someone else remarked (I can't remember who, sorry,) my feeling is that if this had been posted on Metrical there would have been more suggestions for improvement than straightforward praise for it.

An interesting start to the bake-off, though I won't be voting for this one, and that's without having seen any of the others yet, simply because I'm a traditionalist and prefer more rigid adherence to the form.

Jayne

[Mary McLean]

I'm not sure I'd call this IP, but I'd certainly call it a sonnet. Are the two indivisible? The frequent anapestic feet suit the chaotic rhythm of childhood, though as others have suggested it might be nice for the final couplet to revert to a more rigid pattern for contrast.

I can't decide whether I like the symbolism, which feels a bit tacked-on. Is the snake the devil or male genitalia or just a reptile? I'm not sure a snake really can be just a snake in a poem nowadays, particularly in a poem about childhood. The wealth of physical detail and the breathless exuberance of the tone are very attractive, but the clues to the poem's subtext are so contradictory that it doesn't end up meaning much to me. My preference would be for a bit more clarity in the final couplet on the narrator's current state, as others have suggested, since it obviously isn't narrated by a child. But maybe that would mess up the tone.

[Paul Connolly]

The run-on sentence fragment works for me, nicely representing childhood from two perspectives at once -- a child's and an adult's.

Childhood seemed to me to run on forever while I was a child; only looking back do I know how brief it was and feel it vanished without fair notice. And so the poem's as much about our perception of time [thanks for ending with the watch!] as it is about childhood. Tempus fugit.

[Chris Childers]

Works for me. Rebecca's critique is indeed very fine. When I read I felt the turn in the change of pace in line 10, the way the verse suddenly slows down as the child lies in the grass, but I wouldn't argue that too strenuously.

The one thing that struck me as a flaw: "for mine" in line 6--does it mean "saved for mine from the Goodwill bag"? That feels a little forced, but maybe I am just not quite getting it.

Good one!

C

[Susan McLean]

I don't mind the looseness of the meter, and the enjambments, though radical at times, contribute to the headlong feel of the poem. I am more bothered by the moments that made me stumble because they weren't clear to me. I took "to shift" as meaning "to fidget," but only after giving it considerable thought because I couldn't make sense of it at first. The ending also bugged me because I wasn't sure that a time jump had occurred, but that was the only way I could make sense of it. I think the whole sonnet up to that point is a daydream about childhood, but that the notepad and watch are in the present of the poet, which she is escaping from into the daydream.

For me, too many details of the memory sound unsurprising and therefore not particularly memorable, but the snake stands out as a moment that convinces by being unexpected. The longing for the freedoms of childhood, even the temporary reprieve from gender of being alone and out in nature, is something that I think most readers can identify with. I don't see any need to impose allegory on what doesn't need it. It comes across as being straight realism to me. If there is an agenda, I would say that it is in the subverting of stereotypes of what girls are like.

Susan

[Alasdair McAndrew]

I think this is a lovely sonnet: beautifully paced, superbly evocative, and rich in sound. To me the slant rhymes are perfect: they help evoke the slight wildness of childhood - I think perfect rhymes throughout would have deadened the poem a little. The poems seems to breathe with its own life, and the form is perfect for its contents. I'm impressed, and envious.