[Bonnie Phares]

I'm afraid that I, too, can't see a sonnet in this poem. I do like it, but it doesn't sound metrical to me. I like the picture it presents of a typical day in a child's life, but I don't think it has deeper meaning than that.

[Scott Miller]

Maryann Delaney, et. al. -- I mentioned in a post for #2, could you please include just a brief description of what sonnet elements specifically failed for you? "Traditionalism" doesn't really mean much to me. Do you not accept anapestic substitution? It sounds like people are faulting the meter. But I'm not sure I'm scanning it the same way if that's the case.

L1 has a single anapestic substitution in the 2nd foot. L2 has 3. L3 has 0, it's pure IP. L4 has a trochaic sub in the first foot and anapestic sub in the last. Of the 4 opening lines, I would only consider calling L2 "sprung". I won't continue but suffice to say I wouldn't totally disqualify it on meter.

p.s. I think of myself as traditionalist too -- I guess there's always someone more formally attired

[Robert Meyer]

Although there is much that I like here, mostly some of the nouns (lots of talk about clothes, especially female clothes, and a snake that is a "garter" snake; the footwear is sneakers and her brother didn't give her the t-shirt, but she took it out of the Goodwill bag when presumably nobody was looking, kind of sneaky), I'm going to have to side with Shaun here. Generally breaking the rules should be done as rarely as possible, and there's only two situations where it works. The first is where it's done so masterfully you don't realize it happened. An example of this is the one 15-line sonnet by Shakespeare. It doesn't even look like he broke the rules. Where's the extra line? The first stanza has 5 lines, but the rhyme scheme is A-B-A-B-A so reading it aloud it seems okay. The second is when there's no other thing to do, sort of an "yes officer, I know I was speeding, in fact I ran a red light before then, but my wife's going into labor and the ambulance didn't come" thing. An example of where that should have been done, but wasn't, is Tennyson's line about Joseph of Arimathea in the Grail section of Idylls Of The King. Instead of just allowing the name to stand, non-iambic parts of it as well, he twists the name around to fit it into unreadable iambs. Neither of these cases apply to "Childhood" so I'd say a rewrite, getting it closer to a traditional sonnet prosody, would be good.

[Latorial Faison]

When I read this sonnet yesterday, I'm not quite sure I internalized it. Today, "Childhood" took me back to my own. I like the simple title and I like all of the simple little details that remind me of my own tomboyish childhood. I couldn't quite relate to being forced to wear that dress each day, but it certainly reminded me of the twice a week my grandmother and I fought like Ali and Liston about it.

Though this sonnet seemed to move very fast with all of its details, it pauses to detail a very slow time and place in life. It yields the idea of the easy, slow, boring passing of time one may have endured as a country kid.

To have done this all in one breath, all in one line was creative. I wondered greatly about the watch in the last line . . . Perhaps the sonnet was more about the watch or time and how much passes in a country day or what can actually happen in a country minute . . . when you're a child.

[Latorial Faison]

Rebecca, I thought the same thing as I pondered about the dress every day and the girl/boy or boy/girl reference. I thought that maybe this might be about more than just a girl who climbed trees and explored nature. Perhaps there's not an exploration here so much as a rebellion against what is. Thanks for bringing me back there; it would make for a more interesting perspective and discussion of the sonnet for sure. Actually, that would take this sonnet to a whole other level . . . simple but really, truly not.

[Ed Shacklee]

Perhaps I wouldn't have enjoyed this as much if I'd read this only as a poem about childhood, but the "To" at the start and the shift at the end made me think this was a vivid memory of childhood instead, and N - perhaps a mother herself now - was suddenly dragged back from her reverie by the tasks at hand, and by Time, symbolized by the watch on her wrist. She 'woke up' to her real life and current age just when I did, and she left me charmed. Perhaps I've gotten it all wrong, but that way of looking at the poem has stuck with me.

Best,

Ed

[Elle Bruno]

This is so sweet and has great slam-the-screen-door energy.
Are we permitted to make suggestions?
Shift hit me as odd too- since it is a type of dress,
and slowed me down.
How about 'squirm'.
And what about calling it Tomboy?
Elle

[Woody Long]

Elle--

I think the poet chose the word "shift" because it has multiple associations related to the rest of the poem:

shift - fidgeting in her chair

shift - a change of clothes

shifts - in time

shift - an article of clothing once for both sexes, now a kind of woman's dress

shift - a change of any kind--the girl will change clothes reverting to almost her old tomboy self (note "both boy and girl" in L9) ; but also she is just about to change from a tomboy into a young woman, signaled by the garter snake.

"garter snake" suggests:

-- a perhaps dated association with women's clothing

-- Eve & the serpent, departure from paradise, etc.

and leads to the mother's call.

All of these associations can be drawn by the reader from the words on the page. I think the poet had at least some of these and maybe more in mind, and wanted to leave the associations open to the reader.

For similar reasons, I believe the poet didn't want to pin down the girl to "tomboy". The poem includes: the girl, the tomboy, the incipient young woman, archetypal Eve, and probably, I think, the older woman being called back from her reminiscence.

--Woody

[Jennifer Gordon]

The necessary end-rhyming disintegrating after the initial quatrain, and a sorry lack of adherence to the cardinal rule of iambic pentametre, it appears the sonnet having been classified some time back as the "most exquisite form of poetry" has been misunderstood to signify that an exquisite thought rendered in fourteen lines must be the same.

On of my sonnet instructors corralling my tendencies to ramble out an entire octet, I know how easy it is, and fall into it still more often than is acceptable. Thence I sympathize with the author, though unable to justify her.

After that, beautifully rendered with excellent imagery, this handily takes the reader back in time to simpler days when childhood indeed merely wanted to be free of the strictures adulthood necessarily forced on it, sweetly illustrating its essence in a sense.

For the first finalist, it was rather discouraging. Aside from that it is a lovely poem. Since Shelley's Ode to the West Wind has been allowed to be classed as a series of sonnets, perhaps there is yet room for a piece like this, but if I am not too bold in stating it, tis dangerous to uphold it as an example of the form lest the uninformed lose their way.

Thanks for sharing!

ttfn,
Jenny

[R. Nemo Hill]

What a veritable tsunami of bogus purity has been washing over certain of these critiques for all these sonnets. You'd think the sonnet was some sort of precious bloodless object that must be kept on an incubator lest its "exquisite" perfection be sullied by the lowly mortals who worship at its altar. A tradition is only viable in as much as it is alive, and being hooked up to an iambic breathing tube in a sterile ward is not living. As far as I can see a lot of the comments here are elevating the sonnet at the expense of poetry, which makes me feel that this ideal sonnet whose virtue is being protected so snobbishly here is not a poem at all, but some sort anemic fetish object. Tradition is a path, not a destination; a lens, not the eye that sees. And poetry transcends its categories. Meanwhile in the attics and basements of the academy the over-instructed devotees grow hoarse with their suffocating defense of the holy fourteen, trying to outdo one another in minutiae of fidelity, and losing all sight of true expression in the process. I dare say poetry is the loser in this tomb. I can keep up with formalism as well as the next poet, it is my first love, but some of the self-appointed sanctimonious attitudes here are, well, hilarious.

Nemo