[Catherine Chandler]

Originally Posted by R. Nemo Hill

"if I may be forgiven for rather playfully rendering Cathy thus"

Well, that's a mouthful! Tell me, Cathy, how does it feel being thus playfully rendered?

Nemo

I think it's hilarious! YEEHAW!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Actually I've been called worse, and to my face, and by own mother . Miss Jenny Gordon can call me whatever she likes. I don't give a rat's culito.

C

[R. Nemo Hill]

Orwn seems to have had the final word here.

Nemo

[Andrew Sacks]

Roger, I really do not know. I would have let Edmund Spenser in. I don't know who "Spencer" was.

[R. Nemo Hill]

Here to score points, Andrew?

Nemo

[Woody Long]

Originally Posted by Catherine Chandler

I don't give a rat's culito.

A diminutive, appropriate for the size of the animal. Rhymes with "cuchifrito" (in "Two Lindens"). Somebody might do something with that. Perhaps in another language.

[Andrew Sacks]

Mr. Hill, I am here because I love poetry and have a healthy respect for the classics.

[Catherine Chandler]

A trimeter sonnet by James Merrill, on page 246, The Penguin Book of the Sonnet: 500 Years of a Classic Tradition in English:

Last Words

My life, your light green eyes
Have lit on me with joy.
There's nothing I don't know
Or shall not know again,
Over and over again.
It's noon, it's dawn, it's night,
I am the dog that dies
In the deep street of Troy
Tomorrow, long ago—
Part of me dims with pain,
Becomes the stinging flies,
The bent head of the boy.
Part looks into your light
And lives to tell you so.

[Roger Slater]

Originally Posted by Andrew Sacks

Roger, I really do not know. I would have let Edmund Spenser in. I don't know who "Spencer" was.

Ouch! You win.

But wait, maybe you don't. Why would you have let him in? Doesn't that admission prove my typo-corrected point?

[Simon Hunt]

I've been busy and also irritated with the SONNET-NOTASONNET jive all over these threads, so I haven't come to the party yet (did you miss me?). I guess I would wish we'd spend more time on the poems themselves. It's a given, isn't it, that any two judges might have picked 10 different winners? So what?

Anyway, I'm here now, and the author of this Mower's Song is the lucky recipient of my first intervention. I like this poem as I did when it was up for critique. I don't think I said anything in that thread, but my only concern about it remains the first two lines. Like others here in this thread and in that one, I think the lines obfuscate unrewardingly. In fact, they say the opposite, sort of, of what they mean. The old guy (I) who mows the lawn pretends he's still a boy. As Tim Murphy says up-thread, it's possible to figure out what is meant, but in such a beautifully plain-spoken piece, the cryptic puzzly opening sticks out for me. Thumbs up on the pithy snap of the trimeter.

[David Rosenthal]

It's all been downhill since Surrey messed up the rhyme scheme. And that shameful business of Shakespeare's 145 -- no respect for tradition.

David R.