[Tim Murphy]

This being Saturday, we'll play a double header: Lisa's Ariadne poem and Deborah's Dido poem, between which some comparisons seem inevitable.


ARIADNE AND THE MINOTAUR

The bull who was and yet was not her brother,
forsaken in the clever walls of Crete--
a creature lost, its nature wholly other.
Not hard to guess the truth that lies beneath
the myth: the fading mention of the child,
the accusations of unnatural birth,
the king who would not have descent defiled;
a child deformed, his life of little worth.
What Ariadne knew: her mother's shame,
the monstrous creature's murderous repute,
its lack of any human given name--
for this she gave her Theseus some jute
that he might go to murder in the maze
and safe, return to hear her sing his praise.
--Lisa Barnett


Dido, It Would Have Ended Anyway


Dido, it would have ended anyway.
Command the sun to linger at its crest
in hot abeyance—order noon to stand
stopped, as if there isn’t any west—
maybe you can get it to obey.
Not love. There’s never been an almanac
that tells when an Aeneas (overdue
in Latium) will leave. No, faithfulness
is for Achates: Love? It barely tops
its hottest summer height before it drops—
as your desire—burnt out—would have, too.
Try something easier, for practice; try
to anchor the daylight and hold the bright ship back
that carries the sun across the windy sky.

--Deborah Warren

[Dick Davis]

The retelling of a Classical myth in a sonnet is something I’ve done myself once or twice, so with these poems I’m already on the writers’ side as it were. And maybe I have to tread more carefully than usual too, for the same reason. Though these two poems seem similar I think they’re doing rather different things: Lisa’s is a poem that reinterprets the myth and sees it as a cover for something else (an illegitimate (?) deformed child hidden away, and then killed, if I’m reading her poem correctly), whereas Deborah’s for me is saying that what was true then is true now (great passion doesn’t last, men are faithless so-and-so’s). I admire them both, but as they’re set next to each other it’s hard not to rate them and I guess I feel that Deborah’s is a bit more successful. There are little bits that seem still awkward to me in Lisa’s poem: eg the run-on from lines 4 to 5 (it’s usually hard to bring off a run on, I think, when the sense comes to a sudden stop at the end of the first foot in the second line of the two). Also line 12 seems a bit weak to me. I think my real problem with the poem though is that Lisa hasn’t convinced me that her interpretation of the myth is the "true" one: in line 4 she says it’s "not hard" to work out what was really going on, but her version of that is never one I’d have come up with, and the poem doesn’t wholly persuade me. The myth seems too grand and the interpretation too domestic: of course you can say that that is Lisa’s point, the grand should be rooted in the domestic if we’re to see its immediate human truth. I’m being picky: there are a lot of things I admire in the poem - "the clever walls of Crete", the felicitousness of lines 6 and 10, the whole concept of the poem (even if I’m not wholly persuaded by it I still admire its audaciousness).
Deborah’s poem I find generally the more convincing. There are moments in the rhetoric I paused at (eg "in hot abeyance") but that’s probably my own temperamental liking for fairly lowkey language, and I’d guess such moments wouldn’t bother most people. There are some metrically iffy lines that are perhaps defensible (line 6 is a syllable short: one can defend it by saying that its flat colloquialism is just what’s needed to contrast with the relatively high rhetoric of the opening, and its (to me) metrical awkwardness fits that sudden descent into the banal. In line 11 you have to scan desire as 3 syllables, which is weird for my (admittedly Brit) ear, and then in the following line "easier" seems to be scanned as 2 syllables, which is a bit of a swallow for me. The extra syllables in the last 2 lines I think work well though, as they give a sort of wistfulness to the whole thing – the emotion won’t fit, can’t be satisfied; the meter mimes that I’d say). The rhyme scheme is unorthodox for a sonnet (to put it mildly) but I’ve done that often enough myself so I can’t be picky there. Some might fault the volta / turn in this poem (we have a rhyme in the octave picked up in the sestet, and the sense doesn’t pause or really change direction after l.8). I quite like it though: technically the volta occurs after "faithfulness", which as it’s a poem about unfaithfulness seems really a fine stroke to me, even if the volta is as it were buried or muffled.

[Michael Cantor]

Both are so good they scare me. This is turning into a wonderful learning experience. Thank you, Tim and Dick, for thinking of it and doing the heavy lifting.

A few nit-type questions/comments regarding Deborah's poem. Dick, you indicated that L6 is a syllable short. Sorry, but I don't see it. Line 5 is short, but I regard that as a headless line. Is there some confusion here, or am I even dumber than usual?

Similar deep and penetrating question on L12. I have no trouble scanning "easier" as three syllables and feeling comfortable with the meter. What am I missing?

Finally, while I like the idea of the metric upset in the last two lines giving a feel that it does "hold the bright ship back", somehow the two extra syllables in L13 make it so clunky (every time I read it I elided to "to anchor daylight, hold the bright ship back") that - my feeling - the break in meter is too disturbing and defeats its purpose. (I had no trouble with the extra syllable in L14 -thought that worked.) Thanks again.

Michael

[Dick Davis]

Michael,
You’re right on both counts of course that it was line 5 of Deborah’s poem I was referring to (not line 6) as being a syllable short, and that "easier" scans easily (and correctly for the scansion) as 3 syllables. I clearly wasn’t counting either lines or syllables very well this morning. I withdraw my comment on line 12 therefore. The headless line (5, not 6) still bothers me though.

[Robt_Ward]

Line 6 is fine, 10 syllables. 4 and 5 are 9, as is 11 (as noted), 13 and 14 (again as noted) go long, 12 and 11 respectively.

So, speaking of syllables, we have: 10, 10, 10, 9, 9, 10, 10, 10, 10, 10, 9, 10, 12, 11 (for whatever that's worth, LOL)

Unlike Cantor, I have no problem with line 13, for me it's a glorious sweep of a singing line. The whole couplet is sound and sense exemplified, I'm in love with it...

to anchor the daylight and hold the bright ship back
that carries the sun across the windy sky.

(BIG sigh!) I love that couplet, I really do!

(robt)

[peter richards]

Of the six sonnets so far I have two sonnetised Graeco-Roman myths, one old joke retold in sonnet form, one pun on the term 'Shakespearean sonnet', one docu-history presentation of the horrors of colonialism and one sonnet - Alicia's - that breaks ground. They're all wonderful sonnets, of course, but the cutting edge is sitting pretty so far.

Peter

PS - late as ever - I now see that I have been overly, not to mention crassly, dismissive of everybody's-sonnet-apart-from-Alicia's, for which I apologise. The two sonnets that are the specific subject of this thread into which I have so rudely crashed, both present thought refreshed by contrast with the dual classic background of sonnet and myth. There's every reason to applaud their content and the sensible choice/use of medium. Lisa manages both renewal of the myth and of the subject of rejection through non-conformity to norms. Deborah's is a little lighter, to my mind, but marries past and present with consumate elegance.

I know that Tim has paid a lot of attention to technical merit, as well as the possible diversity of sonnet material, while performing the cut. They are all good, obviously, each in its own way. My comment, which was really intended to express my own taste for poems that may change the way we think, was no more than that.

Peter

[This message has been edited by peter richards (edited May 05, 2002).]

[Michael Cantor]

Robt -

I assume you meant, "...no problem with line 13."

Interestingly enough, when I read the couplet by itself, as you have typed it, it does sweep and sing. When I go back and read it in context again, after L11 and L12, it clunks again. Don't quite know why. I guess I get those iambs plugged into my brain and can't hear anything else (if it was simply a longer iambic hex line it wouldn't throw me - it's the breaks in the meter that give me trouble).

Michael

[Lisa Barnett]

A few comments...

First, those question marks in my poem are supposed to be dashes.

Dick, your interpretation is dead-on. The impetus for the poem is/was my ambivalence over having a disabled sibling. This is the only poem I've written that successfully addresses this subject, no doubt because the use of the myth provides some emotional distance.

I do admire Deborah's poem enormously!

Lisa

[graywyvern]

i love both of these!

[epigone]

In response to Peter, I wonder whence this drive to rank poems. If I were to rank poems, I certainly would not do so based on novelty ("breaking new ground"). In any case, what constitutes breaking ground? Sam's poem is apparently so groundbreaking that some posts question whether it is a sonnet at all.

I suppose it is consistent with the spirit of a "bake-off" to choose winners, but based on the "entries" I have seen so far, I think Tim has done an superb job of choosing interesting and diverse sonnets, each of which is excellent in its own way. The diversity affords us interesting opportunities to engage in comparative analysis, but it makes rankings difficult -- and pointless anyway.

But I can't stand olympic figure skating because I find the rankings so off-putting (all scandals aside), so perhaps my aversion is more general.