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sirens foghorns steam/smoke buildings swine cesspools … and told you one of the last two items didn’t fit the picture, would it really be a problem? I’m not wedded to the colon, of course. Would another mark of punctuation do better? A backward-pointing colon maybe? )) |
I don't know that it's necessarily the colon, as such, but the order. A comma doesn't seem to change anything, for example. Absent any words to clarify the relationship, it reads to me as if the pigs are being portrayed as cesspools, not the other way around.
And the poem does describes a scene from a former time, and also a waterfront. Literal pigs aren't out of the question. Well, OK, I did grow up in town that from the 1700s until my childhood was dominated by a huge bacon and pork pie factory at its centre, slaughterhouse and all, so maybe that's just me :) Still, it can also be read that neither the cesspools or the chomping pigs are literal. Anyway, yes, given time, a reader may well figure it out, but I don't know if that's the best endorsement. I don't see any easy tweak that keeps the metre, but I reckon you have do other options if you rewrite. Here's a rough attempt at making the figurative relationship clear. Hidden yet more shamelessly from view, underground in gloom, the day’s excreta fattens chomping hogs of cesspools through orifices of sewage (spewing?) cloaca. Ok, it's very slant B rhyme, and is maybe too scatological. And I've just realised that "cloaca" is singular so the rhyme doesn't work! Still, it might be worth having another crack at that stanza. best, Matt |
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