David, so much sadness and simple beauty. L1 seems to flirt with cliché or banality, but that may be no more than my quirky impression.
It’s unseemly for a mourner to be “pushed for time,” so I decided it was the vicar, though the grammar does point more at the N, and Matt has me rethinking that decision.
I wasn’t going to mention the apparently headless S1L4, but I had exactly the same reaction to it as Matt. S3L1 doesn’t bother me, because I hear a stressed “That.”
The only thing that really knocked me for a loop was the choppy, comma-crammed “you, once, as, once, so.” Could I at least get you to remove the commas around the second “once”? The following conjunction made me (and Matt) think “we” was “you and I,” though second thoughts told me it was likely those at the burial who were “comforted.”
I didn’t know what a “harvest home” was, but it’s the perfect note to end on. All in all, a lovely elegy.
P.S. for Matt: Since you aren’t wrong-footed by S3L4, are you giving a slight, promoted stress to “-ing”? Contrary to received wisdom, I’d read this line as headless tetrameter with three consecutive unstressed syllables (“-making and”), though I suppose the difference is more one of description than of sound.
|