[Matt Q]

Foxed

Dawn comes, and marching through the mist,
a strange parade of everything I’ve missed,
of all I’ve lost and all I think I’m due,
emerges from the greyness, sheathed in dew
and glistening, sun spilling from each one.
These shining prizes that I should have won
wraith from the woods, file forward from the past,
then leaping, spinning, whooping, dance on past.

Deep in my chest, a bitter liquid brews,
then thickens, purples up – a world-sized bruise.
It’s then I see the fox. Its russet tail,
upright, proud, flicks away this sorry tale.
So what? it growls. You want to be a bard?
This is your path. The easy way is barred.

.

[R. Nemo Hill]

This is so great, Matt. You know, up here, especially of late, there are so many poems that foreground their formal concerns, calling attention to their structure, too often subverting all their other elements to it, making form an end in itself. They begin to seem like exercises, parlor games in which their pedantic certainty of structure annihilates that mysterious uncertainty that lies at the heart of all the poetry I love.

Yet here is a poem that has it both ways (and as a bonus stands on its head the formalist boogie-man of the identity rhyme, ha!). Formally, clever as a fox; and yet still wild from the chaos of the woods.

Nemo

[Roger Slater]

I enjoyed this as well. My only note would be the meter in L12, which seems to have an extra beat (it's too unwieldy to read "flicks away" as an anapest).

[Clive Watkins]

I, too, like this, Matt. About line 12, why not reverse the order of the first two words, like this: “proud, upright, flicks away this sorry tale”?

Clive

[Carl Copeland]

Clive’s fix for L12, replacing headlessness with a spondee, is great. My only other nit is that the “shining prizes” parading past one by one are a single wraith (unless you’ve verbified “wraith,” which I don’t think anyone will get). The consonant cluster in “wraiths from” would be a mouthful, but still … Much enjoyed, Matt. I can relate. Shades of Dante?

[Joe Crocker]

Me too for Carl's crit on wraiths, and Clive's fix for S2L4.

I heard something of Larkin's "Next please" in stanza 1. I thought here was some overkill in the leaping, whooping, spinning and dancing in L8. And some of the descriptors seemed slightly flat eg shining, glistening, russet, proud.

But it still works well.

[Matt Q]

Nemo, Roger, Clive, Carl, Joe

Thanks everyone for commenting

Nemo

I'm pleased this works so well for you. On the parlour game front, I was a little disappointed when I'd finished it to notice that "past"/"past" breaks the pattern, since they're homonyms and all the rest are homophones. And while I guess "past" and "past" are being used in a different sense (adverb and noun), the meaning isn't all that different. Still, I may well be the only person who this troubles!

Roger, Clive and Carl,

Re S2L4, I wrote it assuming it scanned as strict IP:

UPright | PROUD, FLICKS| aWAY| this SOR|ry TALE

That said, I did have some doubts, before I posted it, as to whether the pause after "flicks" makes it hard to hear this, by breaking up the spondee, which it looks like it does. I’ll think on alternatives.

Clive,

Thanks for the suggestion, though if a pause subverts a spondee, I wonder if "PROUD, UP | right FLICKS" will be heard more clearly, and not also as six beats. That said, it works for Carl and Joe, so I guess not. I do think the play on “upright” is diminished if “proud” precedes it, so maybe something different is needed.

Carl,

Yes, I'm using "wraith" as a verb. As a noun, it would, as you say, have to be a plural. If this were published, I'd hope a reader would assume there were no typos, and work out that it was a verb from it's position and form. I originally had “waltz from the woods”, but since they were marching and filing, this seemed to come too soon in the poem.

Joe,

Yes, “russet” is maybe a bit unexciting, though I guess it identifies it as a red fox and adds something to the image, but something to look at when I think about revising the following line. With “shining” I wanted to suggest “shiny prizes” – as in, ultimately lacking in value – but thought “shiny” was too heavy-handed, but I guess "shining" is maybe redundant given that they’re also glistening and emitted sunlight. I’ll also think on “glistening”, I wasn’t overfond of the enjambment/carry over from the previous line anyway. On L8, it’s hard to assess overkill without knowing how you’re reading the poem, and what you think I’m trying to kill. Could you say more?

Thanks again,

Matt

[Clive Watkins]

Hi, Matt…

At the risk of dragging the discussion of your fine poem into a terminological morass, I would gently suggest you might do better not to think of line 12 in terms of spondees. Consider these two lines (the first, the opening line of a sonnet by Keats, the second a line from Richard Wilbur’s “Trolling for Blues”): “Keen, fitful gusts are whisp’ring here and there”; “Poised, weightless, all attention, yet on edge”. In each case the first word, which in its semantic prominence is stressed, nonetheless does not carry a metrical beat. Rather, the first metrical beat falls on the first syllable of the next word. That is to say, within the metrical scheme the naturally stressed syllable is “demoted”. The same thing happens in this line from Philip Larkin’s “The Whitsun Weddings”, even though the syntax is different: “Fresh couples climbed aboard: the rest stood round”.

The metrical beats in the possibly revised version of your line go like this: “proud, UPright, FLICKS awAY this SORry TALE”.

This is a very common pattern in traditional accentual-syllabic metres.

I apologize if this sounds a bit “preachy”!

Good poem, Matt!

Clive

[Carl Copeland]

Originally Posted by Matt Q

Re S2L4, I wrote it assuming it scanned as strict IP:

UPright | PROUD, FLICKS| aWAY| this SOR|ry TALE

Not sure why I didn’t find that spondee. It seems sound theoretically, and Shakespeare frequently scans more quirkily in practice.

Originally Posted by Matt Q

Yes, I'm using "wraith" as a verb. As a noun, it would, as you say, have to be a plural. If this were published, I'd hope a reader would assume there were no typos, and work out that it was a verb from it's position and form. I originally had “waltz from the woods”, but since they were marching and filing, this seemed to come too soon in the poem.

If someone got a verb out of it on first reading, it’d be interesting to know. The singular noun made me and Joe uneasy, but not enough to force a newfangled verb on us.

[Susan McLean]

Matt, I agree with the others that using "wraith" as a verb is unclear in the context. I would advise against it. Something like "slip" might work in its place. I also noticed that your first line is a foot short.

Susan