[Yves S L]

Version 1.20 (Paula: Adding a period, and removing one inversion)

Extending what I felt to patterned wings,
I love you like I love the butterfly
That landed on my first love's dazzling head.
What do I make of a diminished thing?
Although I wish I met you first instead,
Embellished so, backlit by sunlight, I
Would rather tell the truth and watch you cry.
I take your heartbreak bursting out like spring,
As if I take a rose to nothingness,
More beautiful in blooming less and less:
For snow upon a sitting dove delights,
But when the branch is bare, and the cold wind,
Itself a mourning of how summer thinned,
Whistles a song of absence, it is right.

L10: More beautiful in blooming less and less; --> More beautiful in blooming less and less:

Version 1.10 (Carl: Adding a Frost reference + clarifying a line + 2 lines for fourteener)

Extending what I felt to patterned wings,
I love you like I love the butterfly
That landed on my first love's dazzling head.
What do I make of a diminished thing?
Although I wish I met you first instead,
Embellished so, backlit by sunlight, I
Would rather tell the truth and watch you cry,
And take my heartbreak bursting out like spring,
As if I take a rose to nothingness,
More beautiful in blooming less and less;
For snow upon a sitting dove delights,
But when the branch is bare, and the cold wind,
Itself a mourning of how summer thinned,
Whistles a song of absence, it is right.

L5: Although I wish that you were there instead, --> Although I wish I met you first instead.
L10: So I can track the blooming's less and less; --> More beautiful in blooming less and less;
L8: And take the heartbreak bursting out like spring --> And take my heartbreak bursting out like spring

Version 1.00

Extending what I felt to patterned wings,
I love you like I love the butterfly
That landed on my first love's dazzling head;
And though I wish it was you there instead
Embellished so, backlit by sunlight, I
Would rather tell the truth and watch you cry,
And take the heartbreak bursting out like spring,
For snow upon a sitting dove delights,
But when the branch is bare, and the cold wind,
Itself a mourning of how summer thinned,
Whistles a song of absence, it is right.

[Carl Copeland]

Yves, I think I like this a lot, but there’s something I can’t get straight:

And though I wish it was you there instead

Whaddaya mean “I wish it was you there instead”? She is there: you’re talking to her, right? (N ≠ Yves, granted.) Maybe you mean “I wish that you’d been there instead” (≈ I wish I could tell you that you are my most memorable love and not just a bug on her head).

“Wings” and “springs” are too far apart to activate my rhyme detector, but it didn’t detract from my enjoyment in the least.

Technically, you need a comma after “instead” to keep it from hooking up with “embellished,” but the line break should prevent that in any case.

The last three words (Frostian, imo) are exactly right.

[Yves S L]

Hello Carl,

So I made some adjustments. Since you said Frost, I added an explicit Frost reference. I tried to clarify the line you were talking about, and I have added two lines to make it a 14-line poem. Yeah!

Addendum: I ended up tweaking that line again for clarity.

[Paula Fernandez]

I confess. I could not fully penetrate the complexity of the syntax in your third sentence (all of lines 5-14).

In particular, I'm struggling with "take my heartbreak". Didn't the narrator break the heart of the lover by telling them they are only as beloved as the lover-adjacent butterfly, but not as their first great love? If so, then the heartbreak belongs to the lover, not the N. Right?

The images that follow that are very pretty and melodic, and I think are about diminished love, but I'm not sure about "it is right" at the end. But mostly, I'd love a period or two between lines 5-14 so I can rest my tired brain before moving on. Just my $0.02.

[Yves S L]

Hello Paula. I have give you the requested period in the new version, and responded to your comment "If so, then the heartbreak belongs to the lover, not the N. Right?
".

I have essentially taken away one of the inversions and broke the poem up a little.

You are definitely asking the right questions, and you got the basic theme, so I think the poem is communicating at some basic level.

Thanks for the comments.

Yeah.

[David Elliot Eisenstat]

(Looking at revision 2.) I’m confused by the proposal. “Extending what I felt to patterned wings / I love you like I love the butterfly”: the speaker loves the addressee and is telling the addressee that they love the butterfly the same way? So what’s the “diminished thing” in the rhetorical question? Presumably the speaker’s love for the first beloved? But maybe the butterfly itself? Plausibly both, I guess.

OK, the second quatrain clarifies: it’s the speaker’s love for the addressee; the speaker is presumably breaking up with the addressee. I know so little about their situation, however, that it’s hard to engage emotionally. The sestet disappears into pastoral images that I find too conventional to add much.

The iambic pentameter is Milton-tight. Maybe one could quibble with the second comma on L6. I wouldn’t.

[Jim Moonan]

.
Yves, I’m going to be harsh. Please keep in mind that I consider you to be a better poet than I will ever be. The poem is no doubt, even to my tin ear, rock solid syllabically and metrically, which seems to be your main objective. However, the metrical/syllabic/rhyme patterns seem to force the phrasing into being antiquated. Stylistically it has a Shakespearean-like mentality embedded in it — and also a dose of romantic poetry in it. But when added to that the capitalization that begins each line it tips into near-parody for me. It’s just too much posturing for me to get through and see the beating heart. Just what are you saying? I can’t see it exactly. I can’t intuit it. The N doesn’t really say what he’s feeling. For example, “dazzling head” feels visually off/overwrought (dazzling eyes maybe… or hair possibly… or butterfly… or body even — but head? It feels rhyme-driven)

Your enthusiasm for formal metrical poetry is laudable. You are obviously in love with that genre of poetry that, for lack of a better label, is classical formal metrical. Old school. But imo, your adaptation feels strangely bloodless. It needs an injection of the current “you” that lingers inside your head waiting for the moment when you let it out to speak in its own voice.

The syntax in spots and the inversions are obstacles for me. Is the N caught between two loves — one fading and one remembered?

To Carl's point, I wish it were more Frostian (I don’t feel any Frost in the last line, which feels stunted to me.) Frost would come clean.

Maybe it’s the convoluted rhyme scheme?

As Paula and Carl have said, there are some lovely phrases. But they seem to be unable to find traction to become something your own — not something cleaved from the past. I, too, struggle with this. There is a chasm of time between when I had immersed myself in the poets of 18th,19th and 20th century literature. For decades I wrote nearly nothing, only listening in my head to those poets I had fallen in love with. I had imprinted myself on them. The whole lot of them: Byron, Keats Shelley, Blake, Donne, Wordsworth, Yeats, Frost, et al. My saving grace was Eliot and some of the other more contemporary poets like Baudelaire, Rilke, etc. Even now, when I write poetry the voices of those poets are the first voices I hear. But little by little I’m beginning to recognize my own voice coming out from the past and beginning to speak what’s in my imagination. It is an excruciatingly slow process for me; I am resigned to knowing I will never get there. I don't have the time. But I’m thrilled to be moving toward eventually being authentic in my words, just as I am convinced that I am authentic in my thoughts. Authentic enough to have someone who is themselves an accomplished poet say, “That’s good a good poem.”

I guess most of what I’m saying is meant to encourage you to take what you know so well technically and put some clothes on it to become you.

(Btw, every time I see your name I see the word “Yes”.)

.

[Yves S L]

Hello David,

I have not read much Milton, but I will take Milton-tight. Yeah, Milton's complex syntax versus iambic pentameter is so much fun to read. What I have learned most from Milton comes from reading selected passages from "Paradise Lost". Yeah, conventional, but I wanted to see something about how I framed it. I had questions about that. Thank you for the vote on the comma. I like the comma, but I wanted to see what happens when it disappears.

Hello Jim,

I don't see anything harsh in what you said. What you said is fine. You don't like cover band music, cool.

I think of myself as a dilettante hobbyist poet who is making use of a pre-established talent for sound combinations and emotional inflection and image painting, who can sort of absorb technique from the page, partly because I have written hundreds and hundreds of analysis of people's poetry on the internet, and I return endlessly to poem's whose sound combinations I like.

Oh, my main objective was inversion, but not the syntactic kind, but of thoughts and sentiments that are sort of the opposite of what one expect would say in this kind of conventional sounding poetic context. For example, normally comparisons to butterflys would be straightforward praise, but the comparison here is nested in deflections and is not praise, and so on.

Rhyme and meter are so automatic for me so I don't think of them as technical objectives at all. Mostly I think about what kind of sound and atmosphere I want. For example, the octet and sestet sound have totally different sound to me.

Yeah, I consider the N highly mannered. It is a highly mannered way of talking. I If you want to talk about my voice, then sure, but I have written lots of poems in different voices. Unless, you are telling me that my previous three posts sound the same to you. Do they? It would be so interesting if they did.

Folk here went on and on about Iago, but I have always been more impressed with the N of Browning's "My Last Duchess", though Iago is often in my thoughts: how do you write a character who does think like normal people, and have that character communicate?

"Yeah" roughly equals "that is all", but if folk want it to be a more distinctly positive and emphatic declaration, then let "yeah" be a mirror into your soul. You seem to be a positive person Jim.

In my natural voice my syntax is many levels more complex than what I have written in this sonnet. Really.

Yeah.

[Yves S L]

Hello David,

I have not read much Milton, but I will take Milton-tight. Yeah, Milton's complex syntax versus iambic pentameter is so much fun to read. What I have learned most from Milton comes from reading selected passages from "Paradise Lost". Yeah, conventional, but I wanted to see something about how I framed it. I had questions about that. Thank you for the vote on the comma. I like the comma.
Hello Jim,

I don't see anything harsh in what you said. What you said is fine. You don't like cover band music, cool.

I think of myself as a dilettante hobbyist poet who is making use of a pre-established talent for sound combinations and emotional inflection and image painting, who can sort of absorb technique from the page, partly because I have written hundreds and hundreds of analysis of people's poetry on the internet, and I return endlessly to poem's whose sound combinations I like.

Oh, my main objective was inversion and the thwarting of expectations, but not the syntactic kind, but of thoughts and sentiments that are sort of the opposite of what one expect would say in this kind of conventional sounding poetic context. For example, normally comparisons to butterflys would be straightforward praise, but the comparison here is nested in deflections, and so on.

Rhyme and meter are so automatic for me so I don't think of them as technical objectives at all. Mostly I think about what kind of sound and atmosphere I want. For example, the octet and sestet sound have totally different sound to me.

Yeah, I consider the N highly mannered. It is a highly mannered way of talking. I If you want to talk about my voice, then sure, but I have written lots of poems in different voices. Unless, you are telling me that my last three posts sound the same to you. Do they? It would be so interesting if they did.

Folk here went on and on about Iago, but I have always been more impressed with the N of Browning's "My Last Duchess", though Iago is often in my thoughts: how do you write a character who does think like normal people, and have that character communicate?

"Yeah" roughly equals "that is all", but if folk want it to be a more distinctly positive and emphatic declaration, then let "yeah" be a mirror into your soul. You seem to be a positive person Jim.

In my natural voice my syntax is many levels more complex than what I have written in this sonnet. Really.

Yeah.

[Jim Moonan]

.

Originally Posted by Yves S L

"Yeah" roughly equals "that is all", but if folk want it to be a more distinctly positive and emphatic declaration, then let "yeah" be a mirror into your soul.

I was actually referring to the trick my eyes play on me when I see your name. I see "Yves"

.