Jan, all right. I can see how the break and enjambment could be perceived as rough or arbitrary. But maybe you can also feel the jarring (to me, at least) effect of jamming in the passage from “I woke” through “expand?” in the same stanza right after what precedes. It’s a lot of action and change without a pause:
My bedding lay in rumples at my side:
I rambled dimly in the dreams of night—
but through the room and woodland stretch beyond,
wide, threadless sheets of pressing, pearly light
enveloped everything. I woke. My sphere
had boldened to a spectral fairyland.
Did any see a sudden shift appear
or did it imperceptibly expand?
However, here's another alternative, which eschews the enjambment while creating an irregular stanzaic structure:
My bedding lay in rumples at my side:
I rambled dimly in the dreams of night—
but through the room and woodland stretch beyond,
wide, threadless sheets of pressing, pearly light
enveloped everything.
I woke. My sphere
had boldened to a spectral fairyland.
Did any see a sudden shift appear
or did it imperceptibly expand?
I don’t mind this too much in terms of flow—I might even like it better. But I worry that irregular stanza structures don’t look as pleasing on the page. What do you (and others) think?
David, okay! My latest experiment features a closing question mark, after all.
Tony, thanks very much for the further explanation and the helpful examples. While I’d been familiar with all of them, they wouldn’t have come to my mind as potential models to draw on in my poem. (I also had looked up the examples you gave before.) Your call to glory for the ending of my sonnet is a high bar. For a while after your most recent comments, I was wondering if and how I could gracefully fit in the Romantic/anti-Romantic concept in with the dream/reality, dark/light one of the rest of the poem—but then I realized that all these are actually closely interrelated. Initially, I also wasn't sure if this could be done without violently destroying the Romantic mood. So far, this is where I am:
a full-fledged moon held sway, her highness crowned
in white. Or did mere atmospheric haze
hold such uncanny power to amaze?
At least this gets rid of some modifiers!
I’d also be interested in what you think of the revision “wooded stretch,” the “being” referent issue in S2 vis-à-vis what I really had in mind, and whether the S2 revision’s “sudden shift” seems less problematic to you than “shift sprang.” Thanks for continuing to push me, and don't ever feel a need to apologize for that.
Last edited by Alexandra Baez; 12-11-2023 at 05:05 PM.
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Hybrid Mode
