[Alexandra Baez]

Susan, I saw that you meant to convey a sort of pouring on of blame, but to me, "on" sounds unnatural in your construction because trilling doesn't carry the connotation of a directed physical imposition of something the way pouring does. I think that the song vs. song concept still comes through with "for." Just my two cents.

[Marshall Begel]

Very cute, Susan!

Maybe the feeling of guilt is more earned if you were, say, "savoring nightingales". And not trapped, but "I'm happily dreaming that I"?


S2, 3, and 4 are great at wallowing in that guilt! But S5's "eating crow" idiom doesn't connect well to the dream, since it contains guilty pleasures, rather than getting caught in "I told you so" humiliation.
Maybe the final stanza could be a lesson for not "deriving such pleasure" from "destroying a treasure"


Because of the structure, I found myself looking for the L1-L3 rhymes. Maybe it's just me, but I would find this a smoother read as tetrameter couplets.

[Susan McLean]

Alexandra, the reason I don't like "for" in that context is that it makes it sound as though the verse had offended, when I am envisioning an ongoing battle of song versus verse, as in Poe's raven continually croaking "Nevermore" at him.

Marshall, the weird thing about dreams is that you find yourself doing things that you know are wrong, even while you are dreaming, yet you can't stop doing them in the dream except by waking up. The dream is that kind of anxiety dream, and I am not implying that I would enjoy eating nightingale pie. Feeling guilt for a dream is not rational, since one is not morally culpable for what one dreams. But the guilt feels real. In the last stanza, "eating crow" is admitting having done something wrong, even though the infraction never really happened. Though I could make this into tetrameter couplets, I am not very fond of couplets, and I did put a lot of work into making the meter work as double amphibrachs. I think I like the look of it better with short lines, too.

Susan