My first sonnet of the century

[mhoram100]

(not yet titled)

Too late comes courage to the cowardly lips
Intoxification gives no respite
The spinning earth, the turning year that night
Changes nothing. Passion into slumber slips
Six years on guard for love only to fail
The fortress fast with no treasure inside
It's forges cold and cookfires banked. I abide
In empty halls, the dusty air grows

Comments

[mirandir]

I'll start with something good. This bit really struck me:
"Dearest lady, don't let my silence keep your distance. / My arms are for holding you closer than friends." I edited it slightly to be the way I hear it in my head, like Pablo Neruda. But it's a really nice pair of lines.

And now, some more critical constructive criticism.

I realize that most sonnets are actually kind of flexible with their iambic pentameter, but the variation in this one really distracted me. A lot of the point of having meter is to ensure a certain flow to the poem, but I kept tripping over the language here. The second line is metrically insoluble (there really is just no good way to put that word in iambs); there are also a few lines where I naturally only put four accents in (10, 11, 13, 14). There’s bits of variance here and there throughout the whole poem, and I just kept getting thrown out of sonnet-processing mode as a result.

Similarly, the minimal punctuation and inconsistent header capitalization left me hanging on how some of the sentences should be read. A semicolon or hyphen or two in the first three lines would make them much more readable; something after “slips” or “fail” might also be appropriate. Punctuation is stage direction for the reader-feel free to add some more cues.

Metaphorically, it took me five reads and until writing this critique to realize what this poem is probably about. If the narrator failed to kiss someone and is regretting it, we need another line of explication up front. And you might be better served by externalizing the empty house-instead of having it be an explicit metaphor, you could just have the narrator (a guard?) staggering through it drunk and let the reader make the connection. My suspicion is the poem would be best by splicing the house and the lady and alternating between the two, but that can only be borne out by experimentation.

Little imagery stuff: are you falling or rising, deep or high at the end? Is the passion really newborn or just old and struggling to awaken? What does the cowardice feel like?