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Dictionary Lesson (Free verse) by Dovina

When I said, “I love you,” and soon realized its reciprocal, “You love me,” and its result, “We are in love,” and much later, with its contrary, “I don’t love you,” and finally its opposite, “I hate you,” and when, after a long hiatus, its many reverses blured into, “I have no feeling for you,” I realized my dictionary is a history, written ahead of fact, a compendium of devolution.

zodiac 16-Nov-04/11:40 PM
As far as I know, it is, but only slightly. Then,

1) Do you mean "realized" in the second line to mean anything specific? Or just like, you saw that he loved you too?

2) Opposite and contrary are the same thing.

3) "I don't love you" is the opposite/contrary of "I love you", not, as you have it, "I hate you".

4) This whole poem kind of presumes that a thing necessarily leads into its reciprocal, contrary or whatever. Now, before you go shooting off, of course it doesn't say that outright. But things wouldn't seem like such a "compendium of devolution" if you'd just said, as I often do,

When I said, "I love her,"
I thought about the converse: "If somebody is she, I love that person," which is true.
And the inverse: "If I don't love somebody, then that person is not she," which is not necessarily true.
And the contrapositive: "If somebody isn't she, then I don't love that person," which is also not necessarily true.
And I saw the reciprocal of the original proposition: "she loves me,"
And the result was something like "We love each other."
And then I restated the original proposition, squared: "No, I love you, squared."
And she said, "No, I love you times infinity"
Et cetera et cetera.

5) Most of your problem is using the word "realized" in line 2. Yes, surely you mean "realized" in the sense that an ambitious guy "realizes" his potential or dreams or something. OR DID YOU???! But it isn't the word for the situation and it butches everything up. It makes it seem like all the transformations just follow the proposition, which is of course not the case. Besides, it's not even grammatical to say "realized ... with its contrary" (as you have).

6) You misspelled blurred.

7) Everything after that is worse. A nice idea, your dictionary being your history or whatever, but the way you have it is kind of preposterous and self-absorbed.




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