Sonnet № 127358
A Message from my Dreams
I heard a plaintive message from my dreams,
That they were lonely missing me, it seems.
"Where have you been our friend, our one time friend."
I felt a touch from one I knew as love,
Who had at last been sent from God above
To speak a new beginning from the end.
I have a blessed vision from my muse,
She directs me put away my blues -
To paint the sun with dots of shining gold.
I smell the sweet incense of romance burn
And taste a wine so sweet I cannot turn.
My troubled heart again to be made bold.
A lover I have neither seen nor heard,
My heart yet hangs on her every word.
14 comments
I think that I need a different 3 syllables before 'word' to make the reader feel more comfortable putting the stress on 'her.' If you read it in iambic, it make the emphasis that I wanted when I was in the middle of the TABS (Teenage Angst...), but I shouldn't have to rely on the reader to force the rhythm for me.
This is: http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
You object to rhyming cliché's like Moon/June, but I'd rather see those lollipop words halfway through a line than lines full of so-called literary words that grate in sound. Matter of taste? I'm not so sure.
I agree that triteness and cliché are generally to be avoided, but I don't think that it has to spoil a particular work. The main things are to avoid obvious work arounds and to avoid hingeing the development of the poem on the afflicted lines. In this case, the offending couplet originated later in the development of the poem, but I moved it closer to the begining in order to de-emphasize it.
Also, there's no reason to think using complicated rhymes necessarily means nonsequitors and work-arounds. I once rhymed "Mariachi", "lot - She", "crotchy" and "watching" so seamlessly that no one TO THIS DAY has realized it's a rhyming poem.
Again, I agree that love and above are white trash rhymes, pimple poetry, whatever, I am just suffering from one of the effects of bi-polar disorder... It's absolutely true, but it doesn't apply to my situation.
Put that way, I see that I may have given up too easily back when I decided to calll that poem complete. I'm ready to see if I can't find love in the bodice of the goddess.
Don't reject half-rhyme. Most sonnet-writers today (and there are more, and better, than you think) are writing half-rhymes. For my money, the best half-rhyme I've read recently is Pinsky's Inferno. Which is also half-pentameter, and sounds just like real Italian terza rima.
Nevertheless, except for "watching" the words above are one-hundred-percent rhymes. The poem itself (partly half-rhymed, I admit,) is here: http://www.poemranker.com/poem-details.j
I just read a pretty well-received contemporary (ie, published last year) poem with love/above rhymed. It's not impossible, but I'd say if you stick with well-known rhymes, you're almost sure to write the same poems as everybody else's. If you start out with, say, "bipolar" at the end of a line and can make it work, you've got a chance at doing something that hasn't been done yet.
frustrating <=> bust rating
rhyming <=> hymen
interesting <=> Pinter wresting
beautiful <=> cuticle
cannot <=> planet/Janet
simply <=> dimply
onomatopoetic <=> emetic/a mulatto aesthetic
equivalent <=> ambivalent
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