I want to read two sonnets.
It's awfully hard to write decent sonnets now.
You have such a hard and fast rule of the meter.
So the composition, you can have either a Shakespearean sonnet
in three quatrains and then a couplet, 14 lines.
Or an Italian sonnet in eight lines,
an octet, and then six lines, sextet to finish off.
Mine were in the Italian form because that
seemed to me much easier.
It's hard to get three equal quatrains all saying
much the same thing of going over the general subject,
and then quickly in two lines of the final couplet
to give some conclusion about the whole business.
The proportions don't seem right.
And Shakespeare, though Shakespeare used them,
Shakespeare fudged a great deal.
And I once offended Robert Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks
who were teaching Shakespeare, giving between them
a joint course in Shakespeare.
And I wrote about the defects of his sonnet structures
because he would often would start-- half the time he would
start in about the middle of the last
of the third of the quatrains.
And start with his conclusion taking
four lines or half of that concluding quatrain
and then the whole couplet besides.
He didn't mind at all.
We don't much, of course.
It didn't seem to bother us unless we were very technical.
So the first one is sort of a supernatural poem, halfway.
"The Tall Girl."
"The queens of hell had lissom necks to crane
at the tall girl approaching with long tread.
And when she was caught up even with them, now dead.
If the young miss with gold hair might not disdain,
we would esteem her company over the plain
to profit us all where the dogs will be out barking.
And we'll go by the windows where
the young men are working, and tomorrow we
will all come home again.
But the queen of heaven on the other side
of the road in the likeness, I hear,
of a plain, motherly woman made a wry face despite it
was so common to be wasted by the smooth ladies of hell
and crisped her sweet tone, 'This never will come to good.
Just an old woman, my pet, that wishes you
well.'" There's realism there, I think.