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I want to read two sonnets.

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It's awfully hard to
write decent sonnets now.

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You have such a hard and
fast rule of the meter.

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So the composition, you can have
either a Shakespearean sonnet

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in three quatrains and
then a couplet, 14 lines.

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Or an Italian sonnet
in eight lines,

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an octet, and then six
lines, sextet to finish off.

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Mine were in the Italian
form because that

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seemed to me much easier.

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It's hard to get three
equal quatrains all saying

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much the same thing of going
over the general subject,

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and then quickly in two
lines of the final couplet

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to give some conclusion
about the whole business.

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The proportions
don't seem right.

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And Shakespeare, though
Shakespeare used them,

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Shakespeare fudged a great deal.

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And I once offended Robert
Penn Warren and Cleanth Brooks

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who were teaching Shakespeare,
giving between them

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a joint course in Shakespeare.

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And I wrote about the defects
of his sonnet structures

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because he would often would
start-- half the time he would

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start in about the
middle of the last

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of the third of the quatrains.

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And start with his
conclusion taking

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four lines or half of
that concluding quatrain

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and then the whole
couplet besides.

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He didn't mind at all.

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We don't much, of course.

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It didn't seem to bother us
unless we were very technical.

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So the first one is sort of
a supernatural poem, halfway.

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"The Tall Girl."

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"The queens of hell had
lissom necks to crane

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at the tall girl
approaching with long tread.

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And when she was caught up
even with them, now dead.

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If the young miss with gold
hair might not disdain,

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we would esteem her
company over the plain

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to profit us all where the
dogs will be out barking.

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And we'll go by
the windows where

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the young men are
working, and tomorrow we

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will all come home again.

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But the queen of heaven
on the other side

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of the road in the
likeness, I hear,

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of a plain, motherly woman
made a wry face despite it

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was so common to be wasted
by the smooth ladies of hell

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and crisped her sweet tone,
'This never will come to good.

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Just an old woman, my
pet, that wishes you

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well.'" There's
realism there, I think.

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