On Jun 17, 10:52=A0am, Amanda Reid <scrawlm...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> =A0 =A0 =A0 =A0 226
>
> The thunder pounds my window and the sky
> Releases still more green to stain the ground;
> The cat alerts one ear, but constant sound
> Dulls even soldiers to the softest lie,
> And she is inside. =A0Soon enough, to try
> The rabbit, blackbird, blade of grass she found
> Unlike all others. =A0Dreaming that the hound
> Sniffs bombs in no man's land, her time goes by
> =A0 As mine does not. =A0Again the clock reads two
> As if I had no other thing to say
> And less to know, than that the world took you,
> And took you here or there, but took away.
> Whatever there appears to do,
> The time is -- wrong. =A0But I'm right twice a day.
I love a sonnet, Amanda. Extra points for difficulty, just to start.
My advice: delete the first word of the poem. Also, I got tripped up
on "Soon enough, to try," maybe because of the unexpected sentence
structure: "soon enough" needs a subject that dosen't appear in the
phrase until "she found / unlike all others." I had to re-read a few
times, wondering who is finding something. It seems to be the cat
finding "rabbit, blackbird, blade of grass." There's another
construction problem here as well: "she found / Unlike all others" is
also muddy. I'm trying to figure out what the cat signifies as it is
hunting around outside. She's looking for something unique, something
"unlike all others," but that phrase could also indicate that she
couldn't find any of the other rabbits, blackbirds, or blades of grass
that were out there, so she is just taking what she is able to find.
And why? What is significant about this cat who is either searching
for something unique or taking whatever she finds?
"Sniffs bombs in no man's land" perhaps is meant to indicate that the
hound that would likely kill the cat is remote, therefore the cat
feels safe. The war allusion might foreshadow the disappearance of the
missed person at two o'clock, but it's really unfortunate to have a
dog sniffing bombs, since that can also allude to dog ****, and that's
something dogs do all the time, of course. I think it's
unintentionally disgusting.
The cat's time is going by, but the speaker's time is not. How then,
"Again the clock reads two," suggesting that there was a time when it
did not read two? The adverb "again" refers to something that has
happened before, a repetition or return to a previous state rather
than a constant. I'm getting real specific here because it seems to me
that you want your reader to figure out that the missing person
stopped the speaker's clock, but it's an unfair burden for the reader
to bear if you are going to also trick me with misleading words.
In the end, it matters that the speaker is right twice a day. Twice a
day is the time when his or her clock stopped, and it will always be
that time for the character who is stuck in a state of either
happiness or grief. The tone suggests it's sad that the missing person
is gone, but the speaker being "right" feels like a kind of victory:
he or she could be sitting around thinking, "Yeah! That ****er is
*still* gone!"
There is promise in the contrast between the cat-with-time and the
speaker-without-time, but I'm not sure that the contrast is sharp
enough. Does the speaker envy the cat and want to have time? Does the
cat represent a simpler, more natural world in which time flows
freely, while the speaker represents a complex, human world that is
inferior, melancholy; or is the human world superior, gleeful?
I don't know. This is a good start, but I would take it apart and be
more clear about what everything represents: the storm, green falling
from the sky, cat, clock, speaker, missing person. I would figure out
what the conflict is & up the ante in order to deepen it & then,
perhaps, resolve it.
Hope this helps.
Leisha
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