What a wonderful feeling love can be…
As wonderful as a beautiful rose…
A person by my side who is so dear to me
And day by day…our love grows and grows
Every day I see his wonderful face
And remember how lucky I am to have him
Then I feel that my heart begins to race
And I know it must be love I feel for him
I have never felt this way before
Ever since I met him the hole in my heart was untied
There is no one else I would ask for
Because he is the only one I want by my side
The future is very hard to tell; however
But all I know is that I will love him forever…
I'm afraid to say that after your great last submission you seem to have taken a step back again. What happened?! You nailed iambic pentameter in Task 7, but here only five of the fourteen lines have the right number of feet (of “de-DUM”s)! I've marked below which lines have too many, or too few, syllables. Can you see where you went astray?
ReplyDeleteWhat a wonderful feeling love can be…
As wonderful as a beautiful rose…
A person by my side who is so dear to me (12)
And day by day…our love grows and grows (9)
Every day I see his wonderful face
And remember how lucky I am to have him (12)
Then I feel that my heart begins to race
And I know it must be love I feel for him (11)
I have never felt this way before (9)
Ever since I met him the hole in my heart was untied (14)
There is no one else I would ask for (9)
Because he is the only one I want by my side (13)
The future is very hard to tell; however (12)
But all I know is that I will love him forever… (13)
Iambic pentameter is about rhythm, and therefore a good way to “get” it is to think of your poetry as a song. When you read a line back to yourself, tap the tabletop for each new syllable. Are there ten syllables, or beats, per line? Do they follow a pattern of unstressed-STRESSED, unstressed-STRESSED (this is a bit like the sound of a hi-hat on a drum kit: um-CHA um-CHA um-CHA...)? Iambic pentameter is tricky – I know I struggle with it – but 'Love' showed that you can do this. Give it time, and give it thought. I have faith in you!
You get the sonnet rhyme scheme perfectly, although next time I'd like to see a little more variation and invention (rhyming 'him' with 'him? You can do better than this!).
All the best, Sarah
Hi,
ReplyDeleteFirst of all sorry for taking so long to get back to you on this. I know you've been hard at work, and it's good to see your writing again.
You chose a tricky topic to write a poem on, and one that's at the heart of a lot of good poetry - everlasting love. I think it's brave of you to go with a love poem, and I think that it's a great thing to try and perfect. Sarah's given you a lot to think about with the metre and rhyming there, so I won't overstress it.
I will echo her on saying how well you've pulled it off before, so I know you can do it again. Just be careful, and try to have a 'perfect line' in your head to measure the others against. This means getting a line that you know is iambic, and fits with the syllable count, and then using that when you're constructing new lines.
Something that people look for in writing is originality, and the sense that they have to work a little bit too to understand what's going on. This can mean that it's good to avoid cliches. Cliches are phrases and images that we know so well that they're immediately understood. So with love poetry there is a long tradition of roses, holes in hearts etc, but if you use different images to convey your meaning people have to work a little to understand, and that feels satisfying.
Also it can be good to build on one image rather than use lots of them, so if you're going to write about love being like a rose, see how far you can go with just that idea. How is it like a rose? What are some things that happen to roses that are comparable to love?
I'm looking forward to seeing how you get on with crime fiction, and I'm sure you'll make something great. I hope you'll enjoy coming back to poetry at some point too - for me I was eighteen before I actually started to like it, and felt like I 'got' it, but before then it was fairly frustrating to read, and I still don't write any poetry that I show to other people now. I guess I'm trying to say it gets better :)
Take care, and good luck with the next piece,
Andy