FROM MAEWEST
Love Sonnet
Sonnet V
How could anyone not want to be around you?
Your eyes rival the sun in all their shining blazing glory.
The moon is a pale crescent in the orb of your smile.
Flowers open, birds sing, children giggle
Animals are stirred to investigate your magnetic charm.
I am amazed that you love me, you who could have
the adulation of any number of beauties far creamier than I.
I wake up and my thoughts have been with you for hours.
I sleep with your name on my lips.
When you are not within reach I am frozen, stupid,
wandering in circles while life waits for me to join.
I can’t be part of the world, it doesn’t hum or turn without you in it.
Every thought and belief I have is challenged the moment we lock eyes,
the moment we speak, the moment we touch.
Even when you profess your love, especially
when you profess your love, my mind urges me to run.
But there is no where to run to anymore
You are the one who splits the air with his entrance.
You are the one who has a symphony burning inside.
You are the wind that pushes me past my fears.
You are the sun and the moon and the air I breathe.
May it ever be so.
CRITIQUE
This is not a sonnet. A sonnet is a poem of high structure, rhythm, and rhyme...none of those things here.
I see a lot of passion, but no art. It is not much more than prose made to look like a poem. Again, careless language. How is a smile like an orb? Aside from the tawdry sex connotation, how are beauties like cream?
I'm sorry, but it reads pretty adolescent to me. Teenagers write this kind of hyperbole about their puppy loves, and then the summer ends. It comes off insincere, disingenuous. It's like the old joke:
"You're the sun and moon to me! I'd swim the ocean to be with you!"
"Will you lend me $20?"
"The stars! Beauty personified, yet only dust and gas compared to you!"
"I need $20."
"But my heart! It throbs with passion at the mere thought of you!"
"$20?"
You see? Everyone knows that kind of passion always dies a quick death, and most people of even a little maturity put little investment in the first throes of love, nice as it is. An adult love waits to see what's left after the flames. Is it popping sparks, smoldering embers, or dead ash?
RESPONSE
Hey John, read any Shakespeare lately? He's as puerile as they come, so I'm in good company…
#147 - one of my faves
by Shakespeare
My love is as a fever, longing still
For that which longer nurseth the disease,
Feeding on that which doth preserve the ill,
Th' uncertain sickly appetite to please.
My reason, the physician to my love,
Angry that his prescriptions are not kept,
Hath left me, and I desperate now approve
Desire is death, which physic did except.
Past cure I am, now reason is past care,
And frantic-mad with evermore unrest;
My thoughts and my discourse as mad men's are,
At random from the truth vainly expressed.
For I have sworn thee fair, and thought thee bright,
Who art as black as hell, as dark as night.
COMMENT
Puerile? Not quite. First, I think we can both agree there's incredible art and ingenuity to his words, and that mitigates strongly against puerility. Second, using your posted sonnet as an example, he does not paint an unreal portrait of his love so he can worship it, as you do. No, there's quite a bit of anger at his inability to control his emotions. He cannot think clearly, and she's the cause of it. Though she dazzles him with her fairness and brightness, that same fairness and brightness blinds his reason and puts him through hell. Does he sound happy to be in this predicament? Not to me. Sounds as if he'd like to be rid of his feelings and maybe resents her a bit for causing them, though his reason tells him she did nothing to cause them.
But you ascribe god-like perfection to the object of your love and a sycophantic devotion to yourself, and you seem enthralled with the situation. That's adolescent, in my opinion, and the lack of art or inventiveness in your words points that up even more. But we can agree to disagree.