Sonnet in Winter – Hospital Visit

For a change of pace, here’s a sonnet, written about a winter’s visit to a sick friend.

The sonnet follows the Shakespearean rhyme scheme, and though it tries for Iambic Pentameter, I’m not sure that attempt is truly successful.  As noted in previous posts about sonnets and formal poetry, I tend to use a syllabic rule of thumb rather than to follow strict rules of scansion.

For further explanation of the Shakespearean rhyme scheme and some approximation of the rules of meter in formal poetry, check out prior posts re poetic meter, and sonnets, and for reasons to write formal verse .  (And plenty of others – check out poetry category.)

No chance

I wanted to give her time, a summer’s day,
a perfect green blue day that I would pluck
from my summers to come, that I would lay
upon her bed, and, shimmering, tuck
around her.  It should have been an easy offer,
easy to say.  After all, the future
can’t be readily assigned; life’s coffer
holds nothing forfeit.  Tubes followed suture
to a darkness barely gowned; I searched around
my jangling brain for words, but what came out
were stones that lined her pillow, the sound
not meaning my meaning, and not about
summer days; my own fierce will to live
hoarding what I had no power to give.

All rights reserved, Karin Gustafson.

(If interested in different forms of poems–sestinas, pantoums, villanelles, and more villanelles, and even more villanelles–there are a lot of villanelles.   Really.  Check out these links, and others.  Thanks.)

Explore posts in the same categories: poetry, Uncategorized

Tags: cancer poem, cancer sonnet, cool sonnet, hospital visit poem, iambic pentameter, Karin Gustafson poetry, manicddaily, No Chance, poetry, poetry about illness, sestina reference, shakespearean sonnet, sick friend poem, sonnet, summer's day, villanelle references, will to live

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