4. Villanelle

All the poems we concern ourselves about in this semester are quite heavily structured. Villanelle seems to be one of these particularly difficult and yet it is not really. You buckle up, count the lines, divide into stanzas and make up two lines that you think are particularly cool so they can bear the repetitions and do not make the whole sound like a children song about the bunny rabbits. Then there is the rhyming scheme. I am usually not particularly friendly with rhymes, let’s just say that most of the times we give ourselves a friendly understanding nod, when we see each other, but we wouldn't really engage in prolonged evening conversations over a glass of red. In this case however, I decided to follow the rhyming structure precisely for that reason. It is interesting to do something outside a comfort zone once in a while. As for the actual poem and the theme, it wasn’t very difficult once I established my key lines:

I will always be in pain with you
But when I give up; promise to see me through

As to that first line it might seem quite weird to use the word ‘pain’ instead of ‘love’. You may burn me on the stake but I cannot determine if in this context love is used as noun or a verb. At the same time it doesn’t really matter, because the phrase is so well established in the common language, that one substitution does not create the sense of misunderstanding, but a slight ambiguity that is necessary in this case. Saying ‘I will always be in love with you’ in a poem? I don’t know if someone could really pull it off but if they do, I kneel. I can’t, and I don’t really know if I want to. In this context the message is clear (or at least I hope it is). The second line is a plead and I thought if anything can bear repetition in the quasi-love poem it is going to be a helpless appeal to other person, that cannot be explained or justified. Why do I say quasi-love poem? I wanted to write a poem about love in friendship not about a romantic love as I find that subject far more compelling and worth of exploration. I am a strong fan of the turn in poems and in this one it comes in the second line of the last stanza:

On the road from here to forever; you and my knight

It introduces the third person and shifts the meaning. I am not quite sure about the word ‘knight’, it is somewhat clunky, but I couldn’t think of anything else that would do the job and sustain the rhyming scheme. At the end of the day, this whole line is surely the one for revision. But what to do to keep ‘road from here to forever’ and the rhyming scheme in place? This is not a job for a writer but for a mathematician. I surrender. (only until my grand come back with some kick-ass idea)

(oh and) PS. I am sorry Paul that it took so long. I am a victim of managers who think that ‘part time’ is a synonym of ‘full time, plus, can do all the shit hours’.