Gestalt & the Poet, Part II
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We're discussing how a poet (me) goes about filling in the gaps of some mythical "shape" of a poem that popped into his (my) head.
If you haven't read yesterday's post, you should probably go do that.
So here's the poem as it stands at the moment:
No one mourns the armadillo
/ - / - / - / <—missing line (DUM-de-DUM-de-DUM-de-DUM)
No one plants the yew or willow
/ - / - / - /
Four lines of trochaic tetrameter, rhyme scheme abab. First and third lines are done, and the fourth line is a natural:
Where he died beside the road.
Because that's funny. I think, however, that a better word than died might be lies: all the l's in the line before would support it.
Now, of course, we have to rhyme road: abode, bestowed, bode, commode, code, hoed, Jode, load/lode, mode/mowed, node, sowed/sewed, toed/towed/toad, woad, crowed, glowed, flowed, showed, plateaued, slowed.
Some have more possibilities than others, of course — and if I decide to extend the piece into more verses they may come in handy — but where I ended up was looking at the piece as a whole (GESTALT, after all) and thinking that I should go with the mock classical over-woe'd.
No one mourns the armadillo
/ - / - o'er-woe'd.
No one plants the yew or willow
Where he lies beside the road.
And here's the hard part: getting that last little bit to work. I won't list all the variations I went through in my head on the way home from the meeting, mainly because I can't remember all the drafts I discarded.
The challenge should be clear, though. I needed two trochees that would flow from the first line into o'er-woe'd, which you will have noticed is very classily apostrophinationized. I settled on No one sighs, so... which I don't think is perfect, but at some point one has to face ABANDONMENT, ne-ç'est pas?
And so we have it:
Road Kill Elegy I
No one mourns the armadillo,
No one sighs, so o'er-woe'd,
No one plants the yew or willow
Where he lies beside the road.
Yes, "Road Kill Elegy I," because of course there will be more. Excelsior!
