This poem is for the dverse prompt and is inspired by Jilly’s quote from Jim Harrison
“As with dancing you have to learn the steps”
The challenge is to write a sonnet in free verse. With no rhyme or rhythm, the lines don’t fall into strict units of quatrains and tercets, for me at least, so I’ve stuck to classic Shakespearean sonnet form. A cop out, I know, but I find a sonnet quite hard enough to write without adding an extra twist to the thumbscrews.
Photo ©Tobiasvde
There is never a teacher for this dance,
No more than to guide the fledgling’s first flight,
To fly or to fall, in the hands of chance,
Sleep or the wolf may come with the night.
Will we untangle the mess that we made?
Our steps tripped and faltered, we parted ways,
Like sand castles crumbled, the plans we laid,
The dream of the future obscured in haze.
There must have been love to have left such pain,
As there must have been music to draw us on,
There must have been sun once though now there’s rain,
The piper once played sweet who now is gone.
Watch my eyes at sunset, moonrise to see,
The star-stepped path that brings you back to me.
Jane Dougherty Writes 
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This is lovely, Jane, especially the final two lines – so bittersweet!
Thank you, Helen! Writing a sonnet is a challenge for me. I’m pleased you like the result.
I really do 🙂
🙂
It flows very nicely from beginning to end and leaves a sense of hope for us to hold on to.
Thank you, Paul.
*there must have been love to have left such pain* … so true and something I think people resist in the fallout of relationships – they suddenly deny there was love. I always find that denial tragic. Indeed it is better to have loved and lost …. love being the greatest gift we have in our human state, I believe.
That’s how I feel too. In fact, I’m certain there was love, however much hatred and anger follow a break up. It’s why I’m so thrown by the family dramas, when fathers murder daughters (with the complicity of the mother) for supposed crimes against convention. How? Was there really nothing there to begin with, not even when the child was a toddler?
Those cases leave me absolutely helpless to explain. Tragic doesn’t cover it. I don’t understand how love can die … it is like an irrational blanket of bile smothers it.
I wonder if the weight of tradition and the imposition of convention can be stronger than an instinctive love response. How else can you explain how a mother can let her child be abused, married, raped, murdered or whatever, and even to be complicit in it? Or a father who cradled his daughter when she was a baby hand her over to an old man when she’s barely pubescent? It’s something I tried to write about in The Green Woman. I’m glad to be going back to that story. It’s one close to my heart.
Well done !
A terrific sonnet, but perhaps closer to classical than free verse, sans rhyme, sans meter–still tis lovely & fun to read. I’m sad to be the first to sully your effort–but hey–we are family.
‘Sully’ seems a bit strong to describe your comment, Glenn. I do say in the intro that I couldn’t write a completely free verse sonnet, and that this one is an attempt at a classic Shakespearean sonnet. So I take your comment as a pure, unsullied compliment 🙂
It does flow like a dance. (K)
That’s why I like using rhythm in poems 🙂
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Cheers Michael 🙂
Wonderful! I a m melting away. 😉
Have a nice weekend ahead, which much more of these positive thougths you are able to inspire. Michael
If it makes you happy, Michael, I’m very pleased 🙂
Yes, thank you very much. 😉
🙂
I also find sonnets difficult. There’s a lovely flow to this, and a lovely sound to the words, as well.
A sonnet, to my way of thinking, has a very definite structure and the beauty of it comes from making the structure add to the impact of the words. I don’t see how you achieve the same effect in free verse. Free verse sonnet seems like an oxymoron to me, but I could be missing the point. I spent some time getting this one to work (to my satisfaction) and had to sleep on the last two lines. The second one, written with no rhyme pattern, took less than ten minutes to write. Call me old-fashioned, but…
Nice sound to this. I like the observation in this line which has got me thinking: “There must have been love to have left such pain”
Thanks Frank. It’s something I believe must be true.
I do love the hope in the end, but still the bittersweet parting is the sense that I feel the strongest… I do not think that the division into quatrains was important, but more in the sense where the volta is, which is more like the Shakespearean one (in the last couplet)
I’m glad you like this Björn. I couldn’t see how to get the free verse version to work, so tried a more conventional approach.
“There is never a teacher for this dance” No, love is free form, we must find our own rules – very nice sonnet
Thank you 🙂
Just beautiful, Jane. I fell in love with the line, ‘there must have been love to have caused such pain.’
Thank you 🙂 I don’t see how loss can be painful if there was no love there to begin with.
It’s nice to see feelings in writing..on paper..put precisely the way one needs to hear them. Thanks for writing this.
I enjoyed writing it, Kathy. Thank you for reading 🙂
It is very sad and very beautiful. “there must have been love to have left such pain”.
Thank you 🙂
Beautiful sonnet Jane ~ I specially love the ending lines ~
Thank you, Grace 🙂
Hooray! Hooray! Sleep or wolf – Excellent! Really enjoying seeing you go back through the quotes; you do such wonderful things with the words. I’m sorry I missed doing this prompt.
I’m glad you like it 🙂 You can still write one. I read some of the free verse sonnets and didn’t get exactly what made them work. Maybe I was tired, but the classic form was difficult enough for me.
I may write one this weekend. Must get in touch with my inner Neruda.
I can take him or leave him alone. He doesn’t do much for me.
It’s a mood thing, for me. About half of my students speak Spanish, so I pull out Neruda occasionally to make comparisons across the languages.
I don’t know Spanish so I don’t know how well he translates. Translation is a difficult art at the best of times, but poetry must be hellish.
There must have been sun once though now there’s rain,
The piper once played sweet who now is gone…so bittersweet and full of longing are these lines. A beautiful sonnet.
Thanks Toni. I’m glad you like it though I didn’t manage to write a free verse poem.
That’s okay. You wrote a classical sonnet the way I write classical Japanese forms. Writing something with rhyme and meter would throw me into a tizzy but you ripped it out amazingly well. We do the forms we like best.
I like to be able to sing a poem. Lines that don’t sing throw me a little.
Well. I just like to read them. sometimes I’ll sing a poem if it moves. I am a free verse person due to my years of Japanese poetic forms. Having to write a poem in terms of rhyme and meter throws me into a tizzy and I don’t write to those prompts. Life is too short to be tizzified. And as my mama used to say – this is why there is a choice of sugar or honey to sweeten your tea….I like your forms you use – lovely things they are.
Thank you 🙂 We write in the shadow of the poets we admire, I suppose. My idol is Yeats, but I have a great liking for de la Mare and Masefield, and Christina Rossetti wrote some lovely verse.
I love Yeats
If someone tells me they don’t like Yeats, I know we’re not going to see eye to eye about a lot of things 🙂
I actually enjoy reading all yhe poets you mentioned including American poets from the same time period. I love the rythm and rhyme. I just can’t write it and admire those who can. Willie Yates was a fine poet indeed.
I’d love to be able to write like any of them. Poetry seems to me shows up the huge difference there is between ‘competent’ and ‘gifted’. 🙂
Yes ma’am and I admit to being a sometimes competent poet who often is not.
I like to think of us as all being competent, and each of us having the odd flash of brilliance 🙂
One day, I may have that flash of brilliance.
You do already. We all find beautiful original images in our poems. It’s sustaining that brilliance throughout a whole career that’s hard!
I’ve been writing poetry since I was 12. I don’t think I have a career…all I have is lots of ink and paper. thank you for thinking I may have a flash of brilliance. I keep striving.
We can’t all be memorable poets. I’ll be satisfied with a few memorable lines 🙂
You have certainly made a beautiful sonnet! I would find the classic form harder, so I admire this even more.
It’s the other way round for me. It takes work to find the words and the metre, but without the guidelines, my ‘sonnet’ would come out like any fourteen line free verse poem.
This is poignant and powerful and a word delight for the senses.
Thank you, Ros 🙂
Yes, love causes pain. There is pain in staying as well as in leaving. Beautiful! I like rhyming also but finding sometimes there is more freedom without it.
Thank you! There is more freedom without rhyme or rhythm, in theory. But try ending a poem two ways; one version in free verse, the other with a rhythm and a rhyme. Often, it seems to me, the rhyme makes it more memorable and gives it more force. Depends what you’re aiming for, I suppose.
How lovely it’ll be when our loved one takes the star-stepped path back to us:)
Hopeful poem!
Thank you, Anita 🙂 If there was love to begin with, there’s always hope that it’s still there.
Well done, Jane.
Thank you 🙂 I liked this one too.