Saturday, April 13, 2019

Revisiting Visitations Revisited

Word-Smith
Smiter of Words

I had some insight on how to improve the poem. Here is the original:
Visitations [1]
We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct to seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.
Here's the poem with stanza 2 re-worked:
Visitations [4?]
We visit them each year, no special day,
Just drop in, unexpected, filled with ruth,
And never have they anything to say,
Nor we, to speak the honest gospel truth.

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct they seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Our nothings said, we beg our leave to go,
Turn, step away, with graver thoughts ahead,
But soon forget what we had come to know,
The awful, artful silence of the dead.
Is this latter version better? Clearer? More intelligible? Nobel Prize material? I believe it's version number four. Anyway, it's the most recent rewriting.

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2 Comments:

At 11:11 AM, Blogger Carter Kaplan said...

Perhaps we mumble a few pieties,
But they have surely heard it all before,
And from the horse's mouth direct they seize
What lies for us yet still beyond the door.

Take out some syllables? Thus

Perhaps we mumble pieties,
Yet all surely heard before,
And from the horse's mouth they seize
What lies beyond the door.

?

 
At 11:53 AM, Blogger Horace Jeffery Hodges said...

Sometimes, yes, maybe, but I think I'll stick to iambic pentameter this time.

Jeffery Hodges

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