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A Bench in Open Air
A bench in open air, along a ridge,
Is bathed in sun. It overlooks a spot
Between some cresting hills, where runs a rill
That’s going to the sea from here, beyond.
The river can’t be seen (the drop too low),
But blue and buff and yellow-green abound
Like Van Gogh’s garden—sown with lilac, too
And from this seat a picture can be gleaned.
A path runs through a hollow up the way.
The ground is dappled with a golden light
Which leaves let in; And in the mud, a horse
Print stays. Upon the rocks some mosses cling—
At dusk, marine, in shadows teal and gray.
At noon, the bugs are out, they nest where water
Can find a place to drip and lull. A hawk
From distance cries—it haunts a different stream.
Where, your features—on which trek do they go?
Between the hills, below the eagle cry?
Across the fetid foot path of the moss?
I don’t know mine, but everywhere I look
They seem to follow; showing by a glow
Or tributary; indicating with
A stumble or a climb—the echo of
Mortality and hardness of the slime.
Is bathed in sun. It overlooks a spot
Between some cresting hills, where runs a rill
That’s going to the sea from here, beyond.
The river can’t be seen (the drop too low),
But blue and buff and yellow-green abound
Like Van Gogh’s garden—sown with lilac, too
And from this seat a picture can be gleaned.
A path runs through a hollow up the way.
The ground is dappled with a golden light
Which leaves let in; And in the mud, a horse
Print stays. Upon the rocks some mosses cling—
At dusk, marine, in shadows teal and gray.
At noon, the bugs are out, they nest where water
Can find a place to drip and lull. A hawk
From distance cries—it haunts a different stream.
Where, your features—on which trek do they go?
Between the hills, below the eagle cry?
Across the fetid foot path of the moss?
I don’t know mine, but everywhere I look
They seem to follow; showing by a glow
Or tributary; indicating with
A stumble or a climb—the echo of
Mortality and hardness of the slime.
At first, this seems to fit the title, just a person taking in the natural world around them, but at the end it loses me. The "your features"—is the narrator speaking to one of the elements of nature? The hawk? The reader? I'm not even sure what "features" refers to, unless it's the terrain. And the last stanza went over my head. I don't know what the glow is or why slime would be hard. Structurally, it's mostly blank verse, though by being organized in stanzas, it may imply some organization of ideas. There are some big breaks to the rhythm, though. "Van Gogh's" doesn't fit, "water" has an extra syllable on the end of a line (which can be done in sonnets, but typically only formats like that where the corresponding rhymed line does the same thing). If there's a reason you broke from the stanza pattern to do a three-line one and a standalone line, that also goes over my head, and the first line of the former doesn't fit an iambic meter at all. I do like how the speaker's attention goes all around, so that they're noticing a great variety of things, and it creates a good atmosphere.
>>Pascoite
>>Pascoite
Thanks for reading, as always.
These poems were definitely about playing with iambic pentameter/tetrameter, and the places where you point out a deviation in the meter are "intentional"; I think the error is that they were mostly made for effect. For example, the extra syllable in "water" is supposed to be an interruption in the stolid walk of the iambs. I'm not sure whether that sort of thing is really the point.
Anyway, good to get gold, for once.
>>Pascoite
Thanks for reading, as always.
These poems were definitely about playing with iambic pentameter/tetrameter, and the places where you point out a deviation in the meter are "intentional"; I think the error is that they were mostly made for effect. For example, the extra syllable in "water" is supposed to be an interruption in the stolid walk of the iambs. I'm not sure whether that sort of thing is really the point.
Anyway, good to get gold, for once.