THE POEM OF YOUR LIFE

 

The best poets write sonnets.  Think Shakespeare, John Donne and Elizabeth Barrett Browning. "How do I love thee?  Let me count the ways."  Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter, three quatrains and a couplet. Remember this from English class?  It's a demanding form.  Each line has 10 syllables, unaccent/accent x5.   The rhyme scheme is set.  The couplet is the conclusion.

I wonder if there's some unconscious link between the form and the trajectory of our lives:  youth, middle age, old age and death (the couplet). The form is so beloved.

A poem can be a metaphor for life but if so, I bet most of us do not live a three 4-line stanza kind-of-poem all neatly tied up in a couplet.  Nor an iambic pentameter regular-beat-kind-of-poem with an alphabet rhyme scheme. No life/strife, days/ways, see/be predictable kind of poem. 

My life is more of a free verse type poem with a few off-rhymes.  Poem/roam perhaps.  Or internal rhymes.  Verse that could be prose looked at a bit differently.  The beauty of a sonnet just isn't there.  "Let me count the ways" fits more the hither and yon of my thoughts.  An inadequate offer by a struggling poet you might say, where every line is in medias res.  

If our life were a sonnet, we would know where it's going.  There would be a plan.  We would each know which quatrain we're in, some of us, like me, nearing the couplet.  A beautiful, orderly life.  But most of us don't have that.  Maybe none of us does.

And yet the poems of our lives have some grace, do they not?  Care has been taken.  There are themes that can be followed.  A few words jar, but not all.  The internal rhymes in fact are quite good.  The beat, though irregular, is still pleasing.  

If someone recited your poem (or mine) we might not turn away.  After all, prose poems can be satisfactory too.  Not "a little world made cunningly," but worthy surely.  Given us from God.

Maybe dividing one's life into quatrains isn't fail-safe.  Maybe meandering is a better way, and more accurate.   Joys overlap tragedies, healing interrupts grief, love creates a bulwark against despair.  Bodies contract while minds expand.  Sensations grow richer. Shallowness disappears.  The unknown becomes known. Order is illusive.  Often the more important the event, the less we anticipate it.  Such is how God has created us and our lives. 

If my poem lay crumpled I would smooth it out and read it.  I'm sure I would.  Then read it again.  I wouldn't be grateful for every sadness or trauma, but at least a few lines in the poem would be about forgiveness, given and sought

After all is said and done, if I found my poem I would keep it.  Maybe you would keep yours too.