Another poetry experiment - Temptation
Instead of going to sleep last night I started a poem (the first two lines show evidence of being written at midnight I think you'll find). I have mentioned that I was reading about metrical poetry, and this one is just a fiddle that I finished in my head as I went about my doings today. I actually really don't think it works at all. It's mostly a trochaic tetrameter that becomes sing-songy, composed of uninteresting lines with hypersyllabic endings that limp away into nothing. And it's very 19th century (and is basically just a little sermon to myself). But I amused myself writing it, tapping myself trying to her the feet, and it's all about practice. So, because I don't think it will make the next anthology of English poetry (though I want to try and write something else around the same idea - which won't make that anthology either), here it is:
Oh the shining ignus fatuus
Dancing over the mire you call to us
Know to follow there’ll be grief to pay
Yet we falter, gaze, our feet of clay
Onwards, upwards, narrow trail so dark
Empty, lonely, cold, without a spark
Looks to wind around forever
Backwards, forwards, brightening never
‘Tis our vision dim, so short the view
Heart so misled fails to see the true
Star will rise then sun will follow
Night of sighs, joy on the morrow
Ignus fatuus, flitting o’er the mire
Gaze not, march on, clutch the holy fire
All that glimmers here is transitory
Hope on, up-slope, pressing on to glory.
ALP 2008