A Spring of Roses

Work in the Works ~ Page 3

Updated on 12/22/21

Just Before the Fall

I'm not sure if this is fully cooked or not. Lynn is in the first stanza, her garden in the second, and Eden in the third. I couldn't fully remember the Adam and Eve story, so I decided to re-read Milton's Paradise Lost. That may have been a mistake (I'm guessing it's not a best seller these days), because from line eight on there are many references to Book 9 of Milton's epic. I especially like Milton's phrase 'spring of roses.' (By 'spring' he means plentiful growth, something some of Lynn's roses do just before the fall.) Other words that allude to the Eden story are tempts, mist, right and wrong, eve, demise, and severed.

Satan sneaks into Eden by taking the form of a black mist, then takes possession of a sleeping snake. Adam and Eve have separated ('lest harm befall thee severed from me') so they can get more work done. Satan finds Eve alone, tempts her to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil (right and wrong), and the rest is, well—history.

Everything in my poem is just before the fall, when there's joy and innocence and growth.

Updated on 12/2/21

Three weeks ago, I mentioned how stray thoughts often take time to develop into a poem or story. I was thinking of fall and the time just before a/the fall/Fall. (See update made on 11/12 below.) It’s been a few weeks now, and I thought I’d let you peek at my process of building a sonnet.

The phrase “just before the fall” is what I want to build on. Since three things came to mind, I’m using a stanza for each subject, then a final stanza to tie the three different but similar things together. An English sonnet seems like a natural vessel.

I’ve put Lynn in the first stanza, just before a fall. When we should have been doing things around the house, we somehow always found more “important” things to do around the garden. During Lynn’s many hospital stays, the staff would write the patient’s goals on a whiteboard in the room. Lynn’s was always “Work in the garden.” That was her simple goal: get me well enough to work in my garden. The hospital is just after a fall; the joy is just before a fall. The fall—Lynn’s unseen fate—always shattered the joy.

The second stanza will be just before autumn when the light is subtly changing, and the leaves are just starting to swirl. The roses always have an almost manic spurt of growth in late summer, just before the fall, as if they can sense the changes about to come. They seem to rejoice in the cooler evening temperatures. Of course, a garden can neither sense nor rejoice; that’s the gardeners anthropomorphizing. This is as far as I’ve gotten. Things might change, like not using passive voice, or using a different rhyme.

The third stanza’s still forming and will be about the oldest garden just before The Fall.

Updated on 11/25/21

I ’ve posted a couple of blank verse pieces in the Various Forms section, so I thought I’d better describe what blank verse is. Blank verse poems are unrhymed poems written in iambic pentameter. See? That was easy! Okay—maybe I should go over iambic pentameter, too. You may have heard this term before; it has to do with what’s called a poem’s meter. Even though poetic meter can get complicated, I don’t think it needs to be from the reader’s point of view. Most of the time, a poem’s meter goes unnoticed (unless it’s poorly done), so it’s not that important for you as the reader to learn all the intricate details of meter in poetry to enjoy a poem.

So head over to the Various Forms section to find out about iambic pentameter. And when you’re reading my two (attempted) examples of blank verse, remember (to paraphrase Nick), "Just let the words…flow…over you."

Updated on 11/21/21

I 've added more images, stories, and links to the Rye section of An English Diary. The new images are at the bottom. Each one will open to a larger image that includes a longer description of the scene. As wonderful as Rye was/is, our visit to Lincoln (no, NOT Nebraska!) was even more amazing. It may be a little while to finish up that part of our adventure, though. But winter is coming, so the garden will be asleep and I'll have more time to spend on this web site.

Updated on 11/20/21

I found my grandmother's antique beehive clock in the basement last month. It was lying on its side and hiding behind a stack of books on a shelf. I worked on it for weeks, cleaning and blindly tweaking the unfathomable movement. But now it works. The loud tick-tock of the pendulum at first distracted me. It seemed almost manic—too insistent. Now it's soothing. The world's been turning without me until now. The Beehive Clock

Updated on 11/12/21

I like to do crossword puzzles. I’m not very good at them, but I’m very persistent, and I do use a pen. Puzzles that are hard, like the Sunday New York Times, will keep me busy for days. It always surprises me when I come back to a puzzle that I’ve nearly given up on and suddenly find I know the answer to clues that seemed impossible days earlier. I think it’s the way our brains work. Data that manage to get through the firewall of our senses and find their way into our minds sometimes just pull up a chair and relax for a while. Without knowing it, some of those crossword puzzle clues sit for days, probably sipping vodka martinis, until one day a clue will stand up, stretch, and tap on the inside of my head. “Hey! Let me out!” (I should mention that this method doesn’t work for clues about opera or popular culture. I’m illiterate in both.)

One of the things I enjoy about crossword puzzles is how the clues often involve how a word can have many different meanings. For example, a four-letter word for “Pop star.” Both pop and star have several meanings: father, soda, a sound, to burst; celebrity, celestial body, to headline, to mark with a star. My first thought is to write “Coke,” but it could easily be a current entertainer. The answer is “nova:” a star that goes pop. This thought had to sit and collect itself for a day. When it suddenly tapped on my brain, I thought, “Well, of course!”

Ideas for poems and stories sometimes work this way with me, too. Rarely is an idea fully conceived from the start, where it’s just a matter of getting thoughts on paper—well, screen. Most often, I’ll begin to follow what I think is the obvious path only to find myself lost in a tangle of meanings. When that happens, I’m learning that it’s best to jot down some thoughts and let them relax for a few days. For example:

It’s Fall. My wedding anniversary is coming up, so I’m thinking of Lynn, Lynn who often fell. I’ve also been talking with my cousin, a builder of churches, in all its meaning: a carpenter-theologian. Fall has a religious meaning. I see a connection between the three concepts of the word fall, but it’s still vague, still forming:

The poetic form is a sonnet: three stanzas, one for each idea, and a couplet for the union of the three. The key phrase is “just before the fall”—before the season, before a fall, before The Fall.

I’ll let this relax in my head for a while and we’ll see what develops. Maybe I’ll post snippets of lines as they come to me. Maybe I’ll go do a crossword puzzle.