Poetry’s been on my mind lately, and so I’ve been adding a couple of poems to The Commonplace Book today (Frost’s Stopping by Woods, another Dickinson a Rossetti and a few more). Including one of my own. That’s right, work from my own pen. It’s finally appropriate, too, though it was written close to ten years ago. Which reminds me:
“(…) When [Jane] was only fifteen there was a gentleman at my brother Gardiner’s in town so much in love with her that my sister-in-law was sure he would make her an offer before he came away. But, however, he did not. Perhaps he thought her too young. However, he wrote some verses on her, and very pretty they were.”
“And so ended his affection,” said Elizabeth impatiently. “There has been many a one, I fancy, overcome in the same way. I wonder who first discovered the efficacy of poetry in driving away love!”
“I have been used to consider poetry as the food of love,” said Darcy.
“Of a fine, stout, healthy love it may. Everything nourishes what is strong already. But if it be only a slight, thin sort of inclination, I am convinced that one good sonnet will starve it entirely away.”
(From Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen)
I wonder whether Elizabeth might not be right, in which case I should perhaps have another go at poetry – it seems like a good test. The sonnet in The Commonplace Book was written when I was very much out of love (I wasn’t even having a crush on anyone at the time), but the last time I fancied myself in love I wrote a vilanelle, and just after finishing it, realized that though I was certain that “This is how it’s supposed to feel”, it didn’t feel like that at all. (Incidentally, it does now. I wonder where I put the darn thing. Must go through my “drawers” – i.e. old diskettes etc.)
Meanwhile, a more whimsical sample of my versification can be found between Pooh’s hums and poems on the site of one of my best friends.