Irina's Poetry Corner

MY SWEET ROSE

How sweet and pure thy perfume grows,
As sweet as seasoned showers to the ground
Upon which thy gracious beauty glows,
I swear my love for ever to thee bound.
Ah, my sweetest rose! I long and pine
For cosy softness of thy velvet shine.
Come, do not tarry! Make haste ere Time’s quick pace
Hath ploughed the furrow through my flesh and bones.
Why did thou forsake me? Thou needed space?
For thou did love me, that too, the Almighty knows.
But when I sleep, our two hearts meet in dreams,
My groaning melancholy gone in thy embrace.

All days as nights do seem to me
Until the day my eyes see thee.

© irina dimitric 2013

The first version of this poem was written in 2011 for Wednesday Writing Essential prompt at gather.com:

‘Write a response without any verbs of being and at least one allusion to Shakespeare.’ We were allowed to borrow a line from Shakespeare. Line Two in this poem is borrowed from one of his sonnets; I might still, one day, find which one! Or, perhaps you could find it for me. 🙂 However, I did find the sonnet which provided the idea for my final couplet: it is Sonnet 43.

I started revising the poem three days ago, polishing the metre and rhyme. It was Aquileana’s brilliant post on John Keats http://aquileana.wordpress.com/ that renewed my interest in the sonnet. When I looked up Sonnet on Google, I realised my original version was only a sonnet-like poem: it consisted of three quatrains and a couplet, but the rhyme in the second half of the second quatrain had to be altered and consequently adjusted in the third quatrain; and I paid more attention to metre. Although the language is archaic in some lines, I can call it a Modern Sonnet owing to its peculiar rhyming scheme:

a b a b c c d a d a a d e e.

This is my very first and only sonnet. I hope you like it. ~  Have a nice weekend! ~ Irina 🙂

© irina dimitric 2013