Homework week ending 15/02/16

[Wendy Seddon]

OK Maureen, you said any style - here is my try at a Sestina.

The tale that I just heard was sad, so very sad -
a young woman, a refugee trudging a perilous trail.
She sickened on the way and then she died.
Traumatised her children cried, “We couldn’t save her!”
Like so many blind pedestrians they followed the crowd ,
they felt there was no love, no life – now that is tragic.

Any way you look at it, it is so very tragic.
She leaves behind children who are beyond sad.
Yesterday as I tussled with the lunch-time crowd,
I gave no thought at all about her or the trail
she had to walk, or the pain which ravished her.
It made no difference to me in my world how she died.

After hearing her tale something within me has died.
I pray I will never be subjected to anything so tragic.
No yardstick could measure the unfairness of the life dealt her.
I feel inadequate to change anything and that makes me sad.
I hold in awe those people who live to blaze a new trail,
who elbow a new pathway through the crowd.

Those conscientious warriors who don’t follow the crowd,
who care about and remember the many refugees who have died
when their path to freedom morphs into a death trail.
To these paragons of selflessness, to do nothing would be tragic,
to be oblivious to another person’s struggle extremely sad.
Each of these aspire to be as a white knight to such as her.

Though we will never know her, she had family who loved her -
family for whom she stood out from the crowd.
Children, maybe a mother or husband who feel so much more than sad.
She left a human sized hole in their world when she died -
Though numerous, no national news presenter reported on the tragic
demise of one in a thousand misplaced people on humanity’s shameful trail.

If we had the time, we could trace back through history a similar trail -
hundreds of similar stories all of which could have been about her
and all highlighting the unfortunate chance of birthplace and all of them tragic.
I live in comfort and protection as one of the ‘fortunate’ crowd.
It seems likely that I will die in old age as all of my ancestors have died.
Maybe my friends and family will remember me sometimes and be sad.

Her story is worthy to be remembered in a sonnet or a ballad sweet and sad.
Her battle to lead her brood safely along the perilous trail where she died,
worthy even of Shakespeare’s tragic tales - so popular with a medieval crowd.

[Neville Briggs]

That's fantastic Wendy. Brilliant. !

I think it was Charles Swinburne who devised a rhyming sestina. I have a copy of the format if anyone wants to have a go at that.

[David Campbell]

Thank you for this, Wendy, it's a moving narrative and an interesting format. I don't know anything about sestinas, so now is the time to investigate!

Cheers
David

[Maureen K Clifford]

Oh ! Well done Wendy and a brilliant use of the prompts as well. Her story is worthy to be remembered in a sonnet or a ballad sweet and sad. Yes it certainly is and thank you Wendy for doing just that.

[Wendy Seddon]

Hmmm.... a rhyming Sestina Nev - gotta give it a go!!

Thank you all for your encouraging words

[Neville Briggs]

The format for the rhyming sestina Wendy is :


Column 1 down is the rhyme scheme. Column 234567 stand for the letters at the end of each line. In other words first stanza word order is A B C D E F. second stanza F A D C B E and so on. Column 8 is three lines of envoi.


A A F E B C D D

B B A F E B C C

A C D A F A B F

B D C D A F E

A E B C D E F

B F E B C D A


You start with six lines with six different words ending each line ( abcdef ) and you use just use two rhymes (ab)so that in the first stanza A rhymes with C and E ( rhyme A ) and B rhymes with D and F.( rhyme B ) so you just need to find three rhyming words for each rhyme and then of course the words are repeated at the ends of all the lines so from then on rhyming is no problem.

I hope that makes sense. It is not as hard as it looks to get the pattern, the hard part is finding new phrases each stanza for the same word endings. As you know

The format of this forum makes it hard to set it out any easier.

[Maureen K Clifford]

Or coming it it from a similar angle but a little different -
A sestina is a structured 39 line poem consisting of 6 x six-line stanzas followed by an envoi of 3 lines. The words that end each line of the first stanzas are used as line endings in each of the following stanzas, rotated in a set pattern. It is a 12th century Provençal form still popular today. A sestina is usual unrhymed.

However -

The rhymed sestina, was devised by Swinburne. Here keywords 1, 3 and 5 rhyme with each other, as do keywords 2, 4 and 6. The permutations are revised so that every stanza has the same rhyming scheme ababab. In terms of the keywords, the revised structure is:
stanza 1: 123456
stanza 2: 614325
stanza 3: 561432
stanza 4: 256143
stanza 5: 321654
stanza 6: 432561
tornada: 14/23/56

Not easy to do but certainly a challenge, which Wendy met admirably

[vwalla]

Goodness Gracious. I prefer simple "Bush Poetry" for simple me IE Rhyme and Rhythm that does not need analysing but delivers a simple message.
Sorry
Val W

[Maureen K Clifford]

No need to be sorry Val the homework is not set in concrete to flog you over the head with - it is just a writing exercise to explore different concepts and to hone our writing skills.