Poetry / Adolf Eichmann's Last Night (A Shakespearean Sonnet)
He ponders order silvered bright in rain,
Gun-metal curtains cutting muddy streams.
He hears each drop, yet one more soul to drain
Down vast entrails of slick and sleepless dreams.
He knew he’d seen and felt his master’s sight
The white and black he came to know so well
When things that used to be so eas’ly right
The children’s cries still call his name from hell.
The cigarette he lit with steady hands,
He sees the smoke from stacks that scorched the sky
That carried keys to solve the blood’s demands:
A light solution blacking out the lie
The dream of cleansing not to be fulfilled,
Will end in gallows, what began in kilns.
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It’s so nice to see someone try a sonnet, and this is pretty creditable.
There seems to be punctuation missing from the second quatrain, however.
What I expect from an English sonnet is not only iambic pentatmeter and the traditional rhyme scheme (which your couplet actually misses) but also relative clarity of meaning and a pattern to its exposition. I guess that because this is a modern sonnet it has to be puzzled out a bit more than one by Shakespeare himself, eh?
I did like the last quatrain—the embedded reference to “the Final Solution” is very nice.
One charm in the sonnets I love is the ability of the poet to wash his/her lines into one another, like watercolors—in other words, each pentametric line is not necessarily a stand-alone phrase or clause, but a clause can extend into the next line. It’s also very nice to work with words of more than three syllables, if possible. These things help ward off the clip-clop of the iambic foot.
Thank you for working in this grand old form.
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