#Elegiac Sonnets

[learningaliving]

Commonplace Entry 14: Charlotte Smith's Elegiac Sonnets

On Being Cautioned Against Walking Headland Overlooking the Sea Because it Was Frequented by a Lunatic

"I see him more with envy, than with fear...he has no nice felicities that shrink... He seems uncursed not to know the depth or duration of his woe" (58).

Charlotte Smith's sonnet speaks to the philosophical and cultural prisons that society places on people such as those with abundant assets, properties, homes and the things that fill them. The wealthy have many privileges, but they are also responsible for so much they may experience little freedom. Even more notable in this poem is the prison of the mind referencing those who have knowledge of our condition, or the ills of individual and society. It would seem humanity is nearly made wearier and more miserable with the advancement of knowledge.

Smith, Charlotte. Elegiac Sonnets, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 10th Edition, Volume D, The Romantic Period, New York, London, W.W. Norton Company, 2018, pp.58.

[michael-eugene-cantrall-poetry]

Lines Written For A Musician Who Passed Too Soon

He punched a card and worked for Shasta Cable. He drove a shuttle bus for union pay. And when the lights went out his strings did slay. In bars, he owned the stage and every table, danced with flashy skirts, and wore a sable while others blinked their eyes and held their say. The shadow people were not far away. He found himself in things that veered off-label.

May the ivy, laurel, and jasmine so sweet, cling crimson where sorrow sinks dark and deep whereon these broken strings no longer speak. On his tomb, a marbled angel guards his sleep. Oh! May the abyss find those who do not weep! Osiris! Here, in your shadow, a diamond to keep!

Lines Written © Nov 2023, Michael Eugene CantrallAll images of daguerreotypes, ambrotypes, tintypes, cabinet cards, and postcards are from the author's private collection.  Photographs appearing on this writer's pages on this site are licensed. 

[kkurami]

( LOVE LETTER 2 U ! ) 💌 ² ˚ ༘ fluff

୨୧ ‧ megumi didn’t think he was anything special, not until he received a carefully written love letter just for him <3

like petals unfurling at dawn, my love for you blossoms as each waking day arises.

there’s something so enchanting about being in love, don’t you agree?

i like to believe it gives people a deeper understanding of themselves and their emotions. most people i have seen turn poetic and elegiac when talking about the one they love, which i never quite understood until i fell in love myself. after all, how much can one change just because of another person? the thought had always seemed silly to me.

but if someone were to ask me to describe my feelings for you, i guess i would be a victim of just that.

loving you is a rather unpredictable experience. at times, you make me feel like the happiest person on earth. i get so giddy and whimsical just being around your presence, because you’re the most ethereal person. however, there are times when i’m worried you won’t burn for me the way i do for you. do you feel a fire light up in your soul whenever you see me?

my dearest, your presence is the melody that dances through the corridors of my heart. in the realm of moonlit whispers and star-kissed dreams, your love blooms in the garden of my soul, a symphony of sounds that show we coexist under the same sky. in every heartbeat, i find the rhythm of our connection, a serenade that weaves its way throughout our world. together, we compose a timeless sonnet of boundless affection.

i need to confess… i’ve loved you from the start ♡

a faint blush overtook her features and sat mockingly on her cheeks, as if it waited to expose her inner feelings. she could barely feel the heat that radiated off it, everything in sync with the fast beating of her heart. the inconsistent rise and fall of her chest was synonymous the turmoil she felt deep inside.

her widened eyes held nothing less than affection for the boy who stood in front of her, as his eyes scanned the ivory paper in his hands.

fushiguro megumi, the one who had captured her heart with such grace.

it almost seemed silly, how much the boy had managed to enrapture ever fiber of her soul. after all— they hardly knew each other. she was astonished to find out that he had even known her name.

“this is a love letter?” megumi inquired, an inquisitive eyebrow raised almost as if to think it was silly. “for me?”

y/n’s head bobbed up and down in nervousness. she couldn’t wrap her head around the fact that she was speaking to megumi. “yes! i know we don’t know each other well and you probably don’t like me like that, but i just-!”

“why… me?” y/n put a hold on her rambling to scan her eyes over to megumi, who had his eyeline focused on the letter in his hands.

y/n quirked her head to the side. “why not you?” the question was silly to her. “you probably think people don’t notice you, but they do. i do. i've always admired you, megumi.”

like delicate petals falling from a sakura painted sky, y/n was a blessing that had graced the earth- at least, in megumi’s eyes. he never considered he was anything special, and opted to just live his life as it passed him by. however with just one letter, y/n seemed to reweave the tapestry of his existence. the page, filled with words of love and heartfelt serenades, seemed to hold megumi’s heart within its grasp- and y/n was at the forefront of it all.

“but,” y/n began to speak again when she noticed megumi deep in thought. “you don’t need to like me back. i just wanted to let you know how i feel!”

a sad smile graced her face, and megumi hated being the cause of it.

“let’s get lunch.” megumi roughy stated without thinking, before correcting himself. “i meant, um, let’s get lunch together.” he couldn’t stop the blush the threatened its way up to his face, nor the fast pace of his heart.

with hushed tones and soft smiles, y/n and megumi began their way towards the lunch room. the air was adorned with the subtle symphony of love as their hearts synchronized. amidst the delicate cadence, the world melted into the background, leaving only the warmth of companionship and the promise of countless conversations yet to unfold.

it was the beginning of a perfect love.

[shimyereh]

Sing, Muse — no elegiac composition,      Nor sonnet — there’ll be other times for those. I have a couple deadlines for submission      Of applications, research to propose… But though the aim is different, why partition      The craft? Infuse my academic prose With that same spark and focus underlying My penchant for compulsive versifying.

[xkuja]

|| || With a languorous grace reminiscent of a virtuoso conjuring the crescendo of a symphony, Kuja's sinuous fingers danced through the silken cascade of his hair. Each strand yielded beneath his deft ministrations, as if compelled by an arcane melody only he could hear. Obedient as courtiers to their sovereign, the locks flowed like a river of liquid silver, eager to be ensnared within his elegiac tapestry.

A soft sigh, laden with the weight of a thousand sonnets, escaped his lips, and his eyes, shimmering like sapphire pools reflecting a starlit night, remained half-veiled, a proclamation of the languid finesse that enshrouded his every gesture. And as the final sweep of his fingers concluded this reverent symphony, his hair settled into a harmonious cascade, a symphony of reverence, reminiscent of ripples undulating across the cosmic pond, kissed by an otherworldly breeze.

However, one misfortunate black mage had dared to stand a touch too close to this sublime, violently violet display of self-adulation...

Those silver-violet strands, suddenly possessed of a force beyond the celestial realms from whence they hailed, collided with the hapless thrall with calculated force, artfully defying the very geometry of reality itself. defying the logic of reality; A thousand silken threads lashed across its face, and the unlucky mage recoiled in their wake as if struck by the hand of a capricious god.

In an instant, the arcane wards which cocooned the mage's corporeal form trembled and flickered like fragile stars fluttering in the breath of an impending tempest. Colors heretofore unimagined spilled forth, as if the very essence of the mage's being sought to transcend the confines of its corporeal form. Like oil in water it unravelled into the same symphony of hues from whence it once hatched, a tumultuous ballet where mist and darkness danced in a chaotic waltz, entwining with obsidian, amethyst, emerald, and sapphire.

Then, as swiftly as this mesmerizing dirge had arisen, the mist began to dissipate. Black Mage #155's essence winked from existence, no more substantial than fragrant wisps wafting from freshly poured tea. Forsaken by crystal, condemned to the abyss, it vanished into the void with nary a requiem sung by the cosmos.

The deadly silver strands, now poised in their exquisite, exact arrangement, framed Kuja's visage with an aura of regal elegance, a diadem woven from threads of moonlight itself, a magnum opus etched onto the tapestry of existence by the hand of elegance incarnate. The remaining Black Mages quivered, torn between awe and fear, for they stood in the presence of a magniloquent master both cruel and beautiful, an enigma cast in the mold of the cosmos' most vivid dreams.

"Oops~." he said, plainly.

[merc-h-w]

Elegiac Sonnets excerpt by Charlotte Smith (1784-97)

But far, far happier is the lot of those

   Who never learn’d her dear delusive art,

Which while it decks the head with many a rose,

    Reserves the thorn, to fester in the heart.

Broadview Anthology, page 50

[eightvermore]

our enchanting memories.

in the frosty dosser of the night, I find myself yearning for the solace of your arms, a longing that dances in the cold breeze, echoing the symphony of our shared moments. the night, draped in its starlit gown, becomes a canvas for the mural of my yearning, where I dream of rewriting the narrative. instead of the emptiness that accompanies your absence, I envision the warmth of our togetherness, an elegiac dance of two souls entwined.

within the quietude of longing, I miss you like a verse misses its rhyme, and I miss us, an ensemble of emotions that once harmonized as one. the echoes of our laughter resonate in the corridors of memory, reverberating through the tapestry of time. oh, how I yearn to rewrite this night’s script, to transform the melancholy into a sonnet of connection.

in the middle of night’s canvas, I wish to paint the hues of our unity, the strokes of warmth that defy the cold, and the ode of our embrace that transcends the mere absence. the night, though cold, becomes an idyllic stage where my love for you takes center stage, and the missing transforms into a melody, a serenade sung by the heart for the one it craves.

[robertjamesberry]

Madness

If I ever find a quiet nook in this screaming madhouse

I shall retire to its calm compose elegiac sonnets

the chatter of inmates shall not disturb

my beautiful inspiration my poetry will dazzle

for a time I might entertain notions of spectacular success

only for a while until my refuge is discovered

my peace is looted and madness is sovereign.

Robert James Berry

[stastrodome]

from The Biography of Rainer Maria Rilke

While residing in Montreux, Switzerland, Rilke became used to putting off students and interlopers with wise-sounding advice that passively blamed the supplicant for their failures and did next-to-nothing to help in practical matters. 

One evening at the Maison Ado, however, after dining on eel and white asparagus, this one persistent young man from Heidelberg (always prickly—due to his premature baldness, Rilke assumed) got under Rilke’s skin and the famous writer flew into a most public rage.  

It began when student asked, in a dismissive tone, “Do you know elegies?”

Unused to being treatied as anything less than a beloved expert, Rilke exploded,  hollering “DO I KNOW ELEGIES? Do I know elegies? Me? Rainer Maria Rilke? You’re asking me, do I know elegies? Son, I was writing elegiac sonnets about dead pets when your father was stealing chickens in Vienna! Do I know elegies? Jesus, look at the set of balls on you. You should look me up. Do I know elegies . . . ”

Rilke would later apologize to the student for the sharpness of his outburst in a series of letters but the insult stayed with him for the rest of his life. In fact this particular incident is why he decided to name his final collection of poems the Duino Elegies.

[terristack]

Scansion generator

#SCANSION GENERATOR GENERATOR#

#SCANSION GENERATOR PORTABLE#

Version of the Morpheus morphological analyzer. The macronization is performed using a part-of-speech taggerĭependency Treebank, and with macrons provided by a customized The expected accuracy on an average classical text isĮstimated to be about 98% to 99%. This automatic macronizer lets you quickly mark all the long vowels Maintenance and continuous development! Any amount is very much Time-saving, please consider making a donation, to support If you use the macronizer regularly and find it helpful and When tested on a couple of books of theĪeneid (from the eminent Dickinson CollegeĬommentaries), this has been demonstrated to cut the number ofĮrroneous vowel lengths in half! Currently, dactylic hexametersĪnd elegiac distichs are supported other meters may be added.Īlso, I have now added a PayPal donation button: July 2016: I am happy to announce that the Macronizer now isĪble to take the meter into account when guessing the vowel October 2016: The performance on texts written in all uppercase letters has been greatly improved. May 2017: I have now made the macronized text editable, which means that it will now be much easier to correct typos or misspellings while proofreading the text. Ĭompare result with correctly macronized input text.Īugust 2017: More meters added! The macronizer can now handle hendecasyllables as well as distichs of iambic trimeters and dimeters ( Beātus ille quī procul negōtiīs.). To improve the result, try to scan the text as. Through these devices our goal is to reach a wider audience and engage people to reconnect with poetry.Note: In order to avoid time out from the server, input longer than 50000 characters will be truncated.

#SCANSION GENERATOR PORTABLE#

and a “poetry box” (la boîte à poésie), a portable version of the original idea that can be demonstrated in public events (based on Raspberry Pi components).

#SCANSION GENERATOR GENERATOR#

The generator uses this analysis to produce random sonnets, with different possible structures, respecting the rules of French versification (the code and the resources used, especially the sonnet database, are open source and freely available for research).Ī series of “side products” have been produced from the project, including: In order to do this, the first step is to get a phonetic transcription of the last word of each verse, but this is not enough : a series of rules had thus to be defined to get a proper analysis of rhyme from the phonetic transcription of the last word of each verse. The project requires to get access to a formal representation of rhymes. Each sonnet is encoded in a XML format along with related metadata, and a TEI version of the database is available. Oupoco is currently based on a collection of around 4000 sonnets from a large number of authors from the 19 th century, and this database is regularly expanding (thanks to collaboration, especially with the Bibliothèque nationale de France). It is thus very different from the numerous projects dedicated to the pure generation of poetry, being with symbolic or neural methods. From this point of view, even if the project is intended to generate new sonnets, it is largely based on the development of analysis tools able to identify the scansion, the rhyme and the structure of the original sonnets. The challenge is thus more complex than the one proposed originally by Queneau since our sonnets do not have the same scansion and rhyme. To overcome this problem, we developed the Oupoco project, aiming at proposing a sonnet generator based on the recombination of a large collection of 19th century French sonnets. It would be tempting to develop a computer-based version of Queneau’s work, but Queneau’s book is still under copyright, and it is by definition limited to its ten original sonnets. Queneau’s book is a collection of ten sonnets which verses can be freely recombined to form new poems. Oupoco (L’ouvroir de poésie combinatoire) is a project taking inspiration from RaymondQueneau's book Cent mille mille milliards de poèmes, published in 1961.

[catilinas]

Hi!! Just read The Venus throw and now I really want to read Catullus but I have no idea where to start. Do you have any recs or editions/translations you particularly like? Thanks in advance and I hope you have a great day!

hi! the translations of catullus i Like the most are slightly different from the ones i would recommend anyone Start with but i can tell you about both!

guy lee (oxford world’s classics edition) is probably the best Starting place for catullus in english bcs. i know i am always going on about it but those editions have such good introductions for when you know literally nothing!!! also iirc it’s a parallel translation so you can look at the latin too if you want. it’s also. ok no transmission neutral but he doesn’t lean towards No Obscenity OR exaggerate the obscenity. it’s just kind of There.

my personal favourite translations (although really. i think it depends on the individual poem.) are frank copley’s (kinda e.e. cummings vibes. except then for the long poems and the elegiacs he switches to the most flawless iambic pentameter! he has the range!) and roz kaveney’s (although i don’t think she’s translated the long poems? other than 63 which is online. somewhere) which do Cool Things w anachronism and also gender and also i met her at a book fair once and she wrote me a sonnet about sappho so. i would die for her. i anti-recommend daisy dunn’s translation bcs i could not get through her ‘biography’ of catullus (fluffy prose and speculation) and she has this line in her translation of cat5 that’s like ‘once we’ve passed beneath life’s yardarm’ like daisy what the Fuck are you talking about.

[finishinglinepress]

FLP POETRY BOOK OF THE DAY: Sweet Land by Sherry Siddall

TO ORDER GO TO: https://www.finishinglinepress.com/product/sweet-land-by-sherry-siddall/ Please share/please repost [PROMO]. RESERVE YOUR COPY TODAY

Sherry Siddall lives with her husband and two rowdy dogs in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. Her work has appeared in Tar River Poetry, Kakalak, Pinesong and elsewhere, and has twice been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Sweet Land is her first book.

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR Sweet Land by Sherry Siddall

Sherry Siddall’s Sweet Land rocks and waves with love of words and surround. Bareness crackles, winter’s gone – spring! Who has not experienced this! Sweet Land sings the tune exactly on pitch.

–Shelby Stephenson, poet laureate, North Carolina, 2015-18, editor of Pembroke Magazine for thirty-two years. Recent book: Shelby’s Lady: The Hog Poems.

The elegant, elegiac poems in Sweet Land are rooted in—but also transcend—the natural world. From the opening sonnet’s “Mock orange newly blown,” to the title poem’s “scrolling brown river,” and the final poem’s ashes that “are not soft like moth wings,” Sherry Siddall leads us through American landscapes of beauty, love, and loss.

–Beth Copeland, author of Blue Honey, winner of the 2017 Dogfish Head Poetry Prize

#flpauthor #preorder #AwesomeCoverArt #poetry

[a-chilleus]

Fascinated about your recent PhD placeholder tag if you don't mind could you tell me what it's about?

hi!

I’m currently doing an MPhil in English lit and I’m focusing on Romantic lyric poetry and contemporary slam/performance poetry, looking at the construction of identities and personas and the idea of authenticity - for example the Romantic poet Letitia Elizabeth Landon and the persona she creates as L.E.L. in her writing (she explicitly writes in a preface to some of her work that people shouldn’t attribute all of the miserable unrequited love poems to any of her own experience because one person couldn’t possibly have their heart broken in all these different ways in one lifetime) vs another Romantic poet, Charlotte Smith, who writes in the preface to the sixth edition of her Elegiac Sonnets that people asked her to write happier poems and she couldn’t because she was too sad (her writing is linked very closely to her identity/persona, she puts across this image of authenticity and sincerity). Ideas of embodiment (Romantic depictions of the body as the locus of emotion and as the way we see genuine emotions in others vs the experience in slam of seeing a physical person on stage and hearing their voice directly) will be pretty important.

I’m in the process of applying to do a PhD on a broader but related topic - Romantic lyric vs contemporary lyric, with an emphasis on poetry shared on social media and how that way of sharing work shapes what the poetry is like (ie is it shorter? more or less complex? how does it interact with the architecture of the site, if at all? etc), how we read it and interact with it (comments, reblogs, etc), and how the social media account itself functions creatively. So the placeholder tag (it’s a placeholder because I don’t have a better name for it) is for stuff that speaks to these ideas - the idea that one’s blog represents oneself in some way, that we create these personas (maybe intentionally or maybe not) out of bits of art and media that resonate with us. Is posting a poem on Tumblr different from sharing it on a Wordpress blog? On Medium? In a magazine you had to enter a competition for? Etc. Tumblr seems especially self-aware of how our blogs function in relation to our IRL identities, and maybe that’s a Tumblr-specific thing (ie due to site architecture and how we interact with the site) or maybe it’s that Tumblr is more similar to older sites like MySpace and Livejournal. Hence the tag - I have a hunch (though I could be wrong) that sites like Twitter would have both less creative and less self-aware ways of interacting with the question of how “authentic” our personalities online are.

Thanks for asking! I love talking about this stuff!!

[howieabel]

Poem of the day: A gothic Sonnet

Please consider supporting me on Patreon, it would mean the world for you to support my writing during this difficult time:

https://www.patreon.com/HowieAbel

Charlotte Turner Smith has been largely forgotten, but she was well known in her time. She published ten novels, three books of poetry, four children's books, and other assorted works over the course of her career, but it was as a poet she considered herself above all, living in an age where poetry was the most highly regarded art form. Aged only fifteen, she was married off to the wealthy but irresponsible Benjamin Smith, whose money came from the slave trade. She wrote Elegiac Sonnets in 1783 while she was in debtor’s prison with her husband and children, and through her labours she won their freedom.

A radical, and supportive of the French revolution, she left her husband and wrote prolifically to provide for her nine children (she had already buried three). She would have a huge influence on the Romantic generation of poets, and in many ways she preceded all of them. When she died in 1806, a time of reaction against the French revolution and the rise of Napoleon, she had lost much of her popularity, which to this day has not yet recovered.

Charlotte Turner Smith effectively invented the rare gothic sonnet, an example of which is below. She is worth researching further, as it's difficult to do justice to her life in a few paragraphs. Her strength in adversity shines through her works.

Sonnet on Being Cautioned against Walking on a Headland

Is there a solitary wretch who hies To the tall cliff, with starting pace or slow, And, measuring, views with wild and hollow eyes Its distance from the waves that chide below; Who, as the sea-born gale with frequent sighs Chills his cold bed upon the mountain turf, With hoarse, half-uttered lamentation, lies Murmuring responses to the dashing surf? In moody sadness, on the giddy brink, I see him more with envy than with fear; He has no nice felicities that shrink From giant horrors; wildly wandering here, He seems (uncursed with reason) not to know The depth or the duration of his woe.

[biblioncollection]

Elegiac Sonnets and Other Poems | Charlotte Turner Smith | Poetry | Audiobook full unabridged | English | 1/2 Content of the video and Sections beginning time (clickable) - Chapters of the audiobook: please see First comments under this video. Charlotte Turner Smith (1749 – 1806) was an English poet and novelist. She initiated a revival of the English sonnet, helped establish the conventions of Gothic fiction, and wrote political novels of sensibility.It was in 1784, in debtor's prison with her husband Benjamin, that she wrote and published her first work, Elegiac Sonnets. The work achieved instant success, allowing Charlotte to pay for their release from prison. Smith's sonnets helped initiate a revival of the form and granted an aura of respectability to her later novels.Stuart Curran, the editor of Smith's poems, has written that Smith is "the first poet in England whom in retrospect we would call Romantic". She helped shape the "patterns of thought and conventions of style" for the period. Romantic poet William Wordsworth was the most affected by her works. He said of Smith in the 1830s that she was "a lady to whom English verse is under greater obligations than are likely to be either acknowledged or remembered". By the second half of the nineteenth century, however, Smith was largely forgotten. This is a Librivox recording. If you want to volunteer please visit https://librivox.org/ by Priceless Audiobooks

[literaetures]

For me wilt thou renew the wither'd rose, And clear my painful path of pointed thorn?

Charlotte Smith, “Sonnet VI - To Hope” - Elegiac Sonnets (1784-1800)