Sonnet Analysis: My Old Sonnets III

In honor of Rosh Hashanah, which it is as of nightfall today wherever you may be, I'm going to analyze another of my old sonnets: specifically one from 2005 entitled "Tashlik," named for a ceremony traditionally performed on Rosh Hashanah.

They said to us: go down to riversides
And coasts and shores; wherever water flows,
Go ye where the clear blue stream arose
Or where the dark brown river mouth resides.
Bring with you crumbs of every shape and size,
Made from the corn that 'round your city grows,
That you do reap though, not a one that sows
Among you. Do you this when summer dies.
Go to the water, watch it as it runs
Beneath the sky that mirrors back the blue.
Then look inside, take that your own soul shuns,
The sin, the evil that abides in you.
Now grasp the corn, in crumbled mealy buns,
And cast it out. The water shall renew.

Mistakes Were Made:
I should probably start out by mentioning in preemptive defense that this poem was written intentionally in an archaic style. That does not excuse it from using that style poorly, however. Having just written a post mentioning that "ye" is hard to get away with in modern poetry, here I am guilty of that very crime; and it does not, in fact, work, although it might if the rest of the poem were good enough to carry it. It is not. "Do you this when summer dies," while a good rhyme for "size," is a terrible inversion; or even more so, simply an artificial insertion of "you" into a line that does not need it. "Corn" for grain is archaic, British and unnecessary, since grain and bread are both single-syllable (and the tradition involves baked grains, ie bread products). It's probably best as well to avoid words like 'round, unless the poem is informal, because eliding syllables is either informal or obnoxious - or both. But all of this is beating around the horrible, obvious elephant in the room (which is so bad that I had to mix those stock phrases just to get at how terrible it is): the tragedy that is lines 6-8. "Made from the corn that 'round your city grows,/That you do reap though, not a one that sows/Among you" is basically scraping the bottom of the barrel of imagination. The first line is fine, excepting the corn issue that has already been discussed; it's the inability to come up with another rhyme for grows, and also keep the sentence in some semblance of proper English syntax that creates the monster. The sentence ends up both snarled and senseless, with a little additional hint of pointlessness (and the "though" in the middle of line 7 sums everything up by having literally no reason to be there). The fact that lines 5 and 8 are a different rhyme from lines 1 and 4 in what is clearly supposed to be an Italian sonnet is just icing on this badly made cake.


Not Too Shabby:
Well, the heart is in the right place. Ignoring the corn issue, I actually like the last four lines. "The sin, the evil that abides in you" is a good line, as it both captures what is meant and hits the rhyme and meter perfectly; so is "and cast it out. The water shall renew." Basically, for me, those two lines make the poem, along with "then look inside, take that your own soul shuns;" they hit the meaning of tashlik and they hit the purity of the sonnet meter and rhyme scheme, fitting well into the architecture of the rest of the poem. Too bad that architecture is so flawed.