It's time for another trip in the wayback machine, this time with added profanity! This comes from one of the several protracted periods when I was struggling more than usual with how to express emotions simultaneously in modern words and sonnet verse (for evidence that I am always struggling with this issue, see here). This particular case involved attempting to use profanity and simpler sentence structures, as we will examine afterwards in the usual commentary.
Why the fuck am I in love with you?
It would be so much better if I weren't.
I wouldn't envy everything you do
With someone else. I might, in time, have learnt
To be a friend, a good one, and not be
Always desiring more. I love your smile,
But I could do that and not love you, see
You laughing and not feel that all the while
My heart was being torn. It would be nice
To be with you, and not to be in love.
And yet not loving you would be the price,
And that is something I'm protective of -
I love to love you; and that's why I do.
If only you reciprocated too.
What Went Wrong:
This sonnet starts off with a bang. There's "fuck," right in the middle of the first line. Is that a good idea? I'm still unsure. It definitely gets the point of the poem out there immediately, but it's also, I think, a sign of weakness. It says "I have to do this now for you to keep reading," and it says "I couldn't come up with a better way to say this." Now, it's arguable that, since the line is actually quite decent metrically speaking, there doesn't have to be a better way to say it. But certainly there is a measure of desperation there not only on the part of the poem's narrator, which is fine, but of the poet, which is bad. This is the blunt instrument way of incorporating "modern diction" into the poem: short words, and profanity, smacking you in the face really hard as soon as you start reading. Otherwise, there are a couple places where the interaction of the meter and word order seems unfortunate: "always desiring more" almost seems like an afterthought to complete the above rhyme, and "something I'm protective of" doesn't quite feel natural either. The word "love" gets repeated an awful lot; not necessarily enough for it to start losing all meaning, but fairly close. It's interesting to wonder how it relates to the "desiring" in line five or the being "protective" in line twelve, both of which deviate from the dominance of the singular verb love.
Not Too Shabby:
The English rhyme scheme I think fits the blunt Anglo-Saxon theme of this poem. Really only "protective" and "reciprocated" are not simple, everyday words, and they aren't exactly uncommon or out of place. "Learnt" instead of "learned" might go in that category too, although it's really easy to understand and, I personally think, actually a pretty good way to slip out of the rhyme trap of "weren't" while allowing the former, naturally contracted form to appear where it ought to. The poem does a fairly good job of examining the indecision inside its narrator's mind between the advantages of not-loving and the advantage (and apparent necessity) of loving. The balance between lines one and thirteen("Why the fuck am I in love with you" and "I love to love you; and that's why I do") in both sense and rhyme (and repeating the initial rhyme in the couplet is very effective here) not only brings a good sense of closure, or at least completeness, to the poem, but also punches up the effect of the final line, which is tied in with respect to sense and rhyme and yet also manages to stick out because lines one through thirteen have summed themselves up so well. That sticking-out effect in turn emphasizes that final line and gives the sense that it sums up the entire rest of the poem - which of course it does. On a smaller note, I like how the compliments about how pleasant the love object is are buried inside the complaining tone of the poem as a whole.
Diction:
As mentioned, obviously this poem is an attempt to go into more natural or everyday speech rhythms and diction while retaining the sonnet form. I'm not entirely sure how successful it is; metrically it seems to work, although that may be partly because monosyllables are easier to group into iambs than polysyllabic words, and it certainly provides the poem with a punch that can sometimes be lacking, but as I mentioned above there is a sense of a blunt instrument about the means in which it is achieved. Too many monosyllables can weaken a line by undermining its rhythms (after all, a full word receives in a sense full stress, unlike the unaccented syllables of longer words) and too strong of a commitment to avoid longer words can be as stilted as too strong a commitment to include them. I think that overall this is a successful effort, but the weak half-lines mentioned in the first section of analysis in lines six and twelve look like aftereffects of too many monosyllables, which in turn often increase the sheer number of words and push meaning into those enjambed overflow sections. The fact remains, though, that the meter and rhymes both manage to escape largely unharmed by the intended change in rhythm and diction, and the directness of the poem is certainly improved, which seems to me to signal a successful experiment within the terms in which it was created.
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