I was inspired this week by Yeats’ use of the deconstructed sonnet in his poem, “When You Are Old.” I decided to imitate this form and syntax by crafting a new poem similar to Yeats’. Imitating Yeats’ diction was not an easy feat, and I found struggle to compose these sentences in a way that would flow as eloquently as his poems read.
When You Are Young
When you are young and free and consumed with bliss,
And afraid to face the world, remember the song,
And keenly heed, and dream not long
Your face never touched, and of lips your kiss;
How many love your spirit of warm light,
And love your beauty with hope weak or strong;
But only one saw the ever-present truth prolong,
And saw the goodness in your innocent fight.
And reaching up beside a world unknown
Whisper, without a tear, From us fled our prime;
It escaped us like a clock with no time,
And of our youth from which we were thrown.
The rhyme scheme of this poem reflects the deconstruction of the typical sonnet by adopting the rhyme scheme ABBA rather than ABAB. The poem is also only comprised of 12 lines in place of the assumed 14. I experimented with the content of Yeats’ poem which centers around the nostalgia of the past, taking a different angle and revolving the poem about one currently immersed in their youth. The use of second person was of interest to me and thought this was an effective point of view that brought the narrator closer to his subject – it was as though he was directly sending a message to his former lover that he was formerly able to express. I wanted to capture that same tone by following Yeats’ usage of second person point of view as well as mimic his syntax and diction.
I like how you mirror Yeats’s form of address and rhyme scheme here, as well as the inversion of his core theme (what is in his case retrospective and nostalgic and sad becomes in your poem forward-looking and more full of hope).
Yeats’s poem, though, uses an “enclosing rhyme” scheme, which at least mirrors a Petrarchan sonnet (abba abba) in the first stanza. But I think this is simply a three-stanza poem composed of three stanzas of enclosed rhyme. That is an acceptable form without our needing to imagine the ghost of a sonnet form here (though it is an interesting interpretive angle to take).
In your poem’s second stanza, you come very close to the iambic pentameter (5 iambic feet, 10 syllables, with an unstressed-stressed rhythm), but in much of the poem you seem to let the iambic rhythm slide.
Also, in terms of formatting, you can use the soft-return (shift-return) to eliminate the extra space between lines of poetry.