Challenge 112

Reminder: euhal allen’s “The Bridge” concludes in this issue. Please remember to send us your alternate endings. Suggestions appeared in Challenge 108.

Poetry Mechanics

Formal poetry often gives us a chance to “get under the hood,” so to speak, and see how poems work.

A poem may consist of sentences, phrases or even only isolated words. Fermín González’ “Hermit” is something of a grammatical tour de force: the entire poem consists of only two sentences.

For the grammarians among us: What is the main verb and subject of the first sentence? Does the main verb have an object?
For those who learned to diagram sentences in school (I flunked that unit!): Diagram the first sentence. If that’s too hard, diagram the second. Send us the results as a graphics file!
For the rhymesters: What’s the rhyme scheme? Is a rhyme missing anywhere?
For those who’re adept at scansion: What determines the line length?
For the stylists: Are there any similes in the poem? No. Metaphors? Possibly... Symbols?
For the deconstructionists: Would you have made the first part more than one sentence? In what way? How might the structure of this single complex sentence reflect the poem’s content?
For the philosophers: What does the poem seem to say?