There's something detached, cold and lonely about Westminister, or at least that is the feeling I get. You can feel the separation between the holy and the mundane, the abbey and the city, the living and the dead; which to be honest feels like a loss of purpose for a place that was meant to unite these and imbue them with meaning. The setting, too, is almost a bit sad. Not Nietzsche's 'sepulchers of a dead God' sad, but like something small, reduced. It is an ancient beauty we cannot bear to discard though we no longer understand it.
What I was trying to do with
Westminster was capture the sort of feeling that I got while visiting the Abbey. Now something to be understood with that is that I was firstly visiting the place as a tourist, not as someone come to worship; and secondly that I fall more under the label of "agnostic" than anything else to begin with anyways.
Having come as a tourist, a lot of time was spent looking at and talking about the various burial places in the Abbey - King Edward, Queen Elizabeth I, Queen Mary, and so on. And we're just one of these groups of tourists shuffling through the place, looking at these grand old sarcophaguses holding the remains of these people who were so very influential in their own time, and I can't help but feel both that if any semblance of who they were is still there then they're watching me as I pass through; and at the same time the embeleshment of their graves, descriptions of the things they did in life, and the sheer space of time leaves me feeling utterly distinct and separate from them. I knew - know - that they logically cannot directly act on the world today, but some amount of the presence they had can still be felt.
The bit about my agnosticism might explain the lack of any feeling of bringing people together in unity, I think. When I walked into the Abbey I recognized that the place was considered a house of God and tried to be duly respectful of it as such, but I sort of... lack the ties to Christian deity that might help with that feeling unification. We were in the building when the priest gave one of his on-the-hour speeches, and for someone who was devout perhaps that would have inspired a feeling of connection with God, but for me it just inspired admiration of the building's acoustics.
And the living/dead split that the poem focuses on a bit was further inspired by how, in the very back of the Abbey, there is this section where people who have been knighted into the Order of the Bath have flags with their family crests hung up. It just struck me as rather odd and jarring; all of these elaborate tombs honoring the dead, and suddenly colorful flags to commemorate the achievements of the still-living?
Also, if you'll pardon my being the crusty old Elizabethan (when I'm very much not), I wonder if we're being a little too free with the base sonnet form here in that particular poem.
The evident ABAB CDCD EFEF GG of both that and *Scharnhorst* threw me just a bit with the sometimes wild lack of iambs and the highly irregular meter. I'm as big a fan of modern poetry as most -and by that I mean I am quite iffy on it- but I do think that irregularity should still serve the flow of ideas. Your ideas are there for sure, but the flow of them and the way they keep place and pace through the meter could use some work.
There's a reason sonnets tried to keep to five iambs a line (unstressed-syllable to stressed-syllable) - to make reading in the author's world an easier experience flow-wise. Therefore any reversal or change in flow should be intentional. That is why, say, Lear's "never, never, never, never, never" in Act 5 Scene 3 of King Lear is powerful in context. His world is reversed, upside-down and wrong, and as such five trochees (stressed-syllable to unstressed-syllable) are used instead of the usual five iambs or some variant thereof to emphasize that; variants which, as you might be aware, were common enough anyway.
Hm. Some of that might be that I'm not exactly trying to convey
ideas, as it were; in
Westminster I'm trying to convey an impression, a feeling - possibly multiple. And in *Scharnhorst* I'm more almost trying to tell a story, a brief overview of the ship's life from her own perspective. That might contribute somewhat to the differences between what you're expecting and what you're seeing, maybe?
Nonetheless, I must confess that I've never fully grasped the usage of the iamb or the iambic pentameter. A few different times I have written something that I had thought followed the proper pattern of unstressed-stressed, only to be later informed that I did, in fact, wildly break from the pattern. This feeds into issues with knowing that I have kept it to five; if I cannot tell if I have used an iamb, how can I tell if I used five of them?
Further, I have run into difficulties in the past with having enough space to say what I wish within the structure of the iambic pentameter. Speaking for myself, I would rather break the pentameter and paint the metaphorical portrait that I want to in full than to obey the pentameter and leave things half-done.
That being said, my own method is the much less stringent "does it read through with a good flow, from line to line and verse to verse?" and I must confess here that I am not as happy with
Westminster and *Scharnhorst* than I have been with previous works. There are transitions and word choices that are a tad... jarring, is the best word I can think of for it. I might come back later with a clearer head to see if I can smooth it over, but as of the immediate moment I cannot see how I would change it overmuch without losing what they are intended to convey.
Ultimately, I work with the ABAB CDCD EFEF GG rhyming layout and verse set because that setup is what I feel I know best and can work with to greatest effect at this time. Since these are two of three characteristics of the Shakespearian sonnet I characterize my works as that, particularly because I will sometimes find that I have in fact fallen within the "proper" iambic pentameter by chance and because it satisfied the qualification of flow best for that work. If my deviations from the iambic pentameter are enough to leave a work or works outside that category, however, then I suppose creating a new deviation on the sonnet poetry style is hardly a new thing.
Thank you very much for the constructive criticism, I daresay you've left me with a few things to mull over.
