You are my rock, my anchor, and my sea.
I live within you, yet you hold me fast.
I breathe your soul. Your thoughts so blend with mine
I can't distinguish a dividing line.
Before our love is unimagined past.
There is no after--now is all to me.
Your soft-skinned body's like a wind to me
it stirs the waves on my Sargasso Sea
until our hungry revelry is past,
Our sweet convulsion holding, holding fast,
Deliciously suspended at the line,
Ah! Then, then swiftly everything is mine!
Yet I am yours as much as you are mine.
Obscenity is when it's all for me.
Between love's give and take there is no line
On our undifferentiated sea.
Your delight in mine, both breathing fast,
Engenders mine in yours, till breath is past.
I love you with a tenderness my past
Could never fathom. Before your love was mine,
The person I remember wasn't me.
There was no rope of love to hold me fast
To life's one truth within its restless sea,
Nor happiness to help me draw a line.
Around ourselves, my love, we've drawn a line
Dividing sacred from profane; once passed,
Again our love is lost upon the sea.
Joy has made me treasure what is mine;
Has made me choose the ways that make me, me;
Has given me the words that hold me fast.
Winds of the world blow wild, free, and fast
They obliterate the most enchanted line.
But there is now a well of love in me
Well past the wind, the turbulence well past,
A serenity within me more than mine,
An inner calm more endless than the sea.
Through love we've found a love past yours and mine.
So I will hold fast to what is best in me.
For love draws its own shoreline and pounding sea
Author notes
This is a sestina, a form i'd always loved to master, but haven't had the time or patience. In my poetry class at school we had a class on sestinas and villanelles and i thought for the next assignment i'd submit one, and this is what i came up with. please comment as i'm submitting this at the end of the week and need feedback.
Written June 5th, 2005
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Comments
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ohhh thankyou, that is GOOD!!! i was rather concerned (read sh*tting myself) that i hadn't gotten it right, and considering i'm submitting it soon, this is a good sign.
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Great poem
This poem captures the splendor of love and the connection of life to the sea. All life depends upon love and water to survive, the subtleness of the connections implied is wonderful. I enjoyed reading this very much. -
I'm not a form expert (not at all!) but I realised that it was a sestina before I reached the end - and if even somebody like me can notice that you must have done a good job! Other than that I just loved this poem, it is so truly beautiful and has this very special, almost dreamy atmosphere about it. I loved the imagery you used, as well as the way everything is tied together. Love and water definitely work well together.
Excellent poem, I enjoyed it immensely and it left me in such a delicious mood!
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sestina: blank verse that consists of six stanzas of six lines each followed by a three-line stanza. The final words of each line in the first stanza appear in variable order in the next five stanzas, and are repeated in the middle and at the end of the three lines in the final stanza. (i hope that comes across in my poem)
Villanelle: nineteen lines of any length divided into six stanzas: five tercets and a concluding quatrain. The first and third lines of the initial tercet rhyme; these rhymes are repeated in each subsequent tercet (aba) and in the final two lines of the quatrain (abaa). Line 1 appears in its entirety as lines 6, 12, and 18, while line 3 reappears as lines 9, 15, and 19. Dylan Thomas’s "Do not go gentle into that good night" is a villanelle -
Just curious but what exactly are the criteria for sestinas and villanelles?
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