Hiroshima, Mon Amour (Double Sonnet)

[MorpheusSandman]

A curs’ry radiation lights the sky;
A city pauses, life stilled for the flash,
As if a camera’s eye distilled a sketch
On frames of film the images of flesh
Before it melts away from solid bone,
Like brick and mortar from the structures’ trim,
In massive waves of extirpation’s bane
That leaves a wake of desolation’s frame
Which contrasts to that perm’nent negative,
Developed to a scene of devastation,
Before and after prints on positives,
Of life alive and mortal ruin’s reign.
The waves of chaos mix with shattered lives
Of those who wished they’d died and not survived.

With bleeding nails and minds they crawl and claw
Through compacted pounds of quintessential dust
To wail and rest in silence and to thaw
This too, too solid self of fleshy rust.
The rain of pois’nous ash that floats and falls,
Like pepper sprinkled by the gods, encrusts
The bones in plates of catacombal thrall:
This Earthen meal, devoured, digests to dust.
Yet soon this carnal feast of blood and bone,
Incinerated ash and dust consumed,
Will fertilize the ground where’er it’s blown
And tombs will turn to beds of buds yet bloomed.
I give this threnody to casualties of war;
We’ll always grieve for Hiroshima, Mon Amour

[symphony]

Very, very telling.
I have always marvelled at how you poets can so easily express so much within the limits of a form, and here you are-- starry-eyeing me again!

[Helga]

very good. I liked how you showed the horror of pictures and how they will always be seen
this part was very good


In before and after prints on positives,
Of life alive and mortal ruin’s reign.
The waves of chaos mix with shattered lives
Of those who wished they’d died and not survived.

.....


Yet soon this carnal feast of blood and bone,
Incinerated ash and dust consumed,
Will fertilize the ground where’er it’s blown
And tombs will turn to beds of buds yet bloomed.
I give this threnody to casualties of war;
We’ll always grieve for Hiroshima, Mon Amour

I liked this last part too, how life goes on were something horrible has happened

[qimissung]

The first one is my favorite; I love the metaphor, which is, if I may say so, beautifully developed. Then comes life, which will be lived, whether we want it to or not. I love the last line "We'll always grieve for Hiroshima, Mon Amour." I only wish it were true.

[AuntShecky]

I've always found -- and there are legions of literati who will whole-heartedly agree -- scansion to be the most difficult part of writing metered verse. (My failings in that area got me booted from another poetry site.) My point is
that the iambic pentameter in many of your lines seems perfect, and only fails in a few.

What is more striking in the first 14 lines is the speaker's ability to sustain the metaphor of the photograph, which still in the setting of 1945, involved flashbulbs. The topic is already an emotionally-charged one, but this piece does not exploit that, I don't believe.

I also love the respectful allusion to Shakespeare in line #4of the second sonnet.

I've never seen the acclaimed 1959 Alain Resnais film whose title is the same as the last two words of your piece, but I'm sure you have.

[MorpheusSandman]

I've always found -- and there are legions of literati who will whole-heartedly agree -- scansion to be the most difficult part of writing metered verse. (My failings in that area got me booted from another poetry site.) My point is
that the iambic pentameter in many of your lines seems perfect, and only fails in a few.
That's odd because I've always found scansion to be one of the easier parts of writing metered poetry. The interesting thing with iambic pentameter is that if the piece flows then people just fall into the rhythm and you find yourself pronouncing everything in iambs even if that isn't where the stress would naturally fall. Here, I intentionally diverted the meter twice (in lines 2 and 2 of both); the first was because I think the pyrrhic followed by the spondee slows the meter down and forces one to 'pause' on that moment; the following enjambed pentameter attempts to suggest how fast the initial destruction goes by, but the onset of it seems like a moment that lasts forever. The second is more questionable but I put it there because I decided the consonance of "compacted pounds" made up for having an extra half-foot at the beginning of the line (what do you think?).


I also love the respectful allusion to Shakespeare in line #4of the second sonnet.There's also a subtler one above it ('rest in silence').


I've never seen the acclaimed 1959 Alain Resnais film whose title is the same as the last two words of your piece, but I'm sure you have.Yes, and I highly recommend it; it's one of my favorites. It's as gorgeous an aesthetically rich a film as has ever been made; but it's also quietly devastating in a way that so few films on that subject are (his short documentary, Shadow and Fog made about the concentration camps is more blunt but just as effective). I used it for the title because I wanted to replicate the kind of understated reflection in that film; the allusion also references the idea that no outsider will ever be able to really grasp what happened - which is where the idea of the 'photograph' metaphor came from, i.e. we can only look and observe, but never empathize or truly understand.

[AuntShecky]

That's odd because I've always found scansion to be one of the easier parts of writing metered poetry. The interesting thing with iambic pentameter is that if the piece flows then people just fall into the rhythm and you find yourself pronouncing everything in iambs even if that isn't where the stress would naturally fall. Here, I intentionally diverted the meter twice (in lines 2 and 2 of both); the first was because I think the pyrrhic followed by the spondee slows the meter down and forces one to 'pause' on that moment; the following enjambed pentameter attempts to suggest how fast the initial destruction goes by, but the onset of it seems like a moment that lasts forever.

which is where the idea of the 'photograph' metaphor came from, i.e. we can only look and observe, but never empathize or truly understand.

Don't quote me, but I've been lectured ad infinitum to the fact that terms from Greek prosody e.g. "pyrrhic" are passé in contemporary English verse. Last time I heard spondees made the cut though, and I've found that they have the effect of slowing down the rhythm, which is what one would want to evoke sadness, for instance. What's useful, I've found, are headless iambs and tail-less trochees. You'd be surprised to discover how many American popular songs and jazz standards begin their lyrics with a headless iamb.

I guess scansion is similiar to MLB pitching: it's not the velocity but the location, location, location. It's all right to throw in an anapest (such as a prepositional phrase) or a spondee here and there, as long as the stresses occur regularly and alternate in a general pattern, with the right number of stresses for the chosen form --five in iambic pentameter.

But if any of this is wrong, I'll be the first to admit it!


Oh, and the photographic imagery. A similar motif permeates Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance by Richard Powers. In that case, the war is World War I, not the harrowing events that ended WWII, but the novel as a whole has significant things to say about the relationship between the artist, the work of art, and the audience.

[thinkingsam]

When I read this I focussed on the images and the flow of thought, so I am very impressed by how you blend scientific knowledge of what happens during and after a nuclear explosion, with beautiful poetry.

[Pendragon]

Whoa! Marvelous! :thumbs_up

[MorpheusSandman]

Thanks to symphony, Helga, quimissung, thinkingsam and Pendragon.

@Shecky: You're likely right about pyrrhic being passe (I've never formally studied poetry), and, in fact, that line is actually a trochee followed by an iamb; it's merely the punctuation that gives it that sense, I guess. I've also found when trying to write iambic pentameter - whether in sonnets or blank verse - one of the hardest thing is to begin with an iamb as it's much easier to either cut off the head of the first or open with a trochee and then do iambs for the rest of the line. Austerely forcing the lines into iambs from the beginning often makes it comes out a bit Yoda-ish. I guess when it comes to established forms - and especially one with as much history as the sonnet - I try my best to adhere to the format unless I have a really good reason for eschewing it. This is really the first I've written where I've eschewed it quite a bit; especially with the slant rhymes in the first and the concluding hexameter couplet.

Anyways, thanks for the criticism. :)